Thinking about writing your first screenplay..?

A vocal and alluring industry has evolved to help the aspiring screenwriter tell their stories, encompassing books, courses and podcasts etc.  It calls to mind the American Gold Rush when getting rich was more likely…if you sold the shovels.  I’m not going to debate the merits of whether one can learn screenwriting or indeed storytelling (that’s for another day) but it’s clear there is no silver bullet; rules must be treated carefully, with caution.  Stories often find themselves into ‘being told’ in a particular way that suits them.

There are some obvious problems with rules: 

-What works for one writer doesn’t necessarily ‘speak’ to another.

-You can’t follow all of them and at times they can feel contradictory.

-They often don’t make sense with how you feel your way into a story, or to put it another way, how the story speaks to you.

I think the attraction to developing rules for screenwriting might be because film is collaborative and having prescribed frameworks for creating screenplays is perceived to make it easier for collaborators to work together (although to the detriment of the story in some cases).  Furthermore, developing a screenplay can often feel like fixing a car, namely swapping parts in and out, and rules may well help develop a (false) sense of efficiency and economy for doing this.

My advice to someone new to screenwriting is to read and listen both objectively and subjectively to any rules about how to approach the craft.  If something chimes with you then log it down and chew it over, let it compost in your head for a while as you might a story idea.  Reconfigure rules as ‘suggestions’ by testing how flexibly they can fit your natural approach to storytelling.  When starting out on a story follow your instinct as a storyteller first and allow that story to develop out of its own internal logic, its own causality, to see what you can create and then shape.  Rules, principles and guidelines might well prove to be more useful once you have a piece of work…

Below are some key ‘suggestions’ I absorbed at the start of my journey as a writer (I studied on the MFA in Screenwriting at the University of Southern California) which have stayed with me because they have proved to be compatible with the way I write, not just in screenwriting but storytelling generally:

*Stories have a cellular nature to them, which means the overall structure of a beginning, middle and end is often repeated on a smaller scale within sections and sequences of a story, even down to scenes.  If you’re stuck, then view the section of story you’re working on in this way, find its own arc.

*Causality in storytelling was a real lightbulb moment for me, namely the notion that ‘something’ happens that gives rise to the next dramatic moment and so on.  I saw this most obviously in the consequences of characters’ actions creating another section of the story.

*The importance of posing dramatic questions that you, the writer, are trying to answer through the actions of the characters as you steer them through the story.  These can be long-term questions that echo through the whole story, giving it structure, or short-term ones that maintain story momentum.

*The importance of the midpoint in a story.  This idea crops up a lot in screenwriting books and elsewhere and I first heard of it at USC.  It’s the point in the story where something profound happens to a character (internally, externally or both) which then creates repercussions for them to deal with for the rest of the story.  It can be a moment when the character is furthest away from their goal before beginning their journey back towards it, perhaps as a changed person. 

Aside from the implications for crafting a story, the midpoint has become important to me as a tool for writing a first draft.  I ‘aim’ for the midpoint rather than the end to make the draft feel manageable when writing it.  It’s also the moment I stand back from the story with some sense of objectivity allowing me to assess how it’s developing and where it’s going.  Writing is very much about rhythms in different settings (writing routines, story pacing, rhythm in the prose and dialogue etc.) but one of the most important rhythmic considerations for me is toggling back and forth between being ‘in’ your story when you’re writing it and being ‘out’ of it when assessing your text.  This constant rhythm of switching between being creator and editor can be hard to learn.  It takes practice to develop this relationship with your pages but the benefits are important; for example, you begin to recognise the weaknesses in your own writing and the problems you often fashion for yourself, whilst also speeding up the process of creating a draft.

Some of the above might be useful for you to hold in your head, it might not.  My advice for approaching any writing, and particularly screenwriting which many people try reduce to axioms to make the craft easier, is to work out what complements your natural approach to storytelling.  This means discovering, and then working at, your own principles and instincts for story first, focusing them on the medium you are writing in, and only then incorporating further ‘suggestions’ that might be appropriate.