This week I've decided to feature the words of four screenwriters each day to demonstrate the endless varieties of ways to approach the craft of writing:
What if I could tell you there is a secret formula to the craft of screenwriting? Wouldn't that make life so much easier? Or would it?STEVE ZAILLIAN (Schindler's List, Searching for Bobby Fischer)
"There's a danger in thinking you understand exactly what you're doing because then you start seeing patterns and repeating yourself. I try not to analyze [the process] too much. It's important to me to discover writing all over again as opposed to trying to follow some sort of formula. I'm always terrified of those classes on how to write a screenplay. I've never been to one. When I'm doing my Xeroxing, I see these little brochures [advertising screenwriting seminars], and I'm terrified to even read the brochures. I haven't noticed that there's a trick to it, and I'm afraid if I do, I'm gonna rely on it.
"I purposely don't want to know because I want to approach everything as if it's the only thing I've ever done so it'll be new to me."
PAUL SHRADER (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull)
"I know exactly where I'm going beforehand. I know to the half page if I'm on or off target. I draw up charts before I do a script. I endlessly chart and rechart a movie. Before I sit down to write, I have all the scenes listed, what happens in each scene, how many pages I anticipate each scene will take. I have a running log on the film. I can look down and see what happens by page thirty, what happens by page forty, fifty, sixty and so forth. I have the while timed out to a hundred and five, a hundred and ten pages. You may go to, here pages ahead or behind, you may add or drop dialogue or scenes; but if you're two pages ahead or behind, you have to work that into the timing. Especially if you get five pages work, or, worse, five pages behind, then something you had planned to work on page forty may not work the same way on page forty-five.
"It's completely timed out. Like in AMERICAN GIGOLO I have the characters meet eight times in the movie, and I can see what pages they would meet on those eight times, and the different things that happen between the times they meet, so that there's always something to talk about when they meet, something to pick up, something they had discussed previously, something to develop."
"It's like running the mile. You start to recognize signposts peripherally, and you know as you're running past this house, this corner, whether you're ahead or behind your time. And if you're pushing too hard, you back off; if you're not pushing hard enough, you speed up – because you have to reach that point at the end of the mile where you are totally spent. If you have any energy left, you have failed; and if you run out of energy before the end, you have failed.
"You have to try – in the structure of an hour-and-a-half movie – to arrange scenes that appear to follow each other in what seems to be a natural way, but is anything but natural. Because you can choose only forty, forty-five, fifty scene to tell a story. You have to pick those fifty scenes very carefully if you're going to get a rich story."
JOHN AUGUST (Go, Big Fish)
"Ultimately, it's your characters who have to tell the story, but I think what gets me excited to sit down and actually work on one script rather than another script is generally the idea of it, the theme of it, what's unique and unusual about it. So while I love great characters, I think a lot of times you can have great characters who are trapped in the wrong story, so you always want to find that blend of the most interesting, exciting story you can find and then figure out who are the best characters to be in that story. I do a lot of work for the Sundance Institute, which has this twice yearly filmmaker lab. So for two weeks a year, you sit down with these newer screenwriters, and you help them work on their projects and help them develop the best possible versions of their scripts before they go off and shoot them. What can be really frustrating is reading very talented writers who haven't sort of gotten a firm grasp on what they're doing. They have these really compelling characters and really interesting situations, but they haven't figured out the best way to tell the story. More than anything right now, it's the story that gets me going.
"If the writer can take himself out of his own head and just be the person reading the script and be as interested and compelled and confused as that reader will be, I think you can write a script that doesn't have any classic structural qualities and still maintain their attention. To me, am I turning pages in the script because I'm fascinated about what's going to happen next? If I am, then something is working, and it may not have the classic structure, but it's working, and there's a lot to be said for that. GO doesn't have anything approaching a classic structure, yet within each story, there's a lot of tension. There's a lot of drive, and you can understand both what the characters want and what the movie is trying to do."
CARL FOREMAN (Cyrano De Bergerac, High Noon)
"I really just sit around thinking for a long time. I think about the people involved and what's happening to them, and begin to work out the events of the story in my mind. When I'm ready I make a step outline for myself... which is in pure telegraphese. And when I can do that whole thing in one sentence, I'm ready to write the screenplay. If you can't ell the story to yourself in a paragraph, then you're in terrible trouble. And if you can't tell it to someone else in a paragraph you're in trouble. At least one should be able to get it down to its bare bones and be able to say what it is, who it's about, what it's for, what it's meant to do, in one paragraph to anyone."
If there was a knowable surefire formula for writing a screenplay, once the studios discovered it, the first thing they would do is fire every working screenwriter and develop computer programs to spit out completed scripts like Transformers 8: This Time They're Really Pissed!
In Hollywood where as William Goldman says "Nobody knows anything," the thing about which nobody knows the least is almost always story. Studio executives and producers may like to think it's not all that hard to do what screenwriters do. There's an anecdote I heard attributed to Irving Thalberg, Hollywood's first great producer. As I recall, he was disparaging a group of MGM writers on the lot [paraphrased]:
Thalberg: What's the big deal about what you do? It's just writing words.
Writer: Yes, but it's about knowing which words to write.
Which words to write. The unending challenge we, as writers, face whenever we try to craft a story. We take all we've learned about screenwriting, immerse ourselves in a story universe, and try our damnedest to wrangle something that works onto 100 or so pages of paper.
It's one part hard work, one part inspiration, one part luck, and one part magic. Writing can be confounding, disheartening, even downright cruel. But when we embrace all that, especially the presence, even the necessity of magic in the story-crafting process, that's when our stories come alive. And there is no formula for magic.
There is no right way to write. And thank God for it. Otherwise Hollywood would replace writers with robots. And we wouldn't be prone to wandering around in our creative wilderness... and likely never find the magic in our stories.
Go Into The Story: There's no right way to write: Part 2
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