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I recently caused a minor fracas by suggesting that screenwriters aren’t “writers,” per se, but rather “storytellers,” and that if you want to become a successful screenwriter, your focus should be on telling stories rather than writing. I’m afraid that some of you took me a little too literally and assumed I meant that there’s no actual “writing” involved in screenwriting.
Writing is, of course, an essential part of telling any story on the page. If I write, “Jason, bloodied and wheezing, stumbles through the airplane wreckage, blinded by the smoke,” that’s a hell of a lot more descriptive and exciting than “Jason walks through what remains of the airplane.” To that end, writing is essential. It’s our job to pull a reader into our universe, and how we weave words together to create images and moments is a large part of what makes that process successful.
However, here’s the rub. Unless you’ve created an interesting enough situation to write about in the first place, it won’t matter how well you’ve described that moment, because we’re already bored. And that’s what I mean by “storytelling.” One must create a series of compelling dramatic situations that pull a reader in for the writing itself to matter.
So to help clarify this, here is how I define writing and storytelling and how they relate to screenwriting. Because this is my own theory, I’m not saying these are universal definitions, only definitions to help explain the points I’m making in the article.
Writing – When I refer to “writing,” I mean the way in which everything in the story is described, the way in which the picture is painted. While important, you can give me the greatest description ever of a character, the greatest description ever of that character’s house, the greatest description ever of the way he goes about his nightly routine, and the greatest description ever of a car chase he gets into later…and I can still be bored out of my mind because you haven’t preceded any of these things with a story I care about.
Storytelling – “Storytelling,” on the other hand, is the inclusion of goals and mysteries that create enough conflict, drama, and suspense to pull an audience in and make them care about what they’re watching. For example, that immaculately described car chase above is boring unless, say, the character driving has 10 minutes left to get across town and save his daughter, with the cops, the mob, and the government trying to stop him.
So how does one “tell a story?” What’s the secret to storytelling? Well, I feel storytelling can be broken down into a couple of simple components. The first is G.O.C. (Goals, obstacles and conflict). In most stories, you have a character goal – a hero who’s trying to achieve something. In order to make their pursuit interesting, you must throw obstacles at them, things that get in the way of them achieving their goal. Naturally, because obstacles prevent our hero from doing what he wants, conflict emerges, and conflict is what leads to entertainment, since it’s always interesting to see how the conflict will be resolved. If a character wants something and gets it without having to work for it, there’s a good chance your story (or at least that part of your story) is boring. John McClane’s goal is to save his wife, but the terrorists in the building provide obstacles to doing so, which creates conflict.
The other major component of storytelling is mystery. If you don’t start with a character who has a goal, you should be working to create a mystery. “Lost” built an entire show around this. From the “Others” to the “Hatch” to the “numbers entry.” We kept watching that show because we wanted answers to those mysteries. Note, however, that mysteries always eventually lead to character goals, since sooner or later a character will be tasked with figuring out that mystery (their goal). “The Ring” is a good example. A mystery is created with this video tape which kills people in 7 days. Naomi Watts’ character, then, has the goal of finding out the origins of the tape, and seeing if she can stop it from killing people.
A writer’s mastery of these two components, the goal and the mystery, are often what defines him/her as a good storyteller and determines whether their screenplays will be any good.
What I often run into on the amateur level is the opposite. I read tons of scripts where writers put all their efforts into immaculately describing their worlds, their characters, their scenes, and everything involved in painting the picture for the reader, but without any conflict or drama or suspense. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you go, “This person is a great writer!!” But in the end, there’s no immediate goal, there’s no compelling mystery. So it’s just boring shit happening. Really well described boring shit happening, but boring shit happening nonetheless. I know a lot of writers send their scripts out and get this recurring note back: “We loved the writing but the script wasn’t for us.” It confuses the hell out of the writer. “If the writing is great,” they ask, “Why the hell wouldn’t the script be for them??” It’s because your story is boring as hell! There’s not enough storytelling!
What you must do to prevent this is make sure you’re storytelling on three different levels: on the concept level, the sequence level, and the scene level. What I mean by this is that your overall concept must have a story built into it, each sequence in your script must have a story built into it, and your scenes themselves must have stories built into them. The second you’re not telling a story on one of these three levels, you’re just writing. You’re describing shit or recounting shit or laying out shit. You’re not storytelling. Let’s take a closer look at these three levels using the film, “Aliens,” as an example.
CONCEPT LEVEL – The concept of Aliens has a great story behind it. There’s a mystery: A remote base on a faraway planet has gone silent and they suspect that there may be aliens involved. This mystery leads to a goal. Ripley and a team of Marines must go in and figure out what’s happened, possibly having to wipe out the aliens. An intriguing setup for a story.
SEQUENCE LEVEL – Having a strong overall story concept is great, but you need to find a way to keep that concept interesting for 120 pages. If the characters in Aliens just go in and kill the aliens, your story is over within 30 pages. This is where sequences come in – 10-20 page chunks that have their own little stories going on. These sequences are going to have their own goals and their own mysteries. In other words, you must be telling stories within these 15 page segments. For example, the first goal is to get into the base and find out what happened. They get in there, find out everyone’s gone, and discover some traces of a battle. In the next sequence, the aliens attack, and the goal is for Ripley to get to the soldiers and save them. The next sequence introduces a new goal – figure out what to do about this. They decide to go back up to the ship and nuke the place. Except when the ship comes down to get them, it’s sabotaged by the aliens, leaving them there. — The point to remember is: with each sequence, introduce new goals and new mysteries to keep the story entertaining. If you’re not doing that, you’re just writing.
SCENE LEVEL – Storytelling at the scene level is where I can tell whether I’m dealing with a pro or an amateur. Good writers work to make every scene have some sort of mystery or goal driving it. There’s a situation that needs to be resolved by the end of the scene, and the scene isn’t over until that happens. Again, we’re talking about the same tools here. Goals and mysteries. The goal could be as simple as “making sure the area is secure,” which is what the Marines’ initial job is when they go into the base. Or the mystery can be as simple as “what happened here?” which is what drives the following scene – the characters trying to put the pieces of what happened together through the clues they find.
Each of these levels of your screenplay should be telling compelling stories or we’re going to get bored. I run into really interesting story concepts all the time that turn into boring screenplays because the writer doesn’t know how to tell stories on the sequence or scene level. It’s like they figure, “I came up with a cool idea for the movie. I’m finished.” NO! You have to come up with a cool idea for every sequence! Every scene! Think of each of those as MINI-MOVIES, all of which have to be just as compelling as the overall idea. Because I’ll tell you this: if you write three boring scenes in a row in a screenplay, you’re done! The reader’s officially given up on you. Try to tell a story every time you walk into a scene.
There are obviously smaller tools you can use to enhance your storytelling as well. You can throw unexpected twists in there, suspense, dramatic irony, a character’s inner journey. But if you’re a beginner/intermediate, focus on the basics first. Goals and mysteries. Goals and mysteries. Always remember: No matter how good of a writer you are, how strong your prose is or how well you can describe a scene, unless you’ve set up a story where we give a shit about the characters in that place, it won’t matter. Screenwriting is not a writing contest. It’s a storytelling contest. The sooner you realize that, the faster you’ll succeed in this business. I PROMISE YOU THAT.
Genre: Sci-fi/Comedy
Premise: A hapless and broken hearted barista is visited by two bad-ass soldiers from the future who tell him mankind is doomed, and he alone can save them.
About: This script from British writer Howard Overman sold in March of last year and made it onto the middle of the Black List, right next to Desperate Hours! Overman has been a longtime British TV writer, writing such shows as “Merlin,” creating the show “Vexed,” and winning a 2010 BAFTA Television Award for Best Drama Series for “Misfits.”
Writer: Howard Overman
Details: 116 pages – February 2011 draft
Wait a minute.
Hold up here.
Are you telling me that I just read a comedy script…that was funny? And that I liked? Has Scriptshadow slipped into Bizarro World??
Not only that, but a good comedy that was low-brow (the longest running joke in the screenplay is literally a shit joke)?? I always complain about low-brow comedies. Scripts that have nothing to offer other than jokes.
Aha! But Slackfi DID have more to offer. It had a story (with unexpected twists and turns ‘n stuff!) and even some character development. By the way, what does that mean exactly? “Character development?” I see that phrase thrown around a lot and I’m not always convinced that the people who throw it would know how to catch it if it was thrown back.
Character “development” is any instance of your character developing into a different person. This can be through overcoming a flaw, overcoming the past, or in the case of The Slackfi Project, overcoming a relationship.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Which is fine, I suppose, since there’s time-travel in Slackfi. However, I don’t get the nicest responses when I dislike time-travelling scripts these days. So thank God I enjoyed this one.
20-something Josh sleepwalks his way through his coffee shop job. The guy can whip up a mean vienttia grand-aye half-whip double-sauce cinnamon-style frappe mocha-chino (apologies to all if I’m getting the terms wrong. I’m not a coffee person) but is bored out of his gourd while doing it. Josh is the kind of person where smiles go to die.
But at least he has a reason for it. His girlfriend, Zoe, dumped his stupid ass a few months ago and now toys with him. She wants to hang out, but then she doesn’t. She wants to go on dates, but then she cancels. She wants to have sex, but then the next morning thinks it was a bad idea. God was not a nice dude for creating people like this but they’ll be around for as long as people don’t have the balls to walk away from them, and unfortunately, Josh’s testicles haven’t grown to “walk away” proportion yet.
So how does one deal with devil-chicks like this in the meantime? By playing video games with one’s apartment-mate of course! Josh and his buddy, Apollo, are quite a team, getting high while ridding the alien planet Tressor of the dangerous race: Plekisaurians. But when Apollo says he’s grown up and wants to do more adult things with his life, poor Josh finds himself with only one friend left, his overweight guinea pig, Mr. Tibbs!
Until one night when he’s visited by the duo of Wolf and Tiger, a badass male-female team who claim to be from the future! They tell Josh the world is a week away from a pandemic that will kill 6 billion people. Josh is the only one who can save them because he delivers sandwiches to the lab where they test guinea pigs, who are responsible for the virus. “Deliver sandwiches?” Josh responds. But he’s a barista. Wolf and Tiger look at each other, then double-check the address. Oops, they’re in the wrong apartment. They meant to go to Apollo’s apartment!
“Sorry,” they say, and leave. Bummed beyond all reasonable definitions of the word, Josh happens to run into Wolf, Tiger and Apollo the next day, when they’re attacked by micro-chipped bad guys from the future called Replicants. Apollo is killed, leaving Wolf and Tiger with no choice but to go with Plan B, Josh!
Unfortunately, while gearing up for the big attack on the lab, the police get a hold of Josh and explain to him that Wolf and Tiger are a couple of whack-jobs who escaped from the nuthouse. They made up this whole thing about the future based on their obsession with the Terminator and Matrix franchises, and right now, they’re being escorted back to Crazy City.
At this point, Josh doesn’t know what to believe. Are these two really crazy, in which case he should move on with his life? Or in doing so, is he killing six billion people? It isn’t until Josh confirms that his own guinea pig – MR. TIBBS – is a secret spy for the replicants, that he shifts into high gear! He must find a way to break Wolf and Tiger out of the nuthouse, come up with a plan to get into the lab, and then….well and then massacre hundreds of guinea pigs so they can’t spread the disease. All while his annoying ex-girlfriend keeps trying to ruin his life!
Okay, so let’s get back to that character development thing I was talking about. When you write a script, you want to ask yourself, “How is my main character going to develop? How are they going to change?” If they’re not developing into anything new or different, that means they’re staying stagnant. And for the most part, stagnant is boring.
Overman uses a relationship to develop his hero, Josh, coupled with a flaw. The relationship is obviously his one with Zoe. He allows her to treat him like shit and is afraid to move on. Overman cleverly creates a scenario at the end of the script, then, where Josh is at the lab with Zoe outside the contamination door. He has a choice of either letting her in, which saves her but kills 6 billion people, or leaving her out there to die and moving on with his life.
Remember, this is one of the best ways of conveying development in your character. You give them a choice near the end of the story that basically asks: “Have you overcome your flaw or what?” (Spoiler) In this case, Josh leaves Zoe out there (thank God!) and he’s officially developed into a better person.
BUT, I have a suspicion some of you don’t care. Why? Because I know how a large reading contingent HATES loser wimpy main characters. That’s an issue that’s long escaped me – how to straddle that line. In order to develop your character into a strong person, he must first be a weak person. So how do you make someone weak but still likable? I have to admit Josh was a little too much of a loser for my liking, but the rest of the story was so clever and funny that I still rooted for him.
That’s the other thing I liked here – the story. Most comedies I read have a VERY thin premise that’s stretched to the gills. A joke that should’ve ended on page 7 has been beaten to death for 110 never-ending pages. Slackfi actually had a story that was carefully plotted.
Which reminds me – one of the telltale signs of a good writer is what they do with their midpoint. The midpoint should shift things around a bit, turn what was essentially one story into a slightly different story. I always use the example of Star Wars. It starts out being about some people delivering a message, but then turns into those same people trying to destroy a huge base. In the midpoint of Slackfi, we find out everything Josh has been told is a lie, and that Wolf and Tiger are in the nuthouse. It changes from Josh following along to Josh having to come up with a plan to break out Wolf and Tiger and then save the world.
Anyway, this was a funny little script, and evidence of what I was saying Friday about storytelling being more important than writing. The writing in Slackfi is nothing to write home about. Many of the sentences are stilted and simplistic. Overman also has a bad habit of doubling up on beats, making many moments redundant (i.e. we’ll see Josh get rejected by Zoe and Overman will follow the action by writing something like, “Josh is stung by getting rejected by Zoe” – an unnecessary sentence). But the STORY ITSELF for Slackfi is fun and keeps you reading.
So I recommend this script. It’s a cool little sci-fi project that’s marketable enough to be brought to the big screen. And I couldn’t help but think it would be a perfect double-feature with amateur favorite Keeping Time!
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
What I learned: The midpoint is a great place for passive characters to become active. — Preferably, your hero will be active from the outset (like Indiana Jones). That’s because movies like active characters. But some stories necessitate that the hero start off passive. Starting off passive is fine. What you don’t want is for your hero to be passive for the entire script. At some point, you want them to start driving the story. Through Slackfi and Star Wars, I realized that the midpoint is a great place to do this. Luke doesn’t start taking charge until the midpoint (when he comes up with an idea for how to save Princess Leia) and Josh doesn’t start taking charge until the midpoint (when he has to rescue Wolf and Tiger and come up with a plan to save the world). So consider this option the next time you write a story that begins with a passive hero.
Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, a PDF of the first ten pages of your script, your title, genre, logline, and finally, why I should read your script. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Your script and “first ten” will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effect of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.
Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: (from writer) A reformed hitwoman must return to the world of bullets and bloodshed she left behind, to take on the organization she helped build, in order to avenge the death of her younger sister.
About: We’re going to take a week off from Twit-Pitch so we can get an amateur Friday script in. Lots of you are submitting and haven’t had an outlet lately, and I feel you deserve that. Why did this week’s script get chosen? Because Brandon is persistent! He’s been sending in queries for over a year, and my assistant, Sveta (svetshadow@gmail.com) read his first ten pages and liked them enough to recommend him to me. So here we are!
Writer: Brandon McFall
Details: A lean 96 pages.
I just tweeted yesterday that in all of my meetings, one piece of information that keeps popping up is Buyers are looking for action scripts! I’m not sure why. “Taken” came out like four years ago. What is this immediate need for action scripts all of a sudden? Do studios just get together and decide, “The genre we want to make now is…………..ACTION.” Is there any rhyme or reason? Is there any logic to it all??
I consider this a problem for me because action is not a genre I gravitate towards. It’s often the thinnest genre out there. The characters lack depth. The stories are obvious. It’s just a lot of action sequences, which is often the most boring stuff to read. “He jumps to the side and unloads an entire clip before he hits the ground.” None of the action is ever inventive. It’s all stuff I’ve read a million times before.
I want drama. I want twists and turns. I want characters who are trying to figure shit out about themselves. If someone can write an action movie with THOSE elements, count me in. Which is probably why everyone’s STILL looking for action scripts. As someone pointed out to me the other day, “The reason they’re so desperate to find good action scripts is because all the action scripts out there suck.”
Guggenheim just sold action script Black Box for seven figures, which everybody is telling me is a “not as good Enemy Of The State,” (although to be fair, a few of you LOVED IT). What’s next? Is there someone out there sitting on a cool action spec with characters and a story and, gasp, some unexpected twists and turns we haven’t seen before? If so, send it in for an Amateur Friday submission. If it’s good, I’ll help you sell the damn thing. Of course, you may be too late. Because Brandon McFall might’ve beaten you to it with his action thriller…”Hail Mary.”
Hail Mary has one of those unabashedly simple plots, which can work if you nail every single dramatic element. Look no further than Taken as proof. That story was as simple as it gets – “Save daughter.” But you loved Taken because of its main character. And Hail Mary will live or die on whether you love Mary.
Mary used to be the baddest hitwoman on the planet. But to be fair, the pool of hitwomen is a lot smaller than the pool of hitmen. Still, that’s a pretty impressive title to hold. Mary is pissed to high hell because her little sister’s been raped and murdered.
Actually, let me back up. Mary was chased out of town a long time ago for killing too many of the wrong people. What nobody knew for a long time was that she had a little sister. Well, someone finally figured that out, then killed the sister to bring Mary out of hiding so they could settle a score. Mission accomplished! Mary is back, and mad as ever!
She recruits her little sister’s boyfriend, thug Tony, and her old boyfriend, weapons specialist George, to give her just enough firepower to wreak havoc. After hitting up a corrupt cop, she finds out the person who raped and killed her sister was a crime boss she has a lot of history with named Dominic. Mary has little problem busting Dominic up then shooting him between the eyes.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t end the problem. The leader of The Syndicate, the crime organization that runs the city, finds out about what’s happened. His name is Constantine, and he can’t have little girls making his organization look weak. So he orders everybody in town to take down Mary.
Normally, when you have an entire city of people who want to kill you, you leave town. But Mary doesn’t do “normally.” She does Mary. And Mary says, “If you’re going to try and kill me, I’m going to try and kill you first.” This is Amuurica. Where if you don’t like someone, you shoot’em. So she gathers all her resources together and – despite Tony and George thinking she’s crazy – heads straight to Constantine’s stronghold where she plans to put an end to her problems once and for all.
First thing I’ll say is that this was written like an action script. An action script has to move. The paragraphs have to be nibble-sized (no more than 3 lines) and you can’t get too wrapped up in miscellaneous description. You only want to tell us enough to set up the scene, to create a little bit of atmosphere, and then focus on the action at hand. To that end, Hail Mary was nearly perfect (The only writing mistake I found was the constant misuse of apostrophes like “want’s” and “get’s” which is a mistake I see in a lot of screenplays for some reason).
We also have a clear goal – Mary is avenging her sister. She first has to find out who did this and then kill that person. So there’s a little bit of mystery then some hardcore old fashioned action. A clear and motivated storyline = good. I also liked how the midpoint changed things up. Mary kills Dominic, forcing Constantine’s hand to come after her. It maybe didn’t change the story ENOUGH for my taste (it was still basically – “Kill someone”) but you want your midpoint to change the game so the second half isn’t exactly like the first half, and Hail Mary achieved that.
Now with these revenge scripts, you really have to a) like the main character and b) want the main character to get revenge. I think that’s why Taken was so popular. You loved Liam Neeson. And because you saw how much he loved his daughter and how much he wanted to repair that relationship, you wanted him to save her. By no means did I *not* want Mary to avenge her sister’s death, but I didn’t know her sister. Outside of a couple of quick flashbacks, she was just a name to me. So I was never THAT into Mary getting revenge for her.
This is always the tricky part about these revenge movies. Do you start the story AFTER the character’s death so you can jump right into it? Or do you start out slow, get to know the character, and THEN kill her, making for a slower opening, but one in which we care about the dead character and therefore are more interested in avenging her death? I’m not going to say I know the definitive answer to this question. All I can say is that I didn’t know Elizabeth (the sister) and therefore was mostly detached from Mary achieving her goal. Obviously, this affects one’s opinion of the entire story. If you don’t care about the main goal, how can you care about what happens? Unfortunately, that’s where I found myself.
Another issue here was the character of Tony. Who the hell was Tony?? He starts the movie as our narrator, implying he’s a key character, then disappears for 90 pages, occasionally offering disembodied voice overs with lines like, “But that wasn’t all Mary needed to do.” I just felt like Brandon didn’t know what to do with this character. Either that or he used to be a bigger part of a former draft and Brandon hadn’t yet phased him out. Remember, if you change direction in subsequent drafts, you gotta put things out to pasture from the previous drafts. I don’t see the purpose of Tony at all, so he probably shouldn’t be in the script.
Another problem: My biggest gripe when reading action scripts is that they’re thin and they’re always a bunch of pointless action scenes. So you have to try your hardest not to fall into that trap. When Hail Mary has an entire late sequence where Mary infiltrates Constantine’s compound, then follows that with a final sequence of Mary infiltrating Constantine’s casino, it was basically like watching the exact same sequence twice. That’s what I’m talking about. You have to be inventive. You have to use your imagination. Action is one of the oldest genres out there. So if you’re not trying to make yours unique, if you’re just repeating action sequences over and over again, you’re going to bore us. Each action sequence in an action movie should be DIFFERENT!
As for the characters, I had a couple of ideas while reading this. If you want to keep Tony, why not create more of an unresolved relationship between him and Mary? She detests him but needs him. She always looks down at him, thinks he’s incapable, doesn’t trust him. Really play into that relationship, not unlike the relationship between Ripley and Bishop in Aliens. Then, over the course of the story, the two begin to find common ground, learn to fight together. And in the end, she ends up putting her life on the line to save him, creating a legitimate arc to her character. You don’t have to use that exact scenario, of course, but I think that’s something that was missing. True emotion. Mary was cold. I wanted to see her change, to find that warmth, learn to feel. I didn’t see that, further distancing me from her.
Also, I always feel like a parent’s protection of a child is more compelling than a sibling’s protection of another sibling. Might we make Mary a mother? Elizabeth her daughter? Not only would that make us more interested in seeing Mary get revenge, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a 40+ year old female hitwoman driving the entire story before. I suppose it makes the script less marketable, but it would create a more interesting situation, no? Instead of Mary being unstoppable, she’ll have lost some of her edge. She’s older, slower. Which means she’s more vulnerable. I was kind of bored by the fact that Mary never had to sweat. You never had any doubt that she was going to kill everyone in the room and come out alive. I’m not sure that’s very compelling.
That’s all I got for today. Action has to be great to get me onboard, and this was too familiar for my taste. Still, I commend Brandon for writing a solid quick read! :)
Script link: Hail Mary
What I learned: We just talked about villains yesterday. I HATED how Constantine was afraid of Mary. Your big main bad guy is AFRAID of the hero??? How scary is that? How much do we fear Constantine after that? How much do we want him to go down after that? We don’t care. Cause he’s a weakling! Your villains in this genre need to be arrogant. They need to be fearless. Is Hans ever scared of John McClane? No. And if he was, Hans would’ve sucked balls.
What I learned 2: The late-villain intro who’s also the mastermind is almost impossible to pull off. (spoiler) We find out Vance is our real villain here. Who’s Vance? I met him on page 80. I barely know the guy. Now I’m supposed to be excited because he’s our mastermind? If you want to throw a late twist at us with the final villain, I advise that villain be fairly prominent during the entire screenplay. Dr. Charles Nichols in The Fugitive has around 5 scenes scattered throughout the script before his ending reveal. We need that here too.
So as you know, last week was kind of a disaster. Actually, I wouldn’t say “disaster.” But when I put together the Twit-Pitch competition, I had these grand illusions of finding the next great undiscovered talent. And hey, it might still happen. I’ve only reviewed the “maybes” so far, not the “definites,” and the definites are the best of the bunch.
But what upset me was the general lack of quality in the screenplays entered. I get that everyone is at a different point in their journey, but with the exception of Fatties, none of these scripts was even close to good enough. As I battled with that, I began to understand one of the biggest issues facing aspiring screenwriters – They don’t know what level of quality is expected of them. How can you jump over the bar if you don’t know how high the bar is?
The simple answer to this is AIM AS HIGH AS YOU CAN. Never EVER give out one of your screenplays unless it’s legitimately (no lying to yourself) the best possible screenplay you’re capable of writing at that stage of your career. If you follow that one rule, you’ll put yourself ahead of 80% of the writers out there, even if you’re just starting out.
Now I wish that was all you needed to do but it isn’t. This is still a craft. Effort isn’t the determining factor. There are character-related rules to learn, story machinations to ingest, plotting to grasp, basic dramaturgy you need to know. That’s why you gotta read as many scripts as you can and write as many scripts as your little fingers will allow. With that said, here are seven mistakes that popped out at me from reading the amateur scripts from the last two weeks. Avoid them at all costs!
BEWARE OF FORCED PLOT POINTS – What Man Of Your Dreams reminded me was that you can never allow the plot machine to become visible to the reader. Your plot MUST BE INVISIBLE. One of the challenges of writing a good screenplay is that it NOT FEEL LIKE A SCREENPLAY! It has to feel like real life. The reader must become so wrapped up in it that they forget they’re reading. If you’re pushing contrivances and coincidences on us, we become acutely aware that a story is being written. For example, in Dreams, our main character has a dream that she’s at the altar marrying a doctor named Tom. Since she’s convinced her dreams come true, she’s spent her entire life looking for a doctor named Tom. As a reader, however, I’m going, “Okay well how does she have this dream and not see the guy’s face?” It’s, of course, a plot contrivance. If she knows what he looks like, there’s no movie. And how is it exactly that she knows he’s a doctor? Is he dressed in doctor’s scrubs at the wedding? Does the priest say, “Do you marry…Doctor Tom?” The fact that I’m thinking about all this stuff and not just enjoying the story is a perfect example of the plot being too visible.
MAKE SURE THERE’S ENOUGH PLOT IN THE FIRST PLACE – The Last Rough Rider was a big reminder of what happens when you don’t pack enough plot into your story. Plot can be boiled down to a series of story developments. It might be a side mission your hero has to go on before he can tackle his main mission. It might be that the bad guys catch him and throw him in a dungeon. It might be the wife getting captured, so that he now has to save her IN ADDITION TO stopping the villains. It might be that the villain who we thought was dead reemerges. It might be subplots with other characters. It might be an unexpected twist, where we learn an ally is actually a spy. If all your character is doing is trying to get from point A to point B, as is the case in Rough Rider, your plot will feel too thin.
GIVE US SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE – The lone Twit-Pitch success so far, Fatties, is a great reminder that readers respond to uniqueness. One of the big mistakes writers make is they assume the reader has read or seen the exact same amount of scripts or movies they have. They erroneously believe, then, that if something is unique to them, it will be unique to the reader. Wrong. A typical reader has read way more scripts than you have, and probably seen tons more movies as well. For that reason, you have to go beyond what you think is “new” or “different” and push yourself to find something that’s truly beyond what anybody else has thought of. Even if a reader doesn’t like a script, he’ll usually commend you for coming up with something unique. Unfortunately, almost all writers keep typing up the same stories. And us readers have to keep reading them.
PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS AS A WRITER – Most young writers aren’t yet aware of what their strengths are. If you’re writing in a genre that doesn’t suit your kind of writing, it’s like Clint Black trying to sing opera. The two just don’t go together. Crimson Road reminded me that if you’re not a dialogue king, then you don’t want to write a movie like Scream, or any teenager-driven film, as they tend to rely heavily on clever and punchy dialogue. Be honest with yourself. Identify what you’re good at and what you aren’t. Then, cater the genres and stories you choose to highlight those strengths.
REWRITE!!!! – I said it above but I’ll say it again: The one thing that should never be in question when you write a screenplay is effort. Yet it’s one of the most common mistakes I see new writers make. They think as long as they throw something together that mildly resembles a movie, they’ve done their job, and you should praise them. Yet these are the scripts readers laugh at, or cry about, or complain to one another about. We say to each other, “Why the hell would he send this out to anyone? There are five spelling/grammar mistakes in the first ten pages.” “There are three scenes out of the first six that convey the exact same thing.” “In the first act, no story emerges.” “Characters just babble to each other about nothing. No one’s pushing the story forward.” “There are no scenes here.” “This feels like it was thrown together on a Saturday night.” If your’e a new screenwriter, don’t show your script to anyone unless you’ve done at least ten drafts. You heard that right. Ten drafts. Every draft should be better than the previous one. A lot of work? Yeah. But you’re going up against professional writers who know how to craft a story a lot better than you do and they’re putting in twenty drafts. So your doing ten is just to ensure you don’t embarrass yourself. Screenwriting takes just as much effort to master as brain surgery. If you’re not willing to put in that effort, do something else.
PAINTING YOUR WORLD IS GOOD – PAINTING YOUR STORY IS BETTER – One of the more common things I see is writers with a lot of talent who focus on the wrong thing. The Mad Dogs writers are a good example. These guys created this big sprawling imaginative world that was admittedly cool, yet they didn’t spend half as much time on the story itself. All of the imagination and focus went into the bells and whistles – the visuals and the mythology. I’m not saying that stuff isn’t important. It is. But the story itself is WAY MORE IMPORTANT. Characters going after goals we care about. A story that pulls us in immediately and never lets go. Relationships with issues we want to see resolved. Fun story twists to keep us guessing. People we like and want to root for. The truth is, an imaginative world should always be the backdrop to the more important element, which is the story itself.
AMATEUR COMEDIES ALMOST ALWAYS SUCK – DON’T BE ONE OF THEM – One thing I’ve found is that the comedy genre is the easiest genre to come up with a movie idea for yet the hardest for amateurs to execute. Everyone thinks they’re funny. Everyone has friends who laugh at their jokes. So they think, “Why can’t I be a comedy writer?” It’s a lot tougher than that. You have to learn how to structure a story, how to pace a story, how to extend a story premise out to 110 pages. You have to learn how to build a story around real characters with real problems as opposed to coming up with a string of jokes or a series of funny scenes. Start with your main character and his flaw. In 95% of comedies, the hero should have a fatal flaw he needs to overcome, whether it be arrogance or fear or he’s too wound up or he doesn’t take things seriously. If a character is fighting some kind of a flaw in a comedy, I immediately know that the script is going to be ten times better than the average amateur comedy. Do that and I promise you, your script won’t be taken as a joke.
Look, I want everyone who reads this site to become a great screenwriter. But it’s not just going to “happen.” It takes work and effort and trial and error and patience and failure after failure after failure until you finally come into your own. Take this craft seriously. Every free second you have, do something screenwriting-related. Whether it be studying or reading or writing. Hold yourself to higher standards. Rewrite the shit out of your scripts. Send your scripts to friends or consultants before sending them out into the world and ask them, point blank, “Is this any good?” I’ve saved a lot of screenwriters from losing key contacts or embarrassing themselves because they or their scripts just weren’t ready. Screenwriting is a profession. Be professional. Stop giving out your work unless it’s legitimately the best you’re capable of. You can do better!
Genre: Action/Sci-fi
What I wouldn’t do for a time machine this week! It’s Friday and I still haven’t found a place. I need to go back to Monday and, knowing what I know now, search better and more efficiently. With that said, THANK YOU for all the e-mails yesterday. You guys have given me a ton of apartment leads to follow-up on. I’ll keep you posted on how those go on Twitter. And please, keep them coming!
ALSO, thank you to all the Scriptshadow readers who came out last night! I had a blast meeting everyone in person and everybody was super-cool. My only regret is that I didn’t have more time to spend with each individual person. But maybe I’ll do it again when I move out here in a month. Assuming I have a place that is. And hey, what’s the worst that can happen if I don’t find a place? I’ll be one of the many homelesses. Being homeless in LA is almost trendy.
Return Fire begins with an earthquake in Switzerland. But something’s funky enough about this earthquake that it gets the American military curious. They think it might be a nuke testing of some sort. What the Swiss would be doing testing nukes, who knows? But the point is, the military wants to send in a Special Forces unit to check it out.
That unit is basically headed up by Jonathan “Santa” Santarelli, a young hotshot defined more by his war decorated grandfather than anything he’s achieved. We also have Hawks, a hot chick who’s deft at throwing knives around, Dang, a Cuban who’s obsessed with Star Trek, and a number of other dudes who really enjoy being the biggest badasses on the planet.
So our team flies to Switzerland, locates the epicenter of the earthquake, and finds a hidden bunker there with a couple of dead Nazis and a strange nuclear reactor thingy inside. Seems they’ve stumbled upon a secret Nazi science experiment gone wrong. Certainly nothing to worry about right now though. But as they prepare to leave, there’s a big flash, they pass out, they wake up, and the bunker now looks clean and shiny. Not just that, but those dead Nazi bodies are gone!
Of course Dang thinks they’ve travelled back in time but no one else is buying it – yet. Once they’re attacked by a few Nazis, though, public consensus sways. As hard as it is to believe…they may have just been transported back to 1945, two months before the end of World War 2!
A simple mission all of a sudden becomes, “How the hell do we get back to the present?” After cornering a Nazi scientist who’s a part of the time-travelling experiment, they learn that unless they kill a really bad Nazi (who’s realized via the Americans’ arrival that the Germans lose the war), there’s a good chance Hitler will be informed of the loss and travel back in time to start the war over again, this time making sure he doesn’t fuck it up. So it’s sort of like my apartment hunting issue. Without the threat of a thousand year Reich.
Okay so here’s the good news. This script is probably the best script of the week. The writing here is really strong. Paragraphs are short and packed with information. They’re easy to read. And a lot has been put into the prose. For example, here’s an early line in the script: “In the smoky doorway, SERGEANT MAJOR JACOBS (50s) leans on the jamb, a hard, lean man with a lined face and hair speckled a wise grey.”
So the script was just really easy and fun to read. However, there was something missing here and as I look back on it, I’m not entirely sure what it was. That’ll happen to me sometimes. I’ll read a script that, for all intents and purposes, has very little “wrong” with it. And yet there’s something that just doesn’t do it for me.
To find the issues, I usually ask myself a simple question: “What didn’t you like?” The first thing that pops out at me is that the story isn’t exceptional. It’s serviceable. It explores the premise. I’m just not sure it explores it in an interesting or unique enough way. Once we get back to 1945, the story devolves into a series of small tasks that revolve around finding this Nazi Bad Guy who may or may not tell Hitler they’ve lost the war, which would result in Hitler MAYBE going back in time and starting the war over again.
When I have to play “maybe or maybe not connect-the-dots motivation,” I’m not nearly as invested in the story. I like when motivations are crisp and clean. Taken. Save his daughter or she disappears forever. I get that. It’s not that “connect-the-dots motivation” can’t work. It’s just a gamble, especially when you couple it with a “maybe” scenario. That was the thing. I was never sure exactly what the Nazi bad guy was going to do OR what Hitler would do with the information once he got it.
And yet I’m not sure if that’s the main reason Return Fire didn’t pop for me. I think another issue is that nothing really shocking happened. Nothing surprising. And that’s a problem when you have a time-travel film. Just the nature of the concept necessitates some shocking things to happen.
For example, when Marty gets sent back in time in Back To The Future, how boring would the movie have been if all he had to do was get back? The surprising twist that makes that screenplay one of the best ever is that Marty accidentally gets hit by the car that has his mother fall in love with him instead of his father (who was the one who was SUPPOSED to get hit by the car). So now it isn’t just about getting back. It’s about making his mom fall out of love with him and in love with his father. That’s what made the script pop.
Here we have a nice little storyline with Santa running into the young version of his highly decorated grandfather, but I’m not sure anything interesting is really done with the storyline. It’s sort of like the writers want us to be excited just by the fact that they’ve integrated this character into the past. That’s not clever. That’s the BEGINNING of clever. You still have to do something inventive with that, as well as something surprising with the rest of the time-travel plot.
With that being said, these writers do have a future in Hollywood. Their writing is taut, professional, and easy to read. They understand mechanics and structure. For example, the characters always have a goal they’re going after (i.e Get back to the helicopter drop point, find and kill the Nazi Bad Guy), so the script is always pushing towards something. I just wish the things they were pushing towards were a little more interesting and unexpected. It was like the writers pushed right up to that 75% point of their imaginations and stopped.
Return Fire is one of those “almost” screenplays. You read it. You see a lot of good things. But afterwards, you leave wanting more. If the writers push themselves on the time travel elements, they might be able to make this work. Right now, unfortunately, it’s too standard.
Script link: Return Fire
What I learned: You have to remember that you are competing against MILLIONS OF PEOPLE’S imaginations in the scriptwriting game. Thousands of those people are pushing their imaginations to the brink to come up with something that the next guy hasn’t thought of. If you stop at something that’s simply “good enough,” chances are your script isn’t impressing readers. It’s when you push PAST that point – when you say to yourself, “This is good, but I can come up with something better,” that your screenplays truly start to shine.