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NOVEMBER LOGLINE SHOWDOWN – DEADLINE TONIGHT!
What: November Logline Showdown
Send me: the logline for any script you have (features will take precedence over pilots but if you’ve got the best tv show idea ever, send it in)
I need: The title, genre, and logline
Also: Your script must be written because I’ll be reviewing the winning entry the following week
When: Deadline is Thursday, November 30th, 10:00pm Pacific Time
Send entries to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
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As many of you know, I’m a UFO nut. I love UFOs. I love them so much, in fact, I get angry when the internet tries to make me call them UAPs. I kick it old school. Don’t ruin my high, Internet. Don’t ruin my high, AI.
The UFO community long needed a way to identify UFOs. So they came up with something called “The five Observables.” If something you see in the sky displays these traits, it’s likely an alien space ship. The five observables are anti-gravity lift, instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic flight without signatures (no ‘sonic booms’ for example), low observability (cloaking), trans-medium travel (can move from space to ocean effortlessly).
This reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about in regards to screenwriting. With screenwriting, there are a bunch of things you can teach. You can teach a writer how to break their screenplay into acts. You can teach a writer how to set up and pay off things. You can teach a writer how to create obstacles that your protagonist must overcome.
But there are also things that are next to impossible to teach. These are what I call the “screenwriting unobservables.” They are, mostly, the innate talents that one is blessed with, and, therefore, you either have them or you don’t. You’ll notice that I said, “next to impossible.” I’m going to list these unobservables and then offer some advice on how you can still improve in each category.
UNOBSERVABLE 1 – CONCEPT CREATION
Concept is elusive even before we assign it ‘unobservable’ status. We know this because even the best concept creators strike out. Anyone remember Tenet? For whatever reason, ‘concept’ seems to elude a large percentage of writers. No matter how hard they try, they don’t seem to understand what makes for a good movie idea. So they shoot themselves in the foot, repeatedly writing screenplays that have no shot at being good because they were doomed by their concept from the get-go.
Advice: As a Scriptshadow reader has noted, try to write a come up with a new logline every week. If you have 50 loglines a year, there’s probably a good one in there. Pay attention to movies (not sequels or franchises) that end up having mass appeal and dissect why. Conversely, pay attention to what bombs and ask why. And, finally, send your loglines out to as many friends as possible and listen to their feedback. If no one is excited about your idea – even if they only say it’s ‘good’ – don’t write that script. Keep going, keep logging feedback, and keep challenging yourself to come up with better, more unique, ideas, until others start telling you “That’s a great idea.” Concept creation is no different from writing a screenplay. It takes time to master.
UNOBSERVABLE 2 – CREATIVE CHOICES
I can teach writers how to craft a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But it’s much harder to teach writers how to come up with interesting creative choices within their stories. Creative choices are the things that happen in your screenplay, either through the characters or the plot, that make your story stand out from all the other screenplays out there. Andy Dufresne’s amazing escape plan in The Shawshank Redemption is a masterful creative choice. Getting rid of a body by chopping it up in a woodcutter, a la Fargo, is an interesting choice. John McClane running into Hans on the roof and thinking he’s a hostage is a great creative choice. Most writers make boring or predictable choices throughout their screenplays. The writers who stand out are the ones who come up with the clever stuff. And you’ll know that you’ve got the clever stuff when it’s clear audiences will be talking about it afterwards.
Advice: Remind yourself that you’re boring. This will work even if it’s not true. If you’re convinced you’re a boring writer who writes boring stuff, you will constantly strive to come up with better creative choices. You’ll take more creative risks. Also, use every rewrite as an opportunity to find a new strong creative choice in your script. Don’t leave that rewrite until you’ve come up with a choice that clearly makes your script better.
UNOBSERVABLE 3 – VOICE
This is the big one. The big Kahuna. The writers with a unique voice have a huge advantage over every other writer because they don’t need strong concepts to make their scripts work. Their talent is in finding the unique within the mundane. “Voice” is, essentially, the comedic way in which you see the world. It’s your own sense of humor. Almost all of the best “voice” writers (John Hughes, Woody Allen, Larry David, even Aaron Sorkin) have varying degrees of offbeat humor that power their writing.
Advice: The thing with “voice” is that you can’t create it. So don’t try to write a script with voice. It won’t work. Your voice is already within you. Your job is, simply, to find a concept that aligns with that voice and then your voice will come out naturally. So if you have a dry sense of humor, write an indie concept with dry main characters.
UNOBSERVABLE 4 – CHARACTER REALITY
When I talk ‘character reality,’ I’m not talking about flaws and likability and internal conflicts and vices. Those are all part of creating characters but they’re not the most important part. The most important part is creating a character WHO FEELS LIKE A REAL PERSON. We’ve all experienced this when reading scripts – a character who just feels so incredibly real. Lester Burnham’s character in American Beauty felt like this real burnt-out suburban loser whose family didn’t respect him anymore. More likely, we’ve experienced these characters in television, where there’s more time to flesh characters out. But if you don’t have characters that feel like real people, you’re always keeping your reader at arm’s length.
Advice: Take an intense curiosity in other human beings. Figure out what makes them tick. If you don’t have that curiosity – if you don’t desperately want to know the inner workings of why people are the way they are – it is highly difficult to write a character that readers connect with. If you do this well, you will write your descriptions of characters with more detail. The things they say will contain more specificity. They’ll always act from a place of realism, as opposed to doing things only because the writer needs them to. This is the hardest unobservable to achieve. But boy does it pay dividends for those who can do it.
UNOBSERVABLE 5 – DIALOGUE
There is an innate divide between how the majority of writers make their characters speak (perfunctory, on-the-nose, devoid of personality) and how people actually speak. There is an elusive ability that some writers have whereby they can channel this actuality, as well as make their characters say charming, clever, funny, or intelligent, things effortlessly. And this is a skill that the large majority of writers don’t have. The good news is, you don’t need it to become a professional screenwriter. You can learn to write strong functional dialogue. But boy does it help if you have this special dialogue ability.
Advice: A lot of weak dialogue stems from writers who are afraid to let go. They don’t want their characters to sound weird or odd so they keep a muzzle on them, not unlike they do when they interact with people in the real world. They’re afraid to say something out loud that someone else thinks is strange. You have to let that go because when it comes to speaking, we only ever say interesting things when we’re not holding back. The great thing about writing dialogue is that you can write the craziest s**t imaginable and then, if it’s too much, you just edit it down. But if you’re a dialogue muzzler, it’s going to be hard for you to ever write memorable dialogue.
