Category: screenwriting

There’s a phrase that gets tossed around a lot in Hollywood, usually by directors, actors, and producers. It’s kind of insulting and condescending the way it gets used, but there is a degree of truth to it. That phrase is…

The script is just a blueprint.

Now, the reason I say that’s condescending is because this gets used by directors who want to justify rewriting scenes and actors who want to justify changing (or just making up) lines. We’d never say the director’s just there to block out the scene or the actor’s just supposed to read the dialogue, but for some reason it’s acceptable to say the writer is just a stepping stone for everyone else’s brilliance.

Here’s my take on this. There are numerous stories in Hollywood of brilliant scripts that became average-to-sub-par movies when the director and actors were done with them. Pay It Forward. Excess Baggage. Wanted. Little Monsters. Heck, even Suburban Commando. Yeah, you’re cringing, but have you ever read the original screenplays for any of these films? The ones that sold and got the project greenlit? Most of them were damned entertaining, and one or two of them were just phenomenal. Who do you think’s responsible for the movies that came out of these scripts? The key grip? The wardrobe supervisor? Heck, the writer of one recently released film confided to me that the whole reason the movie went through numerous expensive reshoots was because the director had made “a few changes” during the original shoot which destroyed the character arcs for both protagonists (much to the frustration of both the screenwriter and the producers).

Now, to be fair, how often have you heard of a brilliant director and great actors being saddled with a sub-par script which sank their film? A few times for that, too, right?

Riddle me this, though, Timmy– if the script was sub-par, why did they decide to go into production with it?

Doesn’t make sense, does it? No one’s going to build a house if the blueprints don’t include a foundation, a front door, or a staircase to the second floor. Considering how much more a motion picture costs than a house, does anyone here really believe a studio would march into production with a crap script? That a director would agree to work on it? That actors would rush to be in it?

Unless, of course, those people don’t know what they’re doing, either…

But I digress…

As I said up above, there is some truth to the script as a blueprint analogy. No matter what Hollywood and auteur wankers like to say, the screenwriter is the architect of the movie. They’re the one who sits down with a vision and an idea that gets committed to paper and referred to throughout the construction process. Even if the film is an adaptation or a remake, it’s the writer who has to plan it all out and decide what to keep and what to discard. There’s a reason the architect said put the door here, the window there, and the support beam right there. A screenplay is a blueprint, and when you don’t follow the blueprints–or don’t know how to read them– you get cracks, crumbling, and sometimes a full-on collapse.

However…

(Yeah, there’s a however. If there wasn’t you wouldn’t need to read any of this,would you?)

This does not mean the screenwriter is the end-all, be-all of the process. A good architect knows there’s a lot of stuff he or she gets to shape and insist on, but just as many that they have no control over. Frank Lloyd Wright designed some of the most beautiful structures in the world, but he didn’t have a say on the appliances in the kitchen, the living room carpet, or what the owners decided to use for bedlinen. There’s a point the architect has absolute control, but there’s also a point where the blueprints have to get handed over to the contractor, the painter, and the interior decorator. Not to mention the people who are buying the house. Heck, if the architect gets hired to design a beach house and they turned in plans for a Victorian office building, it doesn’t matter how good that office building is, they’re not getting another job.

Let’s stick with this metaphor for a few more paragraphs. Imagine you hired an architect to design your new house and the first two pages of the plans are an explanation of how the building may look odd but is actually modelled after the house the architect lived in as a child. That house was built by his great-uncle who had fought in World War Two and returned home to Boston afterwards to build a home that resembled the structures he’d seen while fighting in the Pacific Rim. None of this has anything to do with your house, granted, but the architect felt it was worth mentioning. And eating up two pages of blueprints with.

How are the carpenters going to react when they see that half of every page is instructions on how to use a circular saw, lists of preferred nails, and step-by-step guides for using a measuring tape? There’s an extra 50 pages worth of blueprints here telling everyone on the construction crew how to do their jobs–jobs that more often than not the architect doesn’t know how to do himself. How far in will everyone get before they start ignoring everything the architect’s written alongside the diagrams? And then what happens when there finally is something important in all those notes?

Anyone who’s ever taken drafting knows how important clean lines are. If the architect’s cluttered every diagram up by drawing in wood grains or micromanaging every stud and strut, it just get confusing. We don’t need to see all those individual nails, but we do need to see that load-bearing beam and it’s getting lost in the glut of useless detail. A good foreman knows there needs to be a load-bearing beam somewhere in this wall, and if he can’t find it in the blueprints he’ll just put it in himself. If that messes up plans for the second floor fireplace… ah, well.

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make with screenplays is not understanding what a screenplay is. It’s not an exhaustive list of instructions for the director and the crew. It isn’t a magical tool for making actors do and say certain precise things. It’s not a chance to dazzle people with high-falutin’ vocabulary or hyper-detailed imagery. It’s a framework.

A screenplay–a good screenplay– is the underlying structure of a film. It’s the solid framework everything else is built on. It’s careful balancing act of minimal, concise language that’s got to have as much punch and nuance to it as humanly possible. It isn’t choked with excess verbiage or screen directions in the same way the plans for a house don’t list china patterns and carpet selections.

It is the blueprint of the film.

Just not in that insulting, condescending way those other folks say it.

Next time, I’d like to talk about something that lifts and supports.

No, not that. You can find that lots of other places online.

Until next week, go write.

Punchline. You get it or you don’t. And if you get it, you’re already ahead for this week’s rant.

A common pearl of wisdom from gurus is “write what you know.” At its simplest, this little nugget means you should write about things you have experience with, and hopefully some love for. For example, I know comic books. I know Los Angeles. I also know horror. So, believe it or not, I wrote a book about superheroes staving off a zombie apocalypse here in L.A. and a bunch of people liked it. One of them even thought it was worth publishing, and now a lot of people like it.

The flipside of this is don’t force yourself to write things you know nothing about and can’t relate to. When you force writing like this, or falsify experience, a reader can spot it right away. How often have you seen someone try to write mobster discussions, scientific jargon, or period dialogue that just sounds like nonsense?

Most of us are average folks. We each have our little specialty, though, and that’s another place “write what you know” can come in handy. As I’ve mentioned once or thrice, I was trying to write stories before some of you reading this were even born. I have screwed up more stories, in more ways, than most of you ever have a hope of matching. You’ll give up on this writing thing long before you hit the levels of incompetence I managed at one point or another. However, it’s that same long experience and learning process that lets me speak with something vaguely resembling authority now. Not a lot of people can do that.

Likewise, not a lot of people have studied medicine, which gave Michael Crichton’s medical/ scientific thrillers such a great edge. Stephen King knows small-town life in Maine far better than most of us. Kevin Smith knows what it’s like to be lower-middle-class in New Jersey. Each of these people knew what they knew and wrote to their strengths.

Now, here’s the catch. Yeah, there’s always a catch.

A common complaint is “they didn’t get the facts right.” Check out Amazon or IMDb and whatever book or film you choose, there’ll almost always be some idiot pointing out the gross mistakes in it. I’m not talking about the occasional typo or misplaced comma. I mean that guy who feels compelled to point out that a passenger jet takes six and a half hours to travel cross-country from San Diego to Boston, not five. Or that the gasoline in a Geo Metro gas tank would evaporate after seven years so there couldn’t be any in the tank ten years after the apocalypse. Or that a katana would actually shatter if it hit a steel beam, not take a chip out of it. Plus everyone knows they didn’t actually make true katanas until well into the Muromachi period so there’s no way an 11th century Japanese warrior would have one.

Yeah, we all know that guy.

Y’see, Timmy, what this ignores is that sometimes there’s a reason the facts are wrong. As I’ve mentioned many times before, reality is not a story point. I’m generally talking about screenplays when I say it, but it’s true for any type of storytelling. You need to get the facts right as often as you can, but you also can’t sacrifice your chosen tale on the altar of truth. As it’s been said, never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

You want a good example of deliberately getting the facts wrong? Watch any medical or forensics show on television. House is a good one. A standard device on this show is to simplify procedures. Tests get run in minutes instead of hours. Test results take hours instead of days. No, this isn’t realistic, but it allows each episode to maintain a level of suspense and keep a ticking clock atmosphere. If House has to wait two or three days for each test result, that’s a lot of time to kill… and a lot of dead patients the way things work on that show. It’s just not as exciting to hear the team has two months to figure out what’s killing someone, so the writers bend the facts and condense the time. It also helps that 99.9% of us don’t know how long a chromahaemotomagraph test takes. Or exactly what it’s supposed to do. Or how to spell it.

Okay, I made it up.

Now, here’s an example from the other side of the coin. I was reading for a contest a few months back and got a story that revolved around planes. Maybe revolved is too strong a word. There were a lot of planes in it, and they were important to the plot. Sort of. I think they were.

Needless to say, the screenplay had other problems besides the one I’m about to bring up.

At one point the script spent almost three pages on a test pilot going through his pre-flight checklist. It was amazingly detailed, explaining what each system was, what it did, and examples of what could happen if said system failed. No question in my mind, this writer was an experienced pilot who knew his or her stuff. Some of this explanation was in dialogue, some of it was in action blocks, and some of it was kind of an inner-monologue thing. Like I said, there were other issues.

Three pages of that.

Now, being able to rattle off the entire pre-flight checklist for a fighter jet is damned impressive, more so if it’s 100% accurate. But that doesn’t mean it’s good storytelling. To be honest, it brought the story to a crashing halt. It is information we don’t know, but is it really information we need to understand the story? If I didn’t know for a fact the pilot had checked the wing flaps, would some crucial part of the plot collapse later?

This is one of the most common mistakes people make when they write what they know. They feel the need to get the facts right because this is their particular specialty, but they get them right at the cost of the story they’re trying to tell.

One place I see this a lot is weapons. A lot of folks who know their weapons feel the need to list off a lot of information about them. So you get bombarded with makes and years and model numbers and ammunition and magazine sizes and… man, it gets boring just writing about it in general terms. Much like the pre-flight checklist, knowledge of firearms or fencing or martial arts is fantastic, but more often than not it just clutters the page and makes the story drag rather than impress people. Plus, since these almost always relate to action scenes, it’s the last place you want your manuscript to drag.

As a note to screenwriters, it’s especially lethal to load up a screenplay with these sort of details. Unless it’s life-or-death necessary to know the villain is using an Argentinean Bersa Model Thunder 380 Super rechambered for .45 caliber ammo–and the second act will disintegrate without this fact–he or she should just have a pistol. Once your screenplay’s getting made there will be an entire prop department that probably has a much better knowledge of firearms than you, plus a stunt coordinator with years more fight experience. We don’t like it when people tell us how to write–don’t try to tell them how to do their jobs, either. Use that space for your story.

Even if they’re all correct, we don’t need to know all the facts. Sometimes, in fact, it’s better to ignore a fact or three if you can do it without drawing attention to yourself. The most important thing when you’re writing a story is the story, not “getting it right.”

Now, I’d love to be able to say there’s some easy ratio of fact vs. fiction you need to keep track of when writing. It’d be great to just say “keep it at seven parts to three,” but saying that would be a complete fiction in itself. There’s nothing that easy about it. Alas, it’s one of those things a writer just need to get a feel for, usually after making several attempts, failing at most of them, and getting feedback that confirms this failure. And it’s conditional, too–you need a different ratio in a sci-fi story than you do in a comedy.

When all else fails, remember Samuel Clemens. “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

Next time I think I’m going to rant about something that’s been driving me nuts.

Until then, go write.

Historical reference, just to be different. Although awful things with zeppelins isn’t the greatest parallel for what I wanted to talk about. Plus I understand that airship pilots (of which there are ten in the whole world) get really testy if you bring up the Hindenberg…

Anyway, what I’d like to prattle on about this week is balloons. Y’know… those things that get bigger and bigger and finally explode.

It’s not uncommon for a writer to want to take an idea a little further. To turn that short story into a novella, that novella into a full-fledged book, or those two or three clever scenes into a feature-length screenplay. We’re all creative people. It’s what we do.

Plus, let’s be honest. Sometimes it just needs to be longer. We need another 5,000 words to hit a publisher’s minimum or maybe ten more pages to get this producer interested.

Now, the way most people try to expand their stories is by adding words. Sounds kind of obvious, I know, but there’s a catch. These folks mistake adding words for adding substance. Often, the words being added bulk up the manuscript but don’t actually add anything to it. They’re just putting back in all that stuff that was already edited out for being unnecessary.

It’s easy to explain this with a visual aid. Ready?

Picture a large balloon. A good-sized one. Pretend I wrote a short story on this balloon. Got that? Now it’s easy to make the story bigger, yes? Just inflate the balloon until it’s twice as big. We’ve all done something like this at some point, so it’s still easy to picture, yes?

Have I actually made the story bigger, though? It’s just the same ink forming the same story, now spread thin. In fact, since I filled it with… well, hot air, the story’s gotten a bit insubstantial for its size. It’s tough to read because it covers so much space and we can actually see through it at points.

If you’ve got a solid, edited story, you’ve already let all that hot air out. The story on the balloon is compact and dark, if you get my meaning.

Here’s a few quick, easy ways to spot a balloon…

Giving more description is a typical way of ballooning a manuscript. You throw in a few more adjectives or adverbs or a few more clever metaphors about how Phoebe looks like Angelina Jolie’s hot little blonde sister or something. What’s going on here, though, is all those cuts the writer made during editing are being reversed, just like I mentioned above. The unnecessary stuff is getting added back in and… well, that just doesn’t make sense.

Close to this is when the story’s revisiting the same idea again and again. Let’s have another example in the story of how clueless Yakko can be. Or perhaps yet another scene of slackjawed, stammering men which shows us how stunning Dot is. Maybe one more sequence where Wakko demonstrates how awesomely powerful and badass he is. Besides being a variation of the description problem above, belaboring a point like this gets dull fast. Anyone who wants a dull story, raise your hand now.

Then please leave.

Extending action sequences is another way writers sometimes balloon a story. I mentioned a while back that action (in my opinion) shouldn’t take much longer to read than it would take to do or watch. But an easy way to fill space is to decribe the history behind that perfect jodan zuki the ninja throws which connects with Yakko’s jaw. Then I can describe the excruciating pain as one of Yakko’s molars (which he got two fillings in as a boy and almost had pulled but his father insisted he had to keep his teeth as long as possible) gets smashed loose and the coppery taste of blood fills his mouth even as the impact of the strike twists his head around and… well, you get the idea. Does it really take that long to hit someone in the face? Can you imagine if every punch, strike, kick, or gunshot took that long? Dear God, the elevator scene in The Matrix would be longer than Atlas Shrugged.

So, that’s a few easy ways not to expand your story. But how should you?

Well, like so many things in this field, that’s a bit harder to say. A key thing to remember is expanding something often involves changing it. If your 7,500 word story is structured a certain way, the structure will probably have to alter when the story becomes 10,000 words. If it becomes 35,000 words it’ll have to change a lot. If you’re determined to keep the structure exactly the same, you’re probably going to have a lot of trouble making your manuscript bigger.

Another easy rule of thumb– you shouldn’t be adding things that don’t need to be there. So if you want to add a quirky conversation about “the first time,” angel hair pasta, or who got beat up more as a kid, there needs to be a reason for this conversation to take place.

Just to be clear, “boosting the word count” is not a viable reason.

Y’see, Timmy, if you want to expand a story you can’t add hot air–you need to add actual material. You want a bigger balloon, not the same balloon puffed up to look bigger.

Some quick examples…

–Throw an additional character into the mix. It could change relationships, action, pacing, all sorts of stuff. And add to all of these as well.

–Change someone’s motivation. Not everyone walks to the grocery store for the same reason after all. Yeah, maybe Wakko is helping out because he’s a decent guy, but maybe he’s doing it to try to make up for something he did years ago. This could change how he reacts to things, his exact actions, and maybe what’s a desirable ending for him.

–Make a new goal. A short story is generally A to B, maybe even C. So stop trying to cram in A 1/2 or B 3/4. Have your story go on to D, E, and maybe all the way to X.

And then, when you’ve made this change (or these changes), go over your new, larger story and polish it again.

There’s a chance I might miss next week as I rush to meet a bunch of deadlines for Creative Screenwriting. But please check in and perhaps we’ll talk for a spell, as they used to say.

Until then, go write.