Creating believable characters is essential to the success of any screenplay, regardless of its genre. Often my partner and I are called on to come into a project in development and do 'character work,' an ungraceful term which usually means making two-dimensional cardboard cutouts into three dimensional human beings. How one does this is an elusive business at best; it is more like sleight-of-hand than engineering. One cannot, of course, make a character on the page a human being, but one can create the illusion of humanity - the sensation in the mind of the reader or viewer that he has grasped the truth of the character. Doing so is one of the most important and challenging tasks a writer faces, and I suppose that every good writer has his or her own ways of accomplishing it.
In my own work, I have found it useful, when considering the portrayal of a character, to ask a few salient questions. (I will use the masculine pronoun for convenience.) Among these are: What does this person want? Why is this person behaving the way he is - that is, why does he think, talk and act the way he does? Why is he associating with the people with whom he does? What does he cherish most, and what does he fear most?
Now, I have said that writing is not mechanical, and so it is not enough simply to ascribe answers to these questions in order to make characters human and three-dimensional. Arriving at the answers is only a start in the process. You must get to know your character so deeply, so instinctively, that he begins to be a part of your life - that he begins to talk to you. I have always found this to be the case. I so saturate myself with a character that I find him or her talking to me at odd moments - when I am driving, or relaxing or even when I am sleeping. I cannot tell you how many times a character has awakened me in the middle of the night, telling me what he or she wants, challenging me to face the truth about him or her whether I want to or not. When we were working on a script about Marilyn Monroe, for example, I found her regularly invading my sleep, and at one crucial point in the writing process, she said to me: 'You're refusing to face the truth just as I did.' She then proceeded to tell me about something that happened to her when she was nine years old that made the whole script make sense.
Now, of course, I was not having a ghostly visitation. I had come across clues to her perplex in my research, but I did not put them together until Marilyn herself told me how to do it. It was a subconscious process of coming to grips with the character which was the direct result of total immersion over a period of months of research, reading and thinking. And this brings me to a simple point about creating characters: It is damned hard work. You have to live with a character, learn everything you can about him - or in the case of fiction, imagine everything you can about him - think about him, eat and sleep with him, and try to see the world through his eyes. This was certainly true when we wrote 'Nixon,' and it was neither an easy nor a pleasant task. But I will tell you that I came to an appreciation of Richard Nixon that I would never have achieved otherwise. I really did begin to see the world as he saw it, and to empathize with him. That experience, in turn, has colored my entire understanding of the politics of the sixties and seventies, because I now understand that Nixon did have a valid point of view even in extremis, and that his demise may have been the result of a combination of forces, both personal and political, that holds the key to much truth about that period.
For this reason, writing is, first of all (perhaps above all), a learning experience. Creating a character ought to change you; it ought to make you larger, wiser, more compassionate and more sophisticated and nuanced in your world view. For we writers have a responsibility and an opportunity that is denied to any other artist (with the exception of actors): We can become someone else, in a deep and revealing way - revealing not only of the character but of ourselves. All well-drawn characters have something important to teach us as writers. If they do not, how can they teach an audience? To put it another way: If you do not learn from your characters, if they do not teach you things that you did not anticipate and could not have learned any other way, then they are not authentic characters, but mere extensions of your own personality, or silhouettes that you manipulate around a plot as the plot requires.
If you emerge from a work having done nothing but reinforced your own point of view and affirmed your preconceptions, then you can be sure that your characters are flat and sterile, and that you, as a writer, are a fraud. If you write only to reassure yourself that you are right, then you are no better than the socialist realist hacks of the old Soviet Union. You are, in fact, not a writer at all. Writing is and ought to be dangerous: dangerous to society and dangerous to the writer. The experience of seeing the world through another human being's eyes ought to be a revolutionary one for you as a writer. It ought to take you places you did not expect to go, but where you must go because the characters require it. As I said: Creating believable characters changes you.
That this is so is simply a function of the fact that writing is about Truth. Not truths with a small 't' and a plural termination, but about singular Truth with a capital 't'. Unless you feel that you are in possession of some small particle of truth that an audience needs to hear and that you can bring to them in your unique voice, then you should not be writing. And the chief way you do this - to bring this truth to the audience - is through the creation of character. But character has to be real, subtle, organic and vivid, and how are you going to achieve this if you do not get at that particle of Truth contained in your character? So please bear this in mind: When you are creating characters, you are dramatizing not your truth, but theirs. And as a writer, you must believe that the truth of your characters is superior to your own sense of truth. This is a difficult mental, moral and spiritual adjustment to make, but it is what makes writers of drama unique, and what makes it possible for drama to change minds in a way that no other form of writing can do.
So you must be willing to let the character take you wherever HE wants to go - not where you want him to go. You must reach the point in your understanding of the character where he dictates the story to you: he tells you the story he wants told, which may not be the one you set out to tell. Tolstoy experienced this in his writings. Often he simply could not force his characters to do what he wanted them to do, and we can read in his notebooks the arguments and urgings and frustrations he directed at certain of his characters. I have also found this to be true in my work. There are moments in a screenplay when a character simply will not do what I want; he insists on doing something else, something that feels right for him, something that reflects the truth about him.
Motivation is terribly important: Why is this character behaving the way he is? In order to answer this, it is imperative that you put yourself in the character's place, that you get inside his head. For it is not your head that matters, but his. Keep asking him why, what do you want, what are you trying to say through this piece, through me? And whatever the answer is, it ought to conform to your understanding of the meaning of the script as described earlier. If the character's motivation is at odds with the essential meaning of the script, then you are writing the wrong script.
Language is also crucial to character. To a great extent, characters are defined by what they say and how they say it. For a character to be authentic, he must possess a verbal idiom all his own. You must be very careful every time you put words into your character's mouth. The words must be his, identifiably a part of his personality. His level of diction, syntax, grammar and dialect must reflect and reveal who he is. But do not fall into the trap of so many writers by making a character's language too consistent and lacking in variation and color. Listen to how people speak: they often surprise you with their choice of words, or with some sudden unexpected turn of phrase. Your characters should do likewise; their language should be a part of their personalities, and it should be so particular to them that, if your removed all the dialog tags, you would still know who was speaking. I once wrote a book with this idea in mind, and I learned a great deal from the experience. A character's lexicon and style of speech is an integral part of who he is and how the audience will perceive him. For what comes out of our mouths influences how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves.
I have said earlier that ideally a screenplay should be a long-form poem. By this I mean that the language must be intensive as in poetry, and, as in poetry, it ought to have rhythm, balance and weight. Writing a character's dialog is the best opportunity you have to make your screenplay poetic, for everything the character says should have intensity of meaning and sonority of phrasing. This does not mean that you ought to write your dialog in verse (though I have done this, as in 'Copying Beethoven,' and I intend to do it again), but that your words must be chosen with as much care for meaning and beauty (or deliberate ugliness) as a poet chooses his words.
Characters are also defined by the company they keep. A script will normally be populated with subsidiary characters, all of whom stand in relation to the main character (or characters). The question here is who are they and why are they here. And this raises the matter of primacy. Is your main character in fact the most important character in the script? If so, why? It was Steven Spielberg who pointed out to me that if you can tell the story without the main character as the main character, then you are telling the wrong story. I agree. The main character is the main character because his point of view must be the one with which the audience will identify most intimately. I recently saw the film 'Bad Lieutenant' for the first time, and I was struck by the fact that the protagonist was perhaps the most unrelievedly negative character I had ever seen. I did not identify with him for very long; I found him repulsive and off-putting. In my view, he should not have been the main character at all, but, rather, a compelling subsidiary character to, say, the nun who was violated and who chose to forgive her attackers. She, at least, would have had contrasts and subtleties and contradictions in her character that might have taught us something. But at some point, apart from a dull curiosity, I did not care what happened to the lieutenant - in fact, I was in no doubt about what would happen, and I learned nothing when it did.
Your characters, main and otherwise, must possess humanity in order to project humanity. They must have reasons for making the choices they do with which an audience can identify. We just created an example of this recently in a script in which the main character and his family stop at a motel in the deep South. They are turned away by the manager's wife who, in our initial draft, was herself a racist. But we realized that we have seen that character too many times, that such a character is now a stereotype and of no interest. And so, on the re-write, we made it clear that she did not want to turn them away but was afraid of upsetting her husband who was sleeping in the next room. "If it was up to me," she pleads, "but it's not." Those lines made her a more authentic character; one who, instead of being a sneering racist, appears for the brief moment which she occupies in the film as the prisoner of a marriage to a racist, whose snoring we hear. Why is she behaving in the way she does? Because she knows that her husband will be furious if she behaves otherwise. And this in a character who appears for only one page. How much larger a role must motivation play in your main character?
At every turn, with every decision, we must learn something new about your character. His personality must begin to develop facets like a diamond in the process of cutting. But these facets ought to be revealed with the depth and complexity of humanity itself - not through rigorous logic nor arbitrarily, but with the grim and endearing truthfulness of human nature. In the script for 'Like Dandelion Dust,' the antagonist (played brilliantly by Barry Pepper) was originally depicted as an unrelieved villain. When I was asked to rewrite the script, I took it as my first priority to humanize this character; to give him a point of view with which the audience could identify. And so, instead of his just being a violent drunk, I gave him the ability to behave contritely, even sweetly, I made it clear that all his life he had been short-changed by fat cats and big shots, that he had dreams and ambitions but, as often happens in life, they had not been realized. And so, when he declares that he wants his son back, it is because his son represents everything that he has dreamed of and longed for, and that has been taken from him by people more powerful than he.
Make your character's motives clear, and you will have gone a long way toward making him human. You will have provided him with the ability to elicit empathy from the audience, for, even if we do not agree with him, even if we ultimately find him repulsive, we will have remained with him on his journey because we perceive something of ourselves in him: We will have seen a truth. For a writer's only duty is to truth. It is the business we are in, the pursuit we are about. And truth is brought to life above all through character. Character, it is not too much to say, is truth - the writer's truth.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Refining the Idea
Having examined your idea and decided that it can best be realized in screenplay form, your next task it to reduce it to its simplest statement. You must be able to answer the question: What is this script about? And you must be able to answer it in no more than two sentences. One sentence is preferable, and if you can reduce that sentence to one word, all the better. If you cannot do this, then you do not understand your idea correctly, and you will never be able to focus your screenplay on it. Your script will lack an ideational spine, a through-line, an integrity that only an underlying vision can give it. And when we talk about the central idea of the script – about its meaning – that is what we understand: What is the vision behind this work, and how best can we convey it through the medium of film?
For at every turn, at every scene change, with the introduction of every new character, this single, simply stated idea will be your guide. It will determine who and what you will write, and what value they will have in the script, because your choice of scene or character must serve the expression of your core idea. I have always found this to be true. Whenever I was unsure of what to cut to, or where the story should go, or which character I should focus on, I reverted to my single-sentence expression of the central idea and asked: Does this scene or character or dialogue serve to advance and elucidate the meaning I am trying to convey?
This is where many young screenwriters lose their way. If they have read the standard texts on writing the screenplay, they probably know that it must contain events, and even, that these events ought to occur at specific points in the text. And while, as I have said, I think this is utter nonsense, it is true that film scripts should be a framework of events – of things that happen and that can be seen – but that is only half the battle. Screenplays must also have meaning. As all art, they must convey a truth from the author to the audience. And herein lies the essence of screenwriting, or of any writing, from my point of view: Screenplays are not essentially about events; they are about Truth.
Not truths, with a small ‘t’ and a plural, but about Truth with a capital ‘T.’ If you do not believe that you are in possession of some form, some portion, of eternal, immutable Truth, and that you alone can bring that Truth to strangers in a unique voice with a unique vision, then please find some other line of work. And this is where your ability to voice your idea in a simple sentence, or even one word, comes into play. Your idea must be able to be expressed, in your mind at least, as a simple statement of truth. And this truth must reflect fixed, transcendent Truth, not changing, situational truth. Another, simpler way to put this is: Don’t tell people something they already know or could have figured out by themselves. Instead, tell them something you know to be true and that you believe they need to hear. That is what makes you a writer, and makes you worthy to be thought of in the same company as Sophocles and Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Beckett and Chekhov.
For you do want to be in their company, and you must remember that, as a writer, you stand in a tradition for which many people have suffered and been persecuted, imprisoned and even killed, because they dared to put the truth as they understood it into words and onto paper. And I am not just thinking of the great dramatic writers of our tradition – there were great comedic writers who also suffered and died for the integrity of their art. As a writer, your duty is to the Truth, first and above all. Not to make money or to please some studio boss, or to win a prize, but to use the medium of film to enlighten and improve humanity. And as the ancient masks of dramatic art depict – you can do this by making your audience laugh or weep or both.
For at every turn, at every scene change, with the introduction of every new character, this single, simply stated idea will be your guide. It will determine who and what you will write, and what value they will have in the script, because your choice of scene or character must serve the expression of your core idea. I have always found this to be true. Whenever I was unsure of what to cut to, or where the story should go, or which character I should focus on, I reverted to my single-sentence expression of the central idea and asked: Does this scene or character or dialogue serve to advance and elucidate the meaning I am trying to convey?
This is where many young screenwriters lose their way. If they have read the standard texts on writing the screenplay, they probably know that it must contain events, and even, that these events ought to occur at specific points in the text. And while, as I have said, I think this is utter nonsense, it is true that film scripts should be a framework of events – of things that happen and that can be seen – but that is only half the battle. Screenplays must also have meaning. As all art, they must convey a truth from the author to the audience. And herein lies the essence of screenwriting, or of any writing, from my point of view: Screenplays are not essentially about events; they are about Truth.
Not truths, with a small ‘t’ and a plural, but about Truth with a capital ‘T.’ If you do not believe that you are in possession of some form, some portion, of eternal, immutable Truth, and that you alone can bring that Truth to strangers in a unique voice with a unique vision, then please find some other line of work. And this is where your ability to voice your idea in a simple sentence, or even one word, comes into play. Your idea must be able to be expressed, in your mind at least, as a simple statement of truth. And this truth must reflect fixed, transcendent Truth, not changing, situational truth. Another, simpler way to put this is: Don’t tell people something they already know or could have figured out by themselves. Instead, tell them something you know to be true and that you believe they need to hear. That is what makes you a writer, and makes you worthy to be thought of in the same company as Sophocles and Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Beckett and Chekhov.
For you do want to be in their company, and you must remember that, as a writer, you stand in a tradition for which many people have suffered and been persecuted, imprisoned and even killed, because they dared to put the truth as they understood it into words and onto paper. And I am not just thinking of the great dramatic writers of our tradition – there were great comedic writers who also suffered and died for the integrity of their art. As a writer, your duty is to the Truth, first and above all. Not to make money or to please some studio boss, or to win a prize, but to use the medium of film to enlighten and improve humanity. And as the ancient masks of dramatic art depict – you can do this by making your audience laugh or weep or both.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Why a Screenplay
The first question you must answer is: Why a screenplay? Now, the most common answer I have heard to that question involves money. People want to write, and they believe that movies are potentially the most lucrative form of literature. You simply cannot make a living writing poetry or short stories, and it is unlikely that you will become rich writing novels or plays. And you most certainly will not get to hang out with Will Smith or Tom Cruise by writing them. And so, assuming that the film script is a ticket to success and disposable income, people try to turn whatever ideas they have into screenplays.
Money is the worst, most ignoble, and irrelevant motive for writing anything. And it is almost certain to fail. The very fact of adhering to the idea that you will make your fortune by writing screenplays probably indicates that you will never succeed. Why? Because people who think this way usually have nothing to say that is worth hearing.
Now that brings us to our first point: You must have something to say. It must be something of such intense dramatic interest or of such ingenious comic invention that millions of strangers will be able to relate to it and take meaning or joy from it. Further, it must be something that only you can say to your audience in your own peculiar language. It may be that someone else can say it, but you must believe that only you can say it in your way. You must have an idea, an insight, an inspiration, or at the very least, an extremely compelling question that can be asked only in the screenplay form. It must be something that you believe passionately that an audience needs to hear. It must be important and universal. It must be a truth.
If you have such an idea, then you must ask yourself: Is film the appropriate medium in which to express it? Not every idea is, or even can be, turned into a film. I believe that one of the tragedies of the twentieth century was that many of the truly important novelists and playwrights never realized their destiny because, instead of writing in the forms their hearts and their material dictated, they wrote films. They did this at first because it was a new medium - a new toy - and they wanted to try it out. But later they did it because it was a good living. And so, we lost some of our best literature to screenplays for the worst possible reasons.
So you must look at your idea, and you must understand your motivation for wanting to express it, and then you must look at the film medium. In order to do this last, you absolutely must have a good grounding in the history of film, and in film aesthetics. And you do not have to go to film school or to a university to achieve this. You should read the best books you can find on film history, and glean from them what films you should watch. You must start where film art started, with the Lumieres and Melies, and work your way through Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Metropolis, Nosferatu, Wind and City Lights, learning how people, through trial and error, through invention and inspiration, created the genre of film art. You must be conversant with the work of Murnau, Bunuel, Renoir, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Welles, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bertolini, Lang, Chaplin, Fields, Sjostrom, Fellini, de Mille, Bergman and others, paying special attention to how the scripts are made, before you attempt a screenplay. In short, you must possess a film culture before you try to write films.
Film is above all a closely observed visual exploration of an idea. It is at once a vast canvas and an intimate portrait for the expression of truth. It offers you possibilities that other media cannot, but it also imposes limits and restrictions of which you and your idea would be free in other forms. The visual nature of film can be very exciting in the expression of certain ideas. Film can go anywhere in time and space instantaneously, presenting almost infinite possibilities for the exploration and development of material. It offers vibrant use of light and shade, color and texture, composition of images, movement of point of view, and the chance to create visual metaphors with a vividness and immediacy that few other media offer. But a film does not have the sweep and metaphorical depth of the novel; feature films lack the conciseness and intensity of the short story; they lack the interaction of audience and live performers that the theater represents, with all of its possibilities for spontaneity, mistakes and momentary inspiration; and film can never approximate the intensity of language, the explosive depth of imagery, and the sheer verbal beauty which characterize great poetry.
And so, film is not necessarily the appropriate medium for every idea, and you must decide whether what you have to say is best said in screenplay form. You must ask yourself whether your idea is cinematically idiomatic. Be honest with yourself - regardless of your burning desire to lunch with Brad and Angie - and decide whether what you need to say is best said through film. If it is not, then find the correct medium and write in that. Far better to write one truly great poem, or one important novel, or a brilliant cycle of short stories, or a moving and well-made play than a lifetime of failed screenplays in the hope of grand residuals and dinner with Russell Crowe.
Money is the worst, most ignoble, and irrelevant motive for writing anything. And it is almost certain to fail. The very fact of adhering to the idea that you will make your fortune by writing screenplays probably indicates that you will never succeed. Why? Because people who think this way usually have nothing to say that is worth hearing.
Now that brings us to our first point: You must have something to say. It must be something of such intense dramatic interest or of such ingenious comic invention that millions of strangers will be able to relate to it and take meaning or joy from it. Further, it must be something that only you can say to your audience in your own peculiar language. It may be that someone else can say it, but you must believe that only you can say it in your way. You must have an idea, an insight, an inspiration, or at the very least, an extremely compelling question that can be asked only in the screenplay form. It must be something that you believe passionately that an audience needs to hear. It must be important and universal. It must be a truth.
If you have such an idea, then you must ask yourself: Is film the appropriate medium in which to express it? Not every idea is, or even can be, turned into a film. I believe that one of the tragedies of the twentieth century was that many of the truly important novelists and playwrights never realized their destiny because, instead of writing in the forms their hearts and their material dictated, they wrote films. They did this at first because it was a new medium - a new toy - and they wanted to try it out. But later they did it because it was a good living. And so, we lost some of our best literature to screenplays for the worst possible reasons.
So you must look at your idea, and you must understand your motivation for wanting to express it, and then you must look at the film medium. In order to do this last, you absolutely must have a good grounding in the history of film, and in film aesthetics. And you do not have to go to film school or to a university to achieve this. You should read the best books you can find on film history, and glean from them what films you should watch. You must start where film art started, with the Lumieres and Melies, and work your way through Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Metropolis, Nosferatu, Wind and City Lights, learning how people, through trial and error, through invention and inspiration, created the genre of film art. You must be conversant with the work of Murnau, Bunuel, Renoir, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Welles, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bertolini, Lang, Chaplin, Fields, Sjostrom, Fellini, de Mille, Bergman and others, paying special attention to how the scripts are made, before you attempt a screenplay. In short, you must possess a film culture before you try to write films.
Film is above all a closely observed visual exploration of an idea. It is at once a vast canvas and an intimate portrait for the expression of truth. It offers you possibilities that other media cannot, but it also imposes limits and restrictions of which you and your idea would be free in other forms. The visual nature of film can be very exciting in the expression of certain ideas. Film can go anywhere in time and space instantaneously, presenting almost infinite possibilities for the exploration and development of material. It offers vibrant use of light and shade, color and texture, composition of images, movement of point of view, and the chance to create visual metaphors with a vividness and immediacy that few other media offer. But a film does not have the sweep and metaphorical depth of the novel; feature films lack the conciseness and intensity of the short story; they lack the interaction of audience and live performers that the theater represents, with all of its possibilities for spontaneity, mistakes and momentary inspiration; and film can never approximate the intensity of language, the explosive depth of imagery, and the sheer verbal beauty which characterize great poetry.
And so, film is not necessarily the appropriate medium for every idea, and you must decide whether what you have to say is best said in screenplay form. You must ask yourself whether your idea is cinematically idiomatic. Be honest with yourself - regardless of your burning desire to lunch with Brad and Angie - and decide whether what you need to say is best said through film. If it is not, then find the correct medium and write in that. Far better to write one truly great poem, or one important novel, or a brilliant cycle of short stories, or a moving and well-made play than a lifetime of failed screenplays in the hope of grand residuals and dinner with Russell Crowe.
Writing Screenplays
My computer-genius son created this blog for me because recently he has found me talking a good deal about the screenplay: its conception, its writing, its rewriting, and its eventual fate. Not surprisingly, having worked in the Hollywood film business for fifteen years, I have some rather strong views on these subjects, which I will endeavor to set down here from time to time. I do this partly to organize my own thinking on the matter (perhaps as the basis for an eventual book), and partly because I receive many requests each year for advice and guidance about screenplay writing, as well as receiving many scripts by aspiring screenwriters for my comments and notes.
Now, I must say that, until recently, I had never read a book on the writing of screenplays, though I had often heard them discussed. And so, in general terms, I was familiar with the approaches which the standard texts have taken. But I always found myself at a bit of a loss when I was serving on panels or presenting seminars on screenplay writing, and others asked me what I thought of so-and-so's views about structure or character or plot. I simply had never read their works, though some are considered classics in the field.
Finally, last summer, while in a bookshop, I bought a book on screenwriting both because I felt an obligation at least to familiarize myself with what such gurus were saying, and because, frankly, it had an engaging cover. It was written by a man who, I gather, offers as his chief claim to fame the fact that he has had meetings with Steven Spielberg. I made a point of reading it soon thereafter, and what I found there, I found appalling.
Aside from a certain glibness, the book had no value or appeal. The author has, in my view at least, virtually no insight into the art of screenwriting, nor very much to say about the process. So far as I can tell, having failed as a screenwriter, he decided to make his living telling other people how to do what he, apparently, has been unable to do successfully.
Nonetheless, what this author said jibes with what I was able to glean from my many conversations about screenwriting books with those who have read them and rely on them, and it is this: The screenplay is a form of mechanism, and if you assemble the parts in the right order according to certain formulae, it will become a thing of beauty and a source of wealth.
(This is how most writers of screenwriting books appear to regard the process, and so, it is also how most executives in the industry regard it: Involve enough people in the writing process and the work will somehow blossom into life. Which is rather like saying that if you involve enough engineers in the design of a car, it will one day stand on its rear tires and dance.)
To my mind this is nonsense. It violates everything I believe or think or intuit about writing. A screenplay is not a machine, its parts are not mechanical, and there are no formulae for assembling them into a whole. This is where I part company with those who have made a living, not writing films, but telling others how to write them.
A screenplay, to my way of thinking, is an organic being - a living thing. Its creation cannot be approached mechanistically any more than you can raise a child, or cultivate a garden, or grow wine grapes mechanically. Yes, there are certain recognizable rules to help you avoid the worst of mistakes, but these exist only to bring you into that arena in which the organic being of the work can be focused upon and made to flourish. For example, it may be enough to point out that you should not feed babies on gin, or that you cannot grow vegetables in deep shade, or that you must prune vines in order to get the results that you want. But apart from such broad, and fairly obvious, generalizations, the fostering of living beings has more to do with imagination, thought, feeling , hope, despair, invention, inspiration, care, insight, truthfulness, and love than it does with what part goes where, or how to arrive at a plot point on page sixty.
And so I have called this site The Art of the Screenplay because I regard writing in general, and screenwriting in particular, as a form of art. It is the creation of a living organism, akin to the creation of children, or the incarnation of an idea - verbum caro factum est - the word made flesh. The process is analogous to how life on earth occurs: An organic vessel is created which permits the indwelling of a living spirit, or, alternatively, a living truth finds an organic vessel through which it can express itself. This, to my mind at least, is how human beings are made, and it is the only way I know in which living art can be made. And since I believe that the screenplay is, or can be, or ought to be a form of art, this is how I think screenplays should be written.
I will try to define this process, or characterize it, or provide insight into it in this site, for the benefit of those who wish to write screenplays, or, having written them, wish to find a new way to approach their work. But do not seek here easy, ironclad rules for the construction of that blockbuster which will earn your Oscar or secure your fortune. Instead, look for a challenge to probe deeper into yourself, as a writer and as a human being; indeed, to search deep into your soul for the source and spirit of your work. For that, I truly believe, is where the sources of all true art reside. As W. B. Yeats said about finding his inspiration: I will lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
My fondest hope is that the thoughts in these electronic pages may help you to descend that ladder, in order that you may learn how to climb up again reborn as a writer.
Now, I must say that, until recently, I had never read a book on the writing of screenplays, though I had often heard them discussed. And so, in general terms, I was familiar with the approaches which the standard texts have taken. But I always found myself at a bit of a loss when I was serving on panels or presenting seminars on screenplay writing, and others asked me what I thought of so-and-so's views about structure or character or plot. I simply had never read their works, though some are considered classics in the field.
Finally, last summer, while in a bookshop, I bought a book on screenwriting both because I felt an obligation at least to familiarize myself with what such gurus were saying, and because, frankly, it had an engaging cover. It was written by a man who, I gather, offers as his chief claim to fame the fact that he has had meetings with Steven Spielberg. I made a point of reading it soon thereafter, and what I found there, I found appalling.
Aside from a certain glibness, the book had no value or appeal. The author has, in my view at least, virtually no insight into the art of screenwriting, nor very much to say about the process. So far as I can tell, having failed as a screenwriter, he decided to make his living telling other people how to do what he, apparently, has been unable to do successfully.
Nonetheless, what this author said jibes with what I was able to glean from my many conversations about screenwriting books with those who have read them and rely on them, and it is this: The screenplay is a form of mechanism, and if you assemble the parts in the right order according to certain formulae, it will become a thing of beauty and a source of wealth.
(This is how most writers of screenwriting books appear to regard the process, and so, it is also how most executives in the industry regard it: Involve enough people in the writing process and the work will somehow blossom into life. Which is rather like saying that if you involve enough engineers in the design of a car, it will one day stand on its rear tires and dance.)
To my mind this is nonsense. It violates everything I believe or think or intuit about writing. A screenplay is not a machine, its parts are not mechanical, and there are no formulae for assembling them into a whole. This is where I part company with those who have made a living, not writing films, but telling others how to write them.
A screenplay, to my way of thinking, is an organic being - a living thing. Its creation cannot be approached mechanistically any more than you can raise a child, or cultivate a garden, or grow wine grapes mechanically. Yes, there are certain recognizable rules to help you avoid the worst of mistakes, but these exist only to bring you into that arena in which the organic being of the work can be focused upon and made to flourish. For example, it may be enough to point out that you should not feed babies on gin, or that you cannot grow vegetables in deep shade, or that you must prune vines in order to get the results that you want. But apart from such broad, and fairly obvious, generalizations, the fostering of living beings has more to do with imagination, thought, feeling , hope, despair, invention, inspiration, care, insight, truthfulness, and love than it does with what part goes where, or how to arrive at a plot point on page sixty.
And so I have called this site The Art of the Screenplay because I regard writing in general, and screenwriting in particular, as a form of art. It is the creation of a living organism, akin to the creation of children, or the incarnation of an idea - verbum caro factum est - the word made flesh. The process is analogous to how life on earth occurs: An organic vessel is created which permits the indwelling of a living spirit, or, alternatively, a living truth finds an organic vessel through which it can express itself. This, to my mind at least, is how human beings are made, and it is the only way I know in which living art can be made. And since I believe that the screenplay is, or can be, or ought to be a form of art, this is how I think screenplays should be written.
I will try to define this process, or characterize it, or provide insight into it in this site, for the benefit of those who wish to write screenplays, or, having written them, wish to find a new way to approach their work. But do not seek here easy, ironclad rules for the construction of that blockbuster which will earn your Oscar or secure your fortune. Instead, look for a challenge to probe deeper into yourself, as a writer and as a human being; indeed, to search deep into your soul for the source and spirit of your work. For that, I truly believe, is where the sources of all true art reside. As W. B. Yeats said about finding his inspiration: I will lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
My fondest hope is that the thoughts in these electronic pages may help you to descend that ladder, in order that you may learn how to climb up again reborn as a writer.
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