Welcome to 2019!
It snuck up on us, didn’t it?
I had this whole list of things I wanted to get done before the end of the year. Didn’t get to cross anything out. Not to worry, though. This is going to be a great year for screenwriting. I can feel it. And it’s gonna be an even better year on Scriptshadow. Here’s a breakdown of things to come.
Tomorrow, I’m going to post an article on the most underrated scene to write in all of screenwriting. This scene is so powerful, I would place its impact above saving the cat. Unfortunately, I don’t have a catchy “save the cat” like name for it yet. So we’ll have a little competition to see who can nickname the scene tomorrow.
Friday, I’ll be doing a script review. For the weekend, we’ll be having the first Amateur Offerings battle of the year. Let’s start the year off right and find a gem! If you’d like to partake in Amateur Offerings, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.
Monday, I’ll be reviewing Escape Room, assuming it doesn’t have a cataclysmic Rotten Tomatoes score. Why Escape Room? Simple. It’s the perfect spec script premise. If you’re writing a script to sell, you’re not going to get much closer to conceptual perfection than this. Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ll be reviewing scripts. And next Thursday, I’m writing up a First 10 Pages Article, as well as introducing the First 10 Pages Competition. You’ll definitely want to tune in for that.
So a month ago, on a pleasant 70 degree Los Angeles afternoon, I was reading an amateur screenplay. As I finished up the first act, I sat back and sighed. I was bored. Bored bored bored. It wasn’t that the script was bad. Bad implies incompetence. The script was… there. It existed. But that’s all it did. And that’s when a profoundly simple question struck me. Why is it so hard to write a good screenplay? We all love movies. We’ve seen hundreds of them. We know how to BE entertained. But for some reason, we don’t know how to reverse the process and entertain others.
In my opinion, the first problem is effort. I don’t think screenwriters put nearly as much effort into their screenplays as they need to. If you want to write something good, you have to do the boring stuff. You have to do research. You have to outline. You have to do more rewrites than you’d like. You have to write giant backstories for your mythology. You have to have higher standards than the average writer (not settle for “okay” scenes or “okay” characters). Something that drives me BANANAS is when I read a script about a particular subject matter and I know more about the subject matter than the writer! That tells me the only research they did was a cursory glance around the internet. That’s not how good writing works. Not only is a deep dive into your subject matter going to make the journey more fascinating, but the more you know about your subject matter, the more ideas you get. But we live in a time – sigh – when people only do the absolute minimum required. That’s fine. As long as you’re okay with the absolute minimum reaction.
Next, you have to have a good idea. This means a concept that feels larger than life (The Meg), that contains heavy conflict (Fight Club), that’s clever (Game Night), that’s ironic (Liar Liar), that taps into the zeitgeist (Crazy Rich Asians), that’s controversial (Get Home Safe). It takes most writers 6-10 scripts to finally recognize a good idea. Before that, writers write selfishly. They don’t recognize that their idea must appeal to an audience beyond themselves. This results in a lot of nebulous wandering narratives where the writer erroneously believes that just by letting the world into their head, they’re entertaining them. they’re making deep statements about the world.
Actually, one of a writer’s biggest ah-ha moments is when they see an advertisement for a boring movie that nobody’s going to see and they think, “Who in their right mind thought that was a good idea???” It’s only in that small window of time where, if they look at their own script through that same lens, they realize, “Ohhhhhhhhhh. Nobody would want to see this either!!” It’s then when they finally realize this is a business. They now go into the idea-creation process with a new tool – The “Is this a movie people would actually pay to see?” tool. One of the reasons so few writers make it in Hollywood is because they never have this ah-ha moment.
Finally, it’s about execution. Execution is bred from knowledge and practice. How many screenplays you’ve written. How many times you’ve encountered specific scenarios. It took me 10 lousy screenplays to recognize that movies don’t work if the hero isn’t active. For some of you, it will take less. Or, you can simply take my word for it and it won’t take you any screenplays at all. But that’s the case with this medium. You need to repeatedly fail at scenarios in order to know what to do when you encounter them again.
For a long time, I couldn’t figure out the second half of the second act. My scripts would always run out of steam before I got to the third act. That is, until, I read about the “lowest point” second-to-third-act transition. That being when your hero falls to his lowest point (“point of death” some teachers refer to it as) right before the third act. Now that I knew my hero was headed to this “point of death,” I could write towards that.
This is the part no writer wants to hear. But when it comes to writing a good screenplay, a pivotal variable is “time put in.” You have to write a lot. Then you have to write a lot more. Then more. The people who aren’t serious about this craft will fall to the wayside during this period. Just by the fact that you continue on, you increase your chances. At a certain point, you’ll know enough to pass the threshold by which Hollywood identifies professional writing. And assuming you’ve got a good idea with strong execution, you’ll make it. But make no mistake, it’s a long and trying journey. Here’s to conquering that journey in 2019!
