Go Into The Story: There's no right way to write: Part 5

There is no right way to write. No one way. No single approach, paradigm, theory or magic formula. No easy path. There is only the writer. Their creativity. Their stories. And lots of hard work.

This week I've been featuring the words of four screenwriters each day to demonstrate the endless ways to approach the craft of writing:

ALVIN SARGENT (Ordinary People, Nuts)

"I do a great deal of free-associating. Talk, for pages and pages, I don't know what's going on. Then I find something alive – I hope. I think too many people are too organized; they've got it all worked out, instead of hearing their characters first. Get the goop out first, then organize.

"Rigidity is the mother of rigidity. It's very exciting to be ridiculous. I wish I could be even more so than I am. Jump! Jumping is a lifeline, not the suicide or the predictable. It brings you to life. Take the character and put him where he least wants to be. If it's honest, it'll be worth exploring.

"You must write everyday. Free yourself. Free association. An hour alone a day. Blind writing. Write in the dark. Don't think about what it is you're writing. Just put a piece of paper in the typewriter, take your clothes off and go! No destination… pay it no attention… it's pure unconscious exercise. Pages of it. Keep it up until embarrassment disappears. Eliminate resistance. Look at it in the morning. Amazing sometimes. Most of it won't make any sense. But there'll always be a small kernel of truth that relates to what you're working on at the time. You won't even know you created it. It will appear, and it is yours. Pure gold, a product of that pure part of you that does not know how to resist.

"Finally, think of a screenplay in two ways. It takes the form of a joke or a dream. Dreams and well told jokes are always beautifully designed, exquisitely cut. We hear, see, only what's necessary. There is never any deadwood. Never a dull moment. Always unpredictable, always the surprise. The audience cannot sit there and write it before it comes on the screen. That is my guide. The architecture of the dream, the joke."

TIM McCANLIES (The Iron Giant, Secondhand Lions)

"That second act, for me, is the most fun because the first and third acts have such clearly defined functions. The first act you have to set up the problem or problems, introduce all your characters – there are so many things that you've got to do, there just isn't room for the fun stuff. And the third act is almost an extended scene in a way – the chase, the fight, etc. But in the second act you really get to cut loose, find out who this character is, see his or her changes.

"I try to use as many action verbs as possible. I try to make it as vivid as I can. I notice now that I write much more succinctly than I used to. To me, more than four lines of action in a row is a lot. People read very quickly in the business, and they tend to skip over large blocks of print. A lot of times, if it isn't dialogue, they don't see it! So sometimes I find myself saying more in dialogue than if I was actually shooting it.

"Another way to get around the problem is, if you have a big block of action, put things in caps, or at least underline things – all with the intention of holding the readers' interest, making them actually read the action lines."

ROBERT TOWNE (Chinatown, Shampoo)

"Generally speaking, if you don't set everything up in the beginning, you'll pay for it… in the middle or in the end. So I would rather pay for it at the beginning. It's not television and they're not going to go off into the icebox, or they're not going to change channels. An audience in a movie will forgive you for just about anything for the first 10 minutes or so. But really nothing at the end. So it's the time to prepare… the beginning.

"I don't think there are principles, other than asking yourself over and over again what's going to happen next, and seeing if you're interested in what's going to happen next. I'm upset if what I think is going to happen next or I think should happen next, there's something about it that doesn't, I guess, ring true. That's not quite real.

"Most scenes are rarely about what the subject matter is. You soon see the power of dealing obliquely or elliptically with situations because most people rarely confront things head-on.

"You've got to get a sense of the movement of a piece, so that it's lucid, it's visualized well, there's rhythm and orchestration in it so that scenes are not choppy where you should take some time, or too long-winded
where you shouldn't."

DAVID MAMET (The Untouchables, Glengarry Glen Ross)

One: Don't write screenplays to sell. And if you try and write down to the mediocre tastes of studio execs, you're only training yourself to be subservient to the demands of "second-class minds" who will soon kill off your creative spark altogether. Instead, write something you're passionate as hell about...and make a movie of it yourself (unless your spec has the budget of MASTER & COMMANDER, of course).

Two: Never write exposition. And I mean never. Let plot and dialogue push your story along.

Three: The ability to write is a gift. If you don't got it, you don't got it. If you do got it, Craft can make this gift even better.

Four: Most writers don't got it (a.k.a. they suck).

Five: Directing makes you a better writer since it teaches you to cut for pace.

Six: Write till you can't do any better, then move on to the next project.

Seven: Read Aristotle's POETICS and Joseph Campbell's THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES. These will tell you all you need to know about writing.

Eight: Write each day, even if it's just for three minutes at a time.

Nine: Writing is hard and always will be. It doesn't get easier the more you do it.

Ten: There's no such thing as character in a script. There's just a good story with good actors talking.

Eleven: Narration can be either good or bad, depending on the writer.

Twelve: Get out of school as soon as possible. Experience Life. Put that experience in your script.

Thirteen: Biography is the hardest to write since you're trapped by actual events -- and actual events aren't necessarily dramatic. Use Poetic License to remedy this situation.

Fourteen: Don't write and drink at the same time.

Fifteen: All movies are about good and evil (or should be).

Sixteen: All writing is getting over what happened to you before you were ten years old.

Seventeen: God is a mystery. And writing is a way of getting closer to that mystery.

Eighteen: A good script is a simple premise with unforeseeable twists and turns.

Nineteen: I can't explain the writing process because I work unconsciously.

Twenty: Forget every rule Syd Field, Robert McKee or any other screenwriting guru ever taught you. Except one..."Never Be Boring."

In a nifty bit of synchronicity, I received an email from Brian Simpson, a young L.A. based writer who is focusing his attention on long-form improvisation. I had the pleasure of working with Brian in a recent Screenwriting Master Class course which dealt with story structure. I thought Brian summed up quite nicely the overall point I've been attempting to make this week through this series of posts:

I've come to understand screenplay structure as something very similar to grammatical structure. With language, ideas are conveyed through grammatical components ("subject", "verb", "object) just as a screenplay conveys a story through structural components (three acts, a hero, hero's motivation, something in the hero's way, etc.). But, in both language and screenplays, the structure is not the point. When you're about to write or speak a sentence, you don't start with the structure (i.e. you don't ask yourself "Okay, what would be an awesome subject to start this sentence. Good, good, okay now I need a great verb to go with that.") You're much more interested in the content of what you're communicating. It's all about the idea you want to express, not the grammatical form you put your sentence in-- even though it is absolutely essential to get that right as well. So, back to screenplays, the screenplay is about the story, not about the structure. Yes, you have to make the structure proper and clean in order to best convey your idea/story, but you're sitting down to write a story, not a structure.

So now I believe the task at hand is to work hard (i.e. Read Scripts, Watch Movies, Write Pages) to hammer those important structural elements into my subconscious, into my instinctual thinking, so that I can consciously be focused on my story while automatically calibrating the structure to fit properly as a film. I studied French in college, so I know a little about how this process goes for language. You spend a long, long time bumbling over simple sentences, struggling to get the structure right, mostly thinking about using the right subject pronoun or conjugating the verb correctly. Then, over time and lots of repetition, the elements start falling into place naturally, you're able to speak smoothly, the structural aspect of it all just floats to the back of your mind and does the work for you. Ah, it's magic. But it takes some hard work, lots of practice, and lots of time. So I'm getting on with it. My goal: to become fluent in the complicated and multifaceted language of Screenplay-ese.

Precisely. You immerse yourself in the world of screenwriting, testing out whatever theories or approaches you run across. At some point, your hope is that it becomes such a part of who you are, an extension of your own writer's voice, that when you write, you do so on as close to an intuitive level as possible.

There is no simple formula. It does take hard work. But trust me -- you do get better and it does start to make sense on a deeper and deeper level. More from Brian:

I was able to have lunch with a screenwriter friend of my dad the other day, and to him a screenplay works like a ticking clock. He said, in his early days, he would open up the back of that clock and just see a mess of springs and gears. Pretty overwhelming. Now, he says, having built and repaired many of his own clocks, he can pretty much open up the back of any "clock" someone hands him and say, "Okay, you have to fix this, tighten up this, this goes here..." Gotta build up those skills. Read, Watch, Write...

There is no right way to write. But there is your way to write. If you commit yourself fully to finding your own distinctive writer's voice...

You will.

Go Into The Story: There's no right way to write: Part 5