Someone once said that the key to becoming successful in life is mastering the ability to delay instant gratification for long-term benefit.
In other words, if someone handed you 100 bucks, would you spend it all right now? Buy that video game you’ve been jonezing to play? Celebrate with a wild night out of drinking? Head over to farfetch.com and snag that fly pink polo you know you’d look great in?
Or do you put it in a savings account, let it accumulate interest over the years with all the rest of the money you’ve strategically saved, so that when it comes time to buy a house, or send your kids to college, you have more than enough in the bank?
I think there are benefits to both options. Sure, if you spend the money now, you don’t have it in the future. But in a world where happy memories are, arguably, more valuable than anything else, including money, who’s to say that spending that money today on a good time is a bad idea?
With that said, being 60 and broke ain’t the coolest thing either.
This debate is not limited to money. Do you do a fun low-paying job now as opposed to a boring high paying job that will set you up for later? Do you date the young crazy-fun partner now or do you find a mate who, while not as exciting, is more stable and good for you in the long run? These aren’t the easiest questions to answer.
You’re probably wondering why I’m bringing this up.
It’s because writing a screenplay brings up a similar dilemma. Do you try and write the best possible story for the moment, always keeping the script exciting on every page, knowing that you risk the screenplay burning out? Or do you stoke a reserved fire and pace yourself in the hopes that the larger story experience is more rewarding?
To answer this question, I want to talk about two screenplays I’ve read over the years.
The first is one I read a few years ago. The script was a sort of Quentin Tarantino inspired story that involved over-exaggerated characters and a lot of dialogue. And it was GREAT. The characters were all fun. The scenes were long with lots of tension-filled dialogue. It was a really enjoyable read.
What made this particular script such a shocking discovery was that the writer had sent me another script five years earlier and I had privately labeled it one of the worst scripts I’d ever read. It was a quasi biopic comedy about a famous person that, to be frank, was more boring than waiting for water to boil.
When I found out that the same writer had written both scripts, I had to know what he did with the latest script that he hadn’t done with the earlier one. And his answer surprised me. He said that with the first script, he’d carefully mapped out the story and was trying to weave a theme in there and write a traditional three-act movie. But with the second script, he hadn’t even intended to write a movie. Instead, he wanted to practice his scene-writing and write a series of scenes that were entertaining on their own.
He wrote four or five of these scenes before he realized, maybe I can connect these and turn them into a movie. However, even after he started connecting the scenes, he still wrote the rest of the script in the same fashion – just trying to write great scenes.
I was fascinated by this answer because what he was effectively saying was that, with this script, all he was trying to do was write a compelling scene in the moment. He was trying to entertain the reader immediately, with no plans of making a larger story work. He was the equivalent of the guy who spent his 100 dollars right away.
I didn’t put too much stock into this at first. Cause the way I saw it, this was a writer who’d had five more years to get better since his previous screenplay. Maybe he just got much better at writing in general and would’ve written a good script regardless of how he approached it.
But then, around a year later, a producer asked me if Tyler Marceca’s “The Disciple Program” was available cause he wanted to see if he could buy the rights and do something with it.
This got me thinking about The Disciple Program and I remembered the circumstances by which the script was written. It was written for a screenwriting contest (I think it was First Draft’s contest) and they had a very unique contest structure. Each week, you would send in 10 pages of your screenplay and a contest reader would give you notes on those pages to help you craft the next 10 pages. And then the next 10 pages. And so on and so forth.
What this did was force Tyler to only focus on making the current 10 pages as good as possible. Because he couldn’t, for example, write some slower setup scene that was going to get paid off on page 75. There was no reward to setting something up that the reader wouldn’t be able to read for another 8 weeks. So instead, Tyler focused on writing 10 really freaking exciting pages. And then 10 more exciting pages. And then 10 more exciting pages.
He basically wrote a series of ten really exciting 10-page segments.
Naturally, you can see the connection here. Just like the Quentin Tarantino writer, Tyler was focusing on entertaining the reader here and now as opposed to carefully crafting a longer, more deliberate, story.
I think you guys know where I’m going with this.
I’m a believer that you should spend that 100 dollars every 10 pages, instead of saving it all for your climax.
Obviously, there are challenges to this approach. Such as maintaining momentum when every section of your script has to be great. But it’s doable. Tyler’s script was a non-stop action ride. But the first script I mentioned was almost entirely dialogue. The writer just knew how to build up conversations in an exciting tension-filled way. For example, we’d know going into a scene, that Character 1 was planning to kill Character 2, but Character 2 didn’t know that. So there was dramatic irony and tension building during their conversation as we eagerly anticipated the attempted assassination.
And this is not to say you should throw out any pre-construction of your story. I’m not saying never plan your screenplay again.
But this approach does necessitate you do more organization on the back end. The idea is that you write for the moment all the way through your first draft. And then, once you see what you have, you use subsequent drafts to pull all those separate pieces together.
Can EVERY screenplay be written like this? I don’t know but I suspect not. For example, I don’t think you can take something like Lord of the Rings – which has an immense amount of backstory and exposition that needs to be conveyed – and just try to write that in the moment. Movies like that need more planning.
But I do think this strategy can work for most screenplays. And it has a precedent for working. I’m a big believer in The Sequence Approach, which is the process of breaking your screenplay down into eight mini-movies and trying to write eight of the best mini-movies you can. This 10-page approach just tightens that up a bit. Eight sequences in a 110 page script amounts to roughly 13.5 pages each. So you’re cutting that down by 3.5 pages to 10 pages each.
And just to be clear, there are no hard-and-fast rules here. If one of your sequences is 8 pages and the next is 12, that’s fine. The main thing is you’re writing for the here and now. You’re writing roughly 10 pages where your only objective is to make those pages impossible to put down. Put yourself in the reader’s head. Could they be bored by this? If the answer is yes, erase, go back to where it started getting boring, and write something better.
Keep in mind also that you’re writing a SPEC SCRIPT. A spec script does not operate by the same rules as a greenlit Hollywood movie. A greenlit Hollywood movie has the script written in-house. They can have a couple of slow-moving scenes because nobody’s judging the script. They’re all working together. When you’re writing on spec, you’re not working for anyone yet. You’re trying to write something good enough so that Hollywood will allow you to work for someone. For that reason, your script has to be more consistently entertaining than a Hollywood movie. I know it’s not fair but those are the rules, bub.
If you’re curious about what script did this better than any script I’ve ever read, look no further than Source Code. If you only ever saw Source Code the movie, you may think that’s a bold statement. But that original script was pretty much designed to be written the way I’m talking about today. So check it out…
Link: Source Code Original Draft!
By the way, you can still plan your story ahead of time. This is not an excuse to never outline. But when you sit down and write, you need to prioritize entertainment over everything else. If it comes down to you following your outline but your outline idea for the scene is boring? You need to throw away your outline and write something the reader can’t put down. That’s what Tyler did. That’s what the Tarantino writer did. That’s what Ben Ripley (Source Code) did. And that method produced three great screenplays. Why shouldn’t you take advantage of this approach as well?
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