Flavor Bin!
Yes!
It’s Day 4 of writing a screenplay, baby!
Is there any better feeling than writing a screenplay? Don’t answer that. But seriously. When you’re cooking along…. when those ideas are hitting the page like raw chicken hitting the barbecue, that seasoned smoke wafting up into your nostrils and you can’t wait to slather some sauce onto that delicious cascade of meat and nom nom nom your way to culinary heaven. That’s why we do this.
Now since we’re writing 8 pages a day, you should be passing through one of the most important sections of the screenplay today – the first act turn. The first act turn occurs between pages 24 (for a 100 page screenplay) and 30 (for a 120 page screenplay) and denotes the moment where your hero begins his journey.
Indiana Jones going after that Ark. Ben Affleck starts coaching the team in The Way Back. The three friends go out to retrieve their father’s super expensive drone in Good Boys.
If you’re not writing a hero’s journey type script, the first act turn instead denotes a directive being put in place. In one of the biggest spec sales from last year, “Shut In,” about a woman who gets shut into her closet by her druggie husband, the first act turn is the moment where the husband’s violent friend enters the house and she enacts a plan to get out and save her children.
And then there are more complex scenarios, where you hand the “plan” over to the antagonist. Since they’re the active one in the story, it’s them who enact the first act turn in the journey. That’s what happens in The Invisible Man. Cecilia is not active for the first half of the screenplay. The plan – stalking and driving his ex-girlfriend insane – comes from the boyfriend. So the first act turn is when the ex-boyfriend begins the process of stalking her.
The point is, some sort of clear direction needs to be established in today’s eight pages. Otherwise you’re going to have a script that loses its engines and dives towards the ocean and no matter how many times the automatic alert system tells you to, “Pull Up! Beep-beep. Pull-up! Beep-beep.” it’ll be too late.
Moving forward…
One of the topics that keeps popping up in the comments is whether to go back and rewrite some of the stuff you’ve already written.
Should you be doing this?
Under normal circumstances, I’d say yes. It’s actually a nice way to ease your way into the day’s writing session. Cause you look at a previous scene, it gives you a better idea for a setup or a line of dialogue. Now you’re typing. So it isn’t difficult to ride that momentum into writing some new pages.
But we only have two weeks to write this. And I’m guessing a lot of you are behind schedule. I hope not. But I’m hearing little birdies chirp in the comment section that tell me otherwise. And the main reason you don’t have pages is because you’re doing things OTHER THAN writing pages, with rewriting being one of those things.
Here’s the sneaky problem with rewriting pages: It’s fool’s gold. It FEELS like writing. But, at the end of the day, you haven’t written anything new. Or, at least, you’ve written less. So let’s not do any rewriting. Make the focus of each day tackling the blank page and that’s it. That strategy is what’s going to allow you to write a script in two weeks.
For our final topic of the day, we have to thank Jonah Hill.
Hill, who’s sold a few screenplays in his day, has been adamant about the fact that he’s writing while quarantined. And recently he revealed a great writing tip. He calls it “the flavor bin.”
The “flavor bin” is a separate document which contains all of the “too outrageous” ideas he’s come up with for that script. When he gets stuck, he heads on over to the flavor bin to see if any of the ideas can be added to the script.
A flavor bin idea for James’ Cameron’s “Titanic” might be: Someone falls overboard and gets attacked by a shark.
That idea doesn’t quite fit the tone of the movie. You could argue it distracts from the plot and the main themes of the movie. But it’s a great flavor bin idea. It gets you thinking. Regardless of whether you use a flavor bin idea or not, they tend to get the creative synapses in your brain firing, which could lead to some idea-piggybacking that eventually leads to an idea you do use.
It’s also a great idea for conservative writers. If you’ve ever been accused of writing “safe,” “bland,” or “predictable” scripts, you should definitely try adding a flavor bin to your screenwriting toolbox. Flavor bin ideas can take your script to places you never would’ve thought otherwise.
Okay, time to begin the day’s writing. You don’t feel like it? Don’t care. You’ve got so much to do today. Don’t care. You’re not inspired.
This process is not about how you feel. It’s about getting pages down. Whenever you run out of ideas, erase the inner critic and write whatever comes to mind. Even if it’s babble. Babble eventually turns sensical if you do it long enough.
Good luck. After today, you’re 25% done!
