A quick note: I will be reviewing the “Kenobi” pilot in this month’s newsletter, which is coming out Saturday. So if you’re not already signed up, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER.” :)
You know those lightbulb moments you’ve had that literally changed the way you looked at life? Like when you realized you could go to the bathroom without telling your parents? Or that instead of having to eat at the Commons in college, you could order McDonald’s and pizza every night?
Okay, maybe those are less major revelations than they are my issues with authority. However, when it comes to screenwriting, I’ve had some MAJOR earth-shattering realizations over the years, lightbulb moments that spun my prior views about the craft on their head and totally reinvented the way I approached screenwriting.
Today I thought I’d share these with you so that you could have these epiphanies earlier than I did, and therefore improve at a faster pace. Granted, we all look at the craft differently and are inspired by different things. But hopefully these revelations will help out in some way.
It’s not about you, it’s about the reader – I shudder at the thought of my early screenplays as I was so self-indulgent, I bordered on narcissistic. I still remember handing off a 135 page screenplay to a friend who was a reader at a big production company and them saying to me “Are you sure you don’t want to cut this down? 135 pages is a lot.” I mentally rolled my eyes at my friend due to what a stupid statement this was. A good story doesn’t have a page limit, I wanted to say to her. I was shocked when nothing happened with the script and figured that my friend’s pre-conceived notion of how long a script had to be made her downplay it to her boss.
Of course, reading the script years later resulted in the maximum amount of second-hand embarrassment a person is allowed to endure. Soooo much could’ve been cut from that script. But because I wanted to include what *I* wanted to include in the story and because everything *I* wrote had to be genius, there’d been zero editing. The script, I realized, was all about me. As were all the scripts I’d written up to that point.
Around this time I started to read a lot of professional screenplays and noticed just how easy they were to read (The Hangover was a particular favorite). It hit me that I’d been doing it all wrong. I was writing for me, never once thinking about what the experience was for the reader. Ultimately, it’s about making them happy. So I completely changed the way I wrote. 135 page scripts became 110 page scripts. I began writing simpler easier-to-digest sentences (4th grade level instead of going to a thesaurus every tenth word). 4-5 line paragraphs became 2-3 line paragraphs. Crazy weird hard-to-follow artsy sequences were jettisoned entirely. Everything became geared towards giving the reader the most enjoyable experience possible. Yes, you have to be into what you’re writing. But ultimately you’re writing your script for others to enjoy, not yourself. So approach your scriptwriting accordingly.
Outlining is actually a good thing. Oh wait, outlining is actually a bad thing – Like most writers who get into screenwriting, I considered outlining the antithesis of creativity. If you planned what you were going to write ahead of time, you were purposefully stifling your moment-to-moment ability to seize upon inspiration. However, after writing a dozen or so screenplays without an outline, I began to notice I was spending an inordinate amount of time rewriting them. One day I decided that I needed to be more productive with my writing time and looked into what was causing me to rewrite so much. I realized that the bulk of my rewriting was focused on correcting my structure, which was all over the place. Why was it all over the place? Because I’d been taking my story whatever random direction I wanted to in the moment.
Outlining, I realized, corrected this problem. What you have to remember is that screenwriting is the most mathematical of the writing practices outside of maybe poetry. Every page is a minute of screen time. And most movies are between 100-120 minutes. So your length is already set. Therefore, it makes sense that you’d want to divide your script into the most dramatically powerful set of sequences to get the most out of it. Planning where everything goes isn’t anti-creative. It’s putting the pillars of your story in place so that it’s easy to build a story on top of them. There are about 45 scenes in a script. Your first act should have 25% of those scenes, the second act 50%, and the third act 25%. Figure out as much as you can about what goes on in each of those acts and your script is going to be more focused and more purposeful.
But wait! Years later, after following this strategy religiously, I realized it’d created a new problem. Now, my scripts were feeling too predictable. They were structured well and weren’t taking as long to write. But the story beats were all landing in the same spots that all story beats land, giving my scripts the distinctive feeling of “I’ve seen this movie already.” This was because, in my determination to become a structural superstar, I had eliminated all spontaneity. I’d forbidden the act of coming up with an idea on the spot and changing direction, since it went against my outline. Also, if I changed a major part of my outline, it would mean going back and changing the rest of the outline with it.
What I ultimately learned was that you need a balance of both. You need to outline ahead of time. But you also need to give yourself permission to go off on story tangents during the writing process, even if it means re-thinking your story. The act of writing a screenplay is a process of discovery. You will discover new things along the way. If those ideas are notably better than the ideas you had in your outline, by all means incorporate them.
Situation-based writing – In the past, I looked at screenplays as a series of scenes that are stacked together to tell a larger story. Not every one of these scenes needed to be individually entertaining as long as they worked with the other scenes to tell that story. Situation-based writing changed that. It made me realize that each scene could become a story all its own, so that not only was it a part of a larger whole, but was entertaining all by itself. And the concept is simple. Instead of just writing characters moving through your universe, bridges that connect the previous scene with the following one, create a SITUATION within the scene itself that makes it its own little mini-story.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to write a work scene for your protagonist between him and his boss. Technically, you could write anything you wanted. You could have the boss remind your hero of an important presentation he has later. You could write a scene to establish that your hero kisses up to his boss whenever he can, in the hopes of getting a promotion at some point. You can write a scene with your hero and several co-workers talking to their boss after a meeting. None of these scenes would be bad, per se, if you wrote them competently. But none of them are situations. Situations have goals, stakes, and some sort of familiar container that audiences understand the rules of.
So, for example, your hero could have a meeting with his boss where he plans to ask him for a raise. That’s a situation. It’s an identifiable act with clear rules attached to it. Somebody wants something. We’d make sure to attach some stakes to it (it’s crucial that he get this raise). That’s going to be a way better scene than the other three scenes I mentioned specifically because of the compelling situation you’ve set up. In Coda, two high school kids who like each other do homework together in one of their bedroom’s for the first time. That’s a situation. It’s a non-situation if they just talk to each other after class. There’s no “container” to that scenario.
Speaking of high school, a teenager taking their driver’s test. That’s a situation. A road rage confrontation. That’s a situation. When Terry Rossio talks about this, the example he gives is, don’t have your married couple arguing back home, have them arguing on the side of the road while having to change a tire. The changing of the tire is the situation. Situations create a framework around the scene that makes it feel like a miniature movie. You’re not going to be able to do this in every scene. But try to do it in as many as possible.
The second act is the movie – At one point in my screenwriting journey, I was under the assumption that the first act was the movie. Because the first act was where you introduced your concept, which is the whole reason you wrote the movie. Take War of the Worlds, for example. The reason you get excited about writing that movie is what happens ten minutes into it, when these giant tripod aliens appear and start vaporizing everyone. But after writing a bunch of screenplays incorporating that approach, I realized that everything went to crap as soon as my first act was over. I’d introduced this really cool hook but I still had 90 pages to go. What was the point of those additional pages if the best stuff had already happened?
That’s when I internalized that scripts weren’t about introducing big fancy concepts then spinning your wheels for 60 pages until you got to the climax. What happens in the second act was actually the thing that connects with the audience the most. What I ultimately realized is that a screenplay is about a character who’s experiencing intense inner turmoil which is preventing them from finding happiness. The second act is about challenging that conflict to the point where they need to face it head on.
Take Everything Everywhere All at Once. The second act is about this unhappy woman who’s given up on both her life and her family being forced to cooperate with them in order to defeat a bigger evil. Sure, the opening act where we learn she can recruit powers from other universes is cool. But the meat of the story is her trying to connect with her other family members, and that’s 100% explored in the second act. Obviously, you’re throwing plot obstacles at your characters in the second act as well. But it’s primarily about your character being challenged internally. This was a major MAJOR revelation for me because it finally got me to understand what to do in my second act. Before that, I just tried to come up with enough non-boring scenes to get to the 3rd act.
Scripts are not about dialogue – When I started writing, I was heavily influenced, like a lot of people, by Tarantino. And what was Tarantino known for? His dialogue. So all of my early scripts were characters chatting, and chatting, and chatting some more. I think it was John August who said that once a scene was set up properly, anyone could write the dialogue. I don’t know if I completely agree with that. But I agree with the sentiment. What studios pay the big screenwriters for is creating the scenarios that lead to good dialogue as opposed to just writing a bunch of dialogue in a vacuum.
The most famous example of this is what happened on Thor Ragnarok when a Make-a-Wish foundation kid was on set and they were having issues with the line when Thor and Hulk meet each other in the gladiator ring. The kid suggested going with, “We know each other. He’s a friend from work.” The line became the most famous in the movie and some people in the screenwriting community, including myself, were asking that if screenwriting was so hard, how it is that a 10 year old kid can come up with the best line in a billion dollar movie? What we have to remember is that it’s the screenwriter who came up with the fun compelling situation of Thor being forced to fight Hulk in a surprise situation in a gladiatorial ring in the first place. Without them setting up that scene, there isn’t an opportunity for that fun line to exist.
In summary, focus more on creating situations that open the door for good dialogue rather than trying to create good dialogue out of thin air. Even the most famous dialogue scene in history, Jules and Vincent talking about foot rubs while going to collect money, is dialogue that doesn’t work as well if they’re just sitting on a couch rambling. The fact that they’re on their way to strong-arm a client for money builds a sense of inertia (they’re on the move) and anticipation (where are they going, what’s going to happen) that opens the door for a seemingly relaxed conversation.
This weekend, I’m offering $100 off a feature or pilot screenplay consultation. If you’ve got a script that has issues or a script you think is good but needs professional feedback to make it great, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “100” and collect on the deal. You have to secure payment this weekend but you can send the script whenever you want!
