The last three tips are going to roll in your inboxes, I hope you have taken something of value from my advice and your own pens are hard at work!

SCREENWRITING TIP #5: THEME

I can hear you now – “Where is the theme in ‘Transformers One through Twelve?’  ‘Mall Cop?’”  But just because a film is lacking in something doesn’t mean you aim your own efforts to that level.  All sorts of films make a lot of money with incoherent plots, atrocious dialogue, characters thinner than Saran Wrap.  But this is not an excuse to turn out an equally bad screenplay.

And often they probably started out as decent scripts.  You must always be prepared for the meddling and watering down of what you wrote by a whole bunch of people, some well intentioned, some clueless.  That’s the problem with the collaborative process that is filmmaking, there is a lot of input from a lot of people, from the producer to the wardrobe person.  If they are all geniuses you are in good shape.  If they are not…

Having a good solid theme in your script is one of the buttresses you have any control over.  A good theme, a deep strong simple metaphor or universal truth can stand all sorts of assaults.  It also serves as a touchstone you can use in the writing of your screenplay, the editing and the re-writing.  Whenever you are in trouble you can ask the question – what is this story about?

As you write, every character, scene, bit of dialogue, or story point can be tested against your theme.  Courage?  Guilt?  A mother’s love?  The possibilities are endless.  Just choose one.

Plus having a good idea of what the whole thing is about will help you defend your choices against the forces who are going to question your work.  Or to inform the director, producer, actor who is smart enough to ask you.  This way you can relay certain information that you conceived and they are either misunderstanding or not finding clear.  Then it is your job to fix it, because if they miss the point then so will the final viewing audience.

If you have an overall theme to your story then every character should be an aspect of that theme.  “Courage Under Fire”, funny thing, is about courage.  Every character reacts to their fear in combat in a different manner – drugs, over compensating macho bullshit, drinking, defining themselves by their courage or lack of it.  “Mr. Holland’s Opus” is about aspirations, etc. The theme gives your story a unity and strength.

Hopefully a good theme can withstand the bad dialogue rewrites by the directors girlfriend, on camera improvisations by the actors, dropped or added scenes or subplots, whatever is thrown at your screenplay in the long torturous road to the theater or TV screen.

I haven’t forgotten about my writing updates, four more to go! Also we’ve finalized a cover design for the book, one that I am VERY fond of. Excited to show you all down the line. Here’s my favorite writing tip to celebrate, hopefully the tough love will inspire you to go start a project yourself.

SCREENWRITING TIP #4: WRITING HABITS

A note about writing habits – don’t have any.  Well, one – write every day.  Now writing can be research, outlining, thinking about what you have to write, re-writing, but immersing yourself in the process is what really counts.  Still, I try to crank out at least a page a day.

Now I’ve heard it a few thousand times – “I don’t have the time to write.”  Bull.  There were times I was working 50, 60 hours a day.  But I still wrote.  Every damn day.  Too tired at the end of the day?  I can empathize.  I was beat.  So, I wrote on my lunch hour.  Or, at one company, lunch half-hour.

A page a day.  If I was able to put down one page each day I was working toward my ultimate goal – to be a full time writer.  If you write a page a day at the end of three months you have a feature script.  If you re-write it at the same pace at the end of six months you have a better script.

If you can’t write a page a day then you just don’t want it bad enough.  I used to pick the worst restaurant near my work place, where e-coli and hepatitis were selections on the menu.  I picked it because I knew nobody from work would show up and lure me into a conversation.  Don’t bother me, was my motto, I’m trying to work my way out of this soul sucking job.

I wrote every day at lunch, occasional evenings, weekends and holidays.  For six years.  Then one year I made more money writing than as an accountant and I quit.

Here is a little trick I used to make that lunch hour as fruitful as possible – I would check my outline every morning before going to work.  Then I thought about the scene I was going to write all morning.  On the drive to work, during boring meetings, adding columns on a calculator, paging through computer print outs.  By lunch I had written and re-written the scene a half dozen times.  After lunch I would study the next section and let my brain work in preparation for the evening pages -  if I had the energy. 

I still do this.  Every night, right after turning off the lights, as I lay in bed before I go to sleep I run through what I intend to write the next day, concentrating on any particular problem I anticipate.  And surprisingly upon awakening the problem is often solved.  It may be my subconscious helping me out.  Or I’m delusional.  I don’t care.

As for habits.  Besides writing every day, I repeat – have none.  I know some writers make a ritual of their work. “ I must have quiet.”  “A window facing the rising sun (or a wall).”  “A cup of Honduran coffee, Mozart on the stereo, twelve sharpened number two Ticonderoga pencils and a thin lined tablet (white with green lines) and the smell of rotting apples.”

These are all just setting up excuses for you not to write.  It is hard enough to do this, you don’t need any more reasons not to do it.  I write anywhere, anytime.  I have produced pages in a hurry, under duress from directors, executives, actors, in a tent, in the rain, in the cold, at four in the morning with a full crew standing by.  You don’t here a cobbler saying he’s not in the mood to heel your shoes.  A car mechanic never stops because it is too noisy.  Teachers don’t take a day off because they are not inspired.

No excuses.  You write.  Say the writing isn’t going very well and all you can think of is crap.  Write a bad scene.  You can’t re-write a blank page.  But a bad scene often can tell you what’s wrong with it and where you’ve gone awry.

Write.

Hard at work on book edits to get a final one polished for publication. The Inkshares team has been a big help, can’t wait for you guys to read. In the meantime: Another writing tip essay.

SCREENWRITING TIP #3: PLOT (2)

Waldo Salt, a great screenwriter (Coming Home, Midnight Cowboy) once explained the three act structure to me as “First act, chase the hero up a tree, second act, shake a stick at him, third act, he figures a way to get down - or not, and it becomes a tragedy.  Meaning that as you build the first act, set up the characters problem(s), make it as bad as you can for them, try to find a twist in the second act and then one again in the third.  Remember that the audience wants plot and character surprises but only ones that make sense, that fit.

The first act defines your main character’s problem, not just the external plot problem (Nick Of Time – father’s daughter is kidnapped) but their internal problem (Nick Of Time – the man’s wife just died and she never thought he was responsible enough to take care of a child and he has similar doubts).

In act two you make the problem even worse for your character, culminating in the character attempting a solution, one that usually fails and probably makes things even more dire.  Maybe they misunderstood the situation or only tried to deal with the surface crisis.

Act three propels the character into actually striving toward a real solution.  For example; someone who is a control freak cedes control and trusts others to help them.

What you do as a writer is create puzzles that you solve.  You constantly get your character in trouble, physical, emotional, psychological, and then find a way to get them out, over and over and over, escalating the jeopardy until the climax.  The thrill for the audience is the same as it has been for centuries of storytelling, from around the campfire to IMAX 3D, how are they gonna get out of that fix?  That is the fun part.

Often the audience is ahead of you and there is nothing you can do about it because of the genre or the trailer.  They know that there is a monster in the closet.  This is not a bad thing as you can play with that knowledge, tease them.  Hitchcock talked about the bomb under  the table.  Two people are sitting having a quiet amiable lunch – BOOM! A bomb goes off.  It surprises the audience.  Cool.  But what if the audience sees the bomb under their table.  The couple sit, talk about what ‘organic’ really means, and we cut to the clock on the bomb ticking away, closer and closer toward detonation, the tension mounts and instead of the audience having three seconds of surprise they can participate in so many minutes of dramatic tension. Works better, right?

Above all your job is to keep the audience entertained in every possible way, through drama, comedy, action, tension, using every trick of the storyteller’s art.