And that must be true when crossing gender or racial boundaries as well.
Worrying about affronting others because you are writing about their “turf” is a sure recipe for block.
The better phrasing might be: Write what you know in your bones, what you care about, what keeps you up at night.
Write what you can’t not write.
Nothing is off base, nothing disallowed. As long as you have pas-sion and empathy, as long as you are committed in your composition, I say go for it. Whether it is a purely imagined universe, or from your direct experience, or a combination of both. Go for it.
Don’t Be Precious
A frequent cause of being blocked on a scene (or sequence, or screen-play) is thinking it too important. That is, being precious about your agenda. You think it’s got to be right, got to be perfect, got to get you a job, got to make you famous. No scene, sequence, screenplay can han-dle that kind of pressure.
So. The first thing to do is remember you like writing. That writing is fun. That rearranging words on the page, when it works, is a true and profound pleasure. If you’ve never experienced that pleasure then you aren’t a writer and should stop now.
The second thing to do is remember that this screenplay you are writing is not your only screenplay. It is only one screenplay. Perhaps your first screenplay. But it isn’t your last or your only. It’s just one.
Posterity
Nothing kills creativity faster and more thoroughly than writing for posterity. It’s just too much pressure. Write for now. For the fellow sit-ting next to you on the subway.
If you are trying to write a screenplay to become famous, or to solve world hunger, or to leave a legacy of brilliance to the generations to come, you are doomed.
During one of the many blocked times I have experienced, a friend offered this: “Your problem is you want to be a writer more than you want to write.” It was a harsh condemnation. And, sadly, there was truth in it. I have to continually remind myself—difficult to do—that I love writing more than I love being a writer.
Remember that. You are a writer only if you are writing. You’re only as good as the last sentence you managed to put down on paper.
Topicality
Just as daunting as looking into the future is looking too closely at the present. That is, worrying if your idea will be topical. Will it be hip enough? Will it catch the next wave?
First of all, no one knows what the next wave will be. We only see the wave when it breaks. Second, you are of your time. You cannot help it. So anything you write will also be of your time. It can’t be otherwise.
Everything that you know, that you’ve experienced, that is going on around you—everything—feeds into the script you are writing.
Concentrate on what you want to write, what moves you. And, per-haps, with some deal of unpredictable serendipity, it may prove to be ever so slightly ahead of the next wave.
But if you focus on trying to guess what’s next, to mold your work to some idea of topicality, you will surely miss.
Revising As You Go
There are two types of screenwriters. Those who write forward relent-lessly, and those who revise as they write.
There are virtues to each method. And pitfalls.
I call the relentlessly forward method brain-dumping. You have your story more or less in hand, perhaps you’ve done an outline. And now, once you start writing scenes, you write quickly and forward, without looking back. Chances are this method will result in a bloody mess, full of missing beats and overwritten scenes. Likely it will be too long when you finish. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that this rush of words is sometimes the only way to get it down.
Brain-dumping is a way to avoid getting sidetracked by all the doubts and fears that naturally plague a writer. That is, writing for-ward without looking back is a way to plough through, intuitively, with as little self-consciousness and self-censorship as possible.
The other method—and the one I tend to use myself—is to carefully revise each scene. Start the day’s work by looking back at yesterday’s.
If you’re stuck, start reading at page one and revising.
The good news is that what you write will have much more polish when it arrives at first draft. The bad news is that sometimes we use this method to avoid writing. We spend too much time reading and revising and never get around to the new stuff.
As I said earlier, the act of composition—carefully rearranging words—leads to changes and discoveries in character and plot. It can actually change your story. It’s my bias that considered composition should be happening even in the first draft. I believe the more you write, the more the two methods—intuitive dumping and analytical composition—blend together. The ideal is have both parts of the brain working as you write.
That said, whatever gets words down on the page is a good thing.
There’s no one method that’s right for every writer. You need to find your own variation.
Slow Down
Don’t write the end of the film in the beginning. Don’t try and cover everything. Slow down. Let the first scene be that. The first scene.
I’ve seen it happen over and over. The writer tries to get it all in at once. The result is a rush of information, a thick conglomera-tion of backstory and foreshadowing—and a scene that doesn’t play organically.
For each scene look for the organizing shape, the ruling point. If the scene feels overly complicated, if it seems to be trying to accomplish too much, then consider if it isn’t actually two scenes. Save something for later.
You have to remember that you know more than your characters.
You know—more or less—where the story is headed, where the turn-ing points will be. You need to write each scene, particularly at the beginning, without letting that knowledge intrude. You need to limit what happens to what would happen, what the characters say to what they would say given what they know, not what you know.
Like so much else in screenwriting, it’s a balancing act. The opening pages must be efficient. They have to get you to that first conflict, to the inciting incident that moves the story in a new direction. But they also have to establish the world. Give the reader some time to learn the rules of the universe and acquaint themselves with the characters.
Don’t rush toward a known event. Take your time. You can always go back and trim and cut. But in the first pass, let yourself enjoy the task of introducing the world.
Don’t let the fact that you know where things are headed bias your writing of any given scene. Look first to what’s happening in the instant—its needs, its limitations—and trust that if you are true to the scene it will lead you to the next necessity. Don’t force informa-tion. Don’t push the scene where it doesn’t want to go. First, write the scene. Then follow its consequences and expectations to the next scene, and the next. I guarantee that your larger purpose will manifest, you will find your way toward the necessary plot point or reversal. And you will do so more organically the more you trust the scene at hand.
Innocent Reader
Earlier I proposed that your readers are often adversarial. We must now add that they are also innocent. They are new to your story, igno-rant of your intention, literally an innocent in this new world you are creating. They do not have your comprehensive view of the story and theme. They are entering the world afresh. And the only tools they have to orient themselves within your fictional world are the ones that you supply.
It is your job to give your readers landmarks that anchor them into your imagined geography. Much of what I talk about is geared toward how to orient yourself, how to chart new territory, how to navigate the fictional landscape. But it is also important to realize that a great deal of the work of screenwriting concerns the meticulous creation of a world in which your naïve reader will be comfortable.
Part of this comfort is created by simple technical things like gram-mar and format and proper spelling—things that will not set the reader on guard. But it is also a deeper matter of emotional, visceral comfort. The reader must be given sufficient cause for empathy, moments of connection that involve them in the progress of the story.
They must never feel lost or confused. Or if they are lost or confused they are so intentionally, for good reason, and still anchored by empa-thy or suspense.
SCENE AND ACTION DESCRIPTION Setting
Prose description in a screenplay has two basic functions: to draw a picture of the location in which the scene takes place; to present the actions and behavior that take place within that arena.
In setting the scene you should focus on those aspects of the loca-tion that are obvious, and those that are salient. If there is a pink ele-phant in the room, it should appear in the first sentence. If the hero jumps off a balcony at the end of the scene, I should know it’s there are the beginning. You should immediately describe those features that are prominent and those features that function in the scene.
This is especially important for the first time you introduce your reader to a location. The first paragraph should be a considered intro-duction to the geography. How that first paragraph is structured will determine how the reader enters the scene.
Do I see a character first? Or the details of the location? Is it a broad establishing shot? Or a close-up of one element of the location that then broadens out?
You control the reader’s entrance into the scene through adept and thoughtful sentence and paragraph structure. Scene setting it not just what you describe, but the order in which you describe it.
Details
Before considering the various tactics you might use to cajole your reader into imagining the image in your head, you need to decide what to include. You can’t say everything. How do you winnow down
the things you could describe to a manageable and effective handful of things you should describe?
Readers like lots of white space. If they flip through your script and find lots of dense description it will bias them against the read.
More importantly, over describing a scene slows things down. It can confuse the reader by inundating them with detail. The task is to select those specifics that help, that mean enough to tell, that generate interest or suspense.
The object of scene description in a screenplay is not to tell the reader everything they would see were they were watching the filmed scene. That’s impossible. For one thing, what ends up on screen is a result of so many accidents and variables, so many other artisans’
input—from prop master to production designer. There is no way to fully imagine a scene before it is shot.
A paragraph of scene description in a screenplay guides the read-er’s mind through your imagined landscape, highlighting the impor-tant landmarks, the things that cannot be hidden, the things that will have consequence in the scene. The things that are most important to the characters. The objects that interact with the people using them.
How do you decide what to leave out? How do you decide which details to describe? How detailed to get in your description?
l Geography. What is obvious and unavoidable in the scene?
What is the minimum layout to specify that will make your reader comfortable in the space?
l Behavior. Does the object do something? Does the object inter-act with the charinter-acters in the scene? Describe what is necessary to the action. Give vivid and clear representation to those parts of the world that the characters use.
l Teaching. Does the description teach the reader something they need to know? Does it give something to the designer, the direc-tor, to guide them in the realization of the scene?
Everything else is, literally, window dressing.
Remember, you are not simply guiding the eye of your reader through a physical landscape—though that is certainly part of the task—you are also guiding them through an emotional landscape.
You are plunking them down next to your characters—hoping to elicit empathy or antipathy, generating familiarity and comfort. Your choice of physical detail, the manner in which you describe the image in your head, must always service the presentation of character and behavior.
It should always help present the enacted behavior of the scene.