SCREENWRITING IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS - PART 1: MY TAKE
What IS this thing called screenwriting?
My Take on the
Nebulous Art and Science of Screenwriting
This is the first of many posts where I’ll be sharing what I think are some of the most important insights into the strange and often misunderstood world of screenwriting. My goal is twofold:
First, as a business owner (The Screenplay Factory Instruction and Coaching), I need more people to know that I exist and I need to give as many people as I can a chance to get to know me, understand what my particular point of view is on this subject and to share a “sample” of what it might be like to work with me. So, I’ll be sharing these all over social.
The second is even more simple: I’d like to help. Specifically, I’d like to help those just beginning their screenwriting journey, no matter what their goals are or whether or not they’ll ever have any interest in paying for my services. Many people have helped me along the way and I would not be where I am without their patience and kindness. I’ve recently coined the whimsical term “PAAMLAP” (Positively Affect As Many People As Possible) and I try to do what I can to have a positive impact on as many screenwriting newcomers and emerging talents as I can.
It’s also fun to meet with new people and to talk shop, so if that’s of interest, just send me an email. No biggie. No pressure, no obligations, and no selling. Just a friendly chat.
jordan@thescreenplayfactory.com
So… here’s some of what I hope will be helpful, insightful, and actionable for anyone trying to write a screenplay – especially those who want to be paid for their work.
I’m going to start by talking about what some would describe as “keeping your head on straight”. When I work with clients, I do my best to reset any unhealthy expectations and talk about the realities of the screenwriting process which are often either completely missed or misunderstood by new writers.
Some may roll their eyes and groan about more “positive mindset nonsense”, but I know it’s critical to your success. I see talented people enter the world of screenwriting and then quit prematurely all the time because either their attitude or understanding is not in sync with reality. It’s heartbreaking. Unhealthy expectations and misconceptions undermine their efforts - and they fail.
I do not want you to fail.
Having said that - and because I’ve personally witnessed many new writers go through unnecessary stress and often give up - I feel a great responsibility to start by sharing this sobering observation:
This is harder than you think it is,
and
it is going to take more time than you think it will.
That doesn’t mean it has to be painful, however. I truly believe that screenwriting should be a largely positive experience. It can even be - dare I say it - FUN. And, I know now that simply having a better understanding of what screenwriting is and how it works will help you stay out of the dark places many new writers find themselves in.
Of course, there are stressful aspects to screenwriting too, and many of us feel stress-inducing obligations to perform at a certain level or at a certain pace or to reach a particular goal as quickly as possible, but if you begin to feel those things, I want you to know you’ve lost your way. You won’t win if you listen to those dark voices.
If you feel yourself being influenced by those things, it’s likely time to take a break. You need to shake off that negative energy because it will most certainly hurt the quality of your work. This should be mostly fun, mostly positive, mostly exciting, and mostly rewarding - no matter what your goals are or what level of success you are experiencing.
That’s a very important thing to keep in mind at all times:
If you can’t have fun and enjoy yourself now, do not kid yourself into thinking that you will when you start making money and/or achieve some new level of success.
There are many more stressors involved when you work professionally, so things often get harder with success, not easier. The point I’m making is…
…you must enjoy yourself.
And if you aren’t, you are doing it wrong.
Enjoy the process. And do not put any pressure on yourself to succeed. Pursue your goals, of course, but don’t try to force them. It won’t help, and will more likely really hurt your chances.
I’ve regularly witnessed how things can go wrong for a new writer and I do not want you to experience that. I want you to feel comfortable, despite the fact you may not yet know everything you need to or possess the applicable skills and understanding required. And know that those things will come in time -if you let them. I encourage you to remember and reconnect with the special curiosity we all used to have when we were young and constantly learning new things. There may have been a little frustration, but for the most part, it was fun and exciting.
Without a reasonably complete understanding of the process of writing a screenplay and of the industry as a whole, and without realistic expectations of how much time and effort is involved, you will likely get frustrated and you will very likely quit. Unreasonable expectations will sabotage whatever goals you have and they are a serious threat to your success, so we need to spend some time recalibrating your expectations and your understanding of a few things right away.
I’ve been doing this for a number of years now and the one thing that I have learned over and over again is that – of everything that I teach - even the most practical and pragmatic strategies, tools, and insights are not what make the biggest improvement in someone’s performance as a screenwriter.
The reality is that …
I make the most profound impact on new
and emerging writers when I simply
temper their expectations.
So … let me share a few more really important insights with you:
Although it’s true that very few people become successful screenwriters, that doesn’t concern me and it shouldn’t concern you either. All that should matter is that it’s possible. And it is. If you work at it. If you develop the skills and muster the discipline required. If you dedicate yourself to not only understanding the craft of screenwriting but the business of filmmaking as a whole. And...
...If you know what to expect.
For instance, almost every new screenwriter I teach has a very warped idea of how long the process takes. Many believe that when they complete their first draft, they are near the “finish line.”
They believe that a first draft is near the end of the process.
This is NOT the case.
I’m almost at the peak! It’s right in front of me! I’ll be there in no time!
A first draft is often much closer to the beginning of the process than the end. A first draft more accurately reflects that you are just getting started, not wrapping up. The most challenging and time-consuming work typically happens after you write your first draft.
So, not only will the process of learning the required skills and developing the necessary instincts to become a successful screenwriter take much longer than most think it will - on average 5-10 years - the specific act of writing just one effective (more on the word “effective” later) screenplay will also take much longer than you expect.
In my experience, three months from start to finish is incredibly fast. The only people I know who can write great scripts that fast have been doing it for a long time. 5-6 months is still pretty quick, but doable for a person who has some experience and a solid understanding of the fundamentals. A year - or even YEARS - is not at all unusual and much more likely for someone new to screenwriting.
So, be prepared for a substantial investment in time and effort if your goal is to create a screenplay capable of doing business. Taking the dangers of unreasonable expectations further, here’s another sobering statement that I want you to understand at the deepest possible level:
Every single person who writes
an effective screenplay writes a bad one first.
And I mean really bad. It’s so important that you understand this cannot be avoided. More importantly, you shouldn’t try to avoid it because it’s an extremely important part of the process.
Absolutely no one sits down at their laptop and knocks out a polished screenplay on their first pass. First drafts will vary in quality from absolutely awful to bearable at best. They are rarely any good, and the reason for that is usually very simple: they simply aren’t finished yet and the writer does not yet have the instincts or understanding to realize that fact.
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
-Ernest Hemmingway
Successful writers know that writing garbage is an important part of the process. They know that it’s supposed to happen. They know that the first draft and the early pages of any screenplay in development are going to be awful. They are not fazed by this. They keep going. They write freely without fear or embarrassment because they know that a great screenplay doesn’t just suddenly appear - they evolve and emerge out of the ashes of absolute garbage.
One of the reasons screenwriting can take much longer than you think is that completing a first draft is a very preliminary accomplishment. It’s a huge deal on a personal level, and I want you to feel proud of reaching that milestone when you get there, but it’s important to recognize that when you complete your first draft, you’ve still got a long way to go.
“Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over.”
-Ernest Hemmingway
Successful writers know the “magic” doesn’t happen during the writing phase. The real magic happens before and after that. Before, during the critical and often overlooked process of concept development and refinement, and afterward, during subsequent drafts which are less about writing and more about editing. Shaping. Honing. Polishing. Crafting the best possible version of that story. Both are a form of editing and when I say editing I don’t mean correcting simple spelling and grammatical errors. Those basics are important of course, but when I use the term editing, I’m talking about
STORYCRAFT and PAGECRAFT.
STORYCRAFT happens first, at the earliest possible stages while you engineer a timely, relevant, moving, and commercially viable concept, and PAGECRAFT happens last after that first draft exists, and when you focus on how to present your work on the page in the most effective way possible. Even if you somehow know your ideas are excellent in advance, without those skills available to you, more than likely your excellent concept will be “lost in translation”.
THE FOUR PILLARS OF SCREENWRITING
Let’s briefly visit the four disciplines that I feel every screenwriter must master before they have any hope of finding success:
MINDCRAFT
How to maintain a healthy mindset and healthy expectations through all the many ups and downsSTORYCRAFT
How to craft timely, relevant, emotionally impactful, and commercially-viable stories that audiences will go out of their way to pay forPAGECRAFT
How to effectively present your work on the page in the strange, counter-intuitive language of screenplay formattingPROCRAFT
How to navigate the industry, behave like a professional and ultimately get paid for your work
NOTE:
If MINDCRAFT and/or PROCRAFT are of particular interest and you feel that personal coaching on either or both would help you, I recommend reaching out to WGA writer and super coach, BROOKS ELMS who has amazing programs that tackle each of those discilplines specifically.
For now, let’s look a little more closely at the two disciplines I tend to focus on:
STORYCRAFT is all about your ability to compose a timely, relevant, compelling story capable of drawing a paying audience of strangers and eliciting a specific and intended emotional response from them. There are elements of Storycraft that are unique to screenwriting, but much of this skill is transferrable to and from other creative writing disciplines like writing novels or short stories, poetry, comics, graphic novels, or even narrative video games.
PAGECRAFT, however, is all about the completely unique written language of screenwriting - specifically, how you present your work on the page and how the choices you make in presenting your work on the page can either help or hinder your ability to elicit that crucial emotional response. Arguably, Pagecraft is not as important in other creative writing disciplines, but it is absolutely critical in screenwriting. And, due to its odd, totally unique, and counter-intuitive nature, it is not an easy language to learn. It’s for this reason that I like to describe screenwriting as …
…the “PLATYPUS” of creative writing.
In my opinion, STORYCRAFT is about understanding the unique patterns and audience expectations of cinematic storytelling and having the ability to edit and distill your ideas right at the conceptual level with the specific goal of having them used to make a film.
My process (The Story Forge) addresses the audience’s needs and expectations of those familiar patterns. It’s very flexible and adaptable and will work to help you create any genre, scope or scale of screenplay that you want. Innovation and originality are encouraged - to a degree - but only if you can still provide your audience with those required patterns and expectations.
Do not start writing until you know your concept works.
PAGECRAFT on the other hand, is more about the specific rules and guidelines of screenplay formatting. These are not particularly flexible or adaptable and it is important that you become fluent in the written language that the entire industry knows and demands from its writers. If you are excited to break the rules on this front, do not be surprised when your work is rejected. If it doesn’t look like a screenplay, it will not be treated like a screenplay.
Finding your voice within
PAGECRAFT rules and STORYCRAFT expectations
will take some time.
So, it is very important to get your head around the idea that success will likely not come quickly. Or, at the very least, to make sure you do not expect or demand it from yourself. The initial assembly of your ideas and your basic concept may come relatively quickly - and that will be exciting - but taking those early ideas and drafts and sculpting them into a really effective screenplay will not. That’s just not the way it works. It needs to take time.
Understand that there may be many more things that you need to learn about screenwriting than you are even aware of and many of these things cannot be learned quickly at the required skill level or the level of understanding that you’ll need to succeed.
It’s going to take significant time, focus, and effort because…
…IT NEEDS TO.
Next time, we’ll further explore how unhealthy expectations and misconceptions can often lead to the failure of new screenwriters, so… STAY TUNED!
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