Writing has two components: 1) that ‘thing' that you need to say, 2) the tools (skill - talent - commitment) to express it. Without both it is impossible to write a good script.

It is the process of writing - the work itself - that brings joy to me as a writer. If I feel the need to say something and endeavor to put it on paper in an attempt to communicate it, then that's all that really matters. And if I can find the joy in that process I feel that I'm a very lucky person.

It's the needing to express that ‘thing' is central - the tools merely serve that inner need. If you exercise the tools in service of something that's unfelt - not from the heart, that's perversion. But only you know what's in your heart - no one can make that judgement but you.

Without the tools to express what's in your heart is like being a deaf mute - you have so much to say and need to hear what is spoken to you but you cannot. I don't know what's worse (having been in both places) - having nothing to say or being unable to express myself.

It is not necessary to intellectual understand, or be able to analyze, what that ‘thing' is that you need to express. In fact trying to figure it out is often not helpful. Some people are better able to describe their heart than others but that has little or nothing to do with their being able to express it through their writing. Much (or most) of what people need to write about is ineffable - inexpressable. That's why they use drama.

Writing is irreducible. You cannot dissect a scene without, in some sense, killing it. You cannot take apart a script and look at the parts - improve some - and then put it back together in hopes of making it ‘better'. This is not to say that some script are immature or unformed or dishonest or fail in any other number of ways. But being able to understand those failings is best left to the process of rehearsing with actors. Analysis is the wrong tool to use on a dramatic work (at least in the writing process - it may have a place in the critical process but even then I'm not sure).

But on the other hand, unless you understand the mechanics of drama and story and movies, it is often difficult to write effective movies. It is more that you need to learn all these fundamental skills and then forget them - or know them so well that they recede into the background, allowing your unconscious to emerge. There is also a level of appreciation that you develop when you understand the inner workings of a scene. There is a beauty in the mechanics.

It is like they say in Zen - first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. When you learn how drama works it does, in some way, distract you from the truly dramatic. And it only when you learn the skills of writing so well that you forget them that you can appreciate the essential core of what the writer is expressing.

When you first begin to learn the mechanics of writing it does in some sense ruin writing and reading for you. You have lost your purity - your innocence. And it is the memory of how it once was, that keeps you going, learning everything you can about the skill of writing. And only when you come out the other side, can you write from the heart or see something dramatic with a pure heart.

You can only write as well as you can write. Further, you can only write as good a script as you can write. For example, if you write a script that is full of passion and self revelation but has all kinds of structural and character problems, most people would say that if the writer could only fix those problems, the script would be more effective. I'm not so sure. I think there's a greater chance that the rewriting process will lead to analysis which will take you away from your heart and the original need you had to write the script. The rewrite may indeed, on the surface, make the script appear more effective or complete but that thing that gave the script real value originally will probably be lost.

Harold Clurman had two things he would repeat again and again: 1) What's cut can't fail, 2) Don't invest a lot of energy in rewriting - throw the script away and move on. I would agree.

This is not to say that you shouldn't learn from your failures - but the more failures the better.  I heard that on many of the walls at IBM there's slogan:  Success only comes through failure.

Dramatic writing is intended for performance. The script is an outline - a blueprint - fragments of a dream. Only in the production of a script can the meaning or value of the script revealed. When I'm working, if a scene doesn't work after actors have worked on it for weeks and weeks, then I cut it and see what happens. It's hard to know when the right moment is, but cutting scenes can often help a script come alive (again I defer to Harold Clurman).

Only when the words are spoken aloud before an audience can a script come alive and be seen.

HOW I USED TO WRITE:

1) I used to write by coming up with an idea - a character, a snippet of a story (usually the opening and the end). Then I would take the idea and put it in the context of a story. I would find a way to express the story idea in one line. Then I would break the idea down, explore the plot possibilities, and express the story in three lines. Those would be the three acts. I would then take the three acts and break them down into twenty five lines - they would be the scenes. The script would then have one single premise, three acts, and seventy scenes.

2) I would then go to a friend's house (usually the wonderful actor Bill Raymond) and over dinner I would tell the story. I could tell immediately by Bill and his wife Linda Hartinian's reaction what worked and what didn't. I would go home and rework the story and then a few weeks later I would go back and ‘pitch' it again. I would do this until the story had no loose ends or boring sections. By this point I could see the movie in my head. I could hear the characters talking. I would go home and start writing down what I saw and heard in my head.

3) The trick to this kind of writing is to know when to start putting the words down on paper. If you do it too early the story may not have enough ‘juice' to get you through to the end. The story will as a result feel thin and forced. If you wait too long the story may have softened, overripened in effect, and will feel dead and bloated.

4) When I finally started writing the final script I would try to get at least five pages down per day - ten is more to my liking. If a day passes without getting down 5 pages, the script is in trouble. If two days pass without writing the script is in critical condition, if three days pass without writing, the script is dead. I throw it away. Of the twenty or so movies I've finished, only one or two took more than three weeks to complete.  And they are the weakest in my opinion.

HOW I WRITE NOW: (WHAT HAPPENED WAS... THE WIFE) I choose an extremely simple plot (such as: a man comes over to dinner at woman's house - he wants to leave but she wants him to stay - eventually he leaves) and I let the idea percolate way back in my head - I don't break it down any further as far as plot. I will usually think about the people and who they are and listen for them to say something that excites me. I wait until the excitement reaching a certain level and then I start writing, hoping the excitement will sustain itself and carry me through to the end of the story. Again I hope that I didn't start too early or too late. And I will usually thrown the script away if I stop for more than three days without writing at least five pages.

Writing is like training for the big race - it's all in the preparation - in the way you live. And you don't know how well you've been training or living until you hear that gun go off and you try to make it to the finish line. Sometimes you make it - sometimes you don't.

I can usually only write in the morning, as soon as I wake up. If I do anything else first (eat, talk, read, go on the Net, or play music) I usually can't write afterwards. It's that first plunge that requires a little discipline but then it becomes a habit. I rarely write for more than two or three hours (which for me is an extremely successful day). In that amount of time a person can write ten pages of a script.

Drinking alcohol (for me) is not very helpful. I wake up bleary and unfocused and my day never gets started. I end up frustrated and empty by the evening and need to drink again to relax - I watch watching TV or wasting time in some other useless manner from the alcohol's false sense of excitement and the next day the whole cycle starts over again. Drinking not great for my writing.

Sleep is very important to writing.  When I'm not getting enough rest I can't write anything.

When a script is going well it comes out faster than I can get it down. I have to carry a little notebook around because everything I see and hear seems to fit in with what I'm writing about. I keep an open pad near the bed with a pen so if I wake up during the night with an idea (which usually are incomprehensibly stupid in the morning) I can write it down.

Music is very helpful to me. I will usually pick a piece of music and play it over and over again as I write. The music is usually sad and slow. If I laugh AND cry during a session from the writing of words, I consider that a huge success, no matter what ever happens with the script.

An idea is not a script. In fact, ideas are often the enemy of the script. The process of writing often dies when put in the service of ideas. Ideas are for newspapers and magazines.  Newspaper and magazines are poorly written stories - intended only to distract - designed to be thrown away.

What magazines are to books, television is to movies.

I wish there were a law against adapting books into movies. Once a book has been adapted into a movie, no matter how good that movie is, it prevents anyone who sees the movie from ever really reading the book. I don't mean those who will skip the book having seen the movie already - chances are they probably wouldn't have ever read the book anyway. I'm speaking for those who may have eventually read the book on their own - they can never experience the book the way the author intended it. Their imagination has been polluted by the movie. Writing is an art. Reading is an art. It is a sad thing when one art plunders and destroys another.  The movie industry plunders the other arts routinely.

(And there is no way to really adapt a book into a movie - they are two utterly different mediums. Most books are adapted because the studio may feel there's going to be a built in market for the movie (as in the case of Stephen King and John Grisham for example) or because they (as most executives) don't understand how movies are made and don't know how to read a screenplay. A book already has an audience and a story so they think all they have to do is translate it to the movies.  BOOKS ARE UNTRANSLATABLE.

I feel the same way about music in movies, especially classical music. Putting a Beethoven symphony in a film, forever robs the audience of ever experiencing the pure beauty of Beethoven. Every time they hear the music they'll think of Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner riding a horse or driving a fast car or eating dinner with some beautiful babe.

You become a better writer in two ways: 1) by becoming a better, more interesting person, 2) by writing. In addition I must say that reading helps enormously with writing but in some sense reading is an art form of its own and helps both #1 and #2.

A good script can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. A script that can only ‘work' when done one particular way is of little value. For example, a script that can only work if an actor weeps or explodes in anger or shimmies seductively at a prescribed moment in the story is a manipulation. A good script is a revealed in it's execution through the human presence of the actors, the director, and the crew. And that revelation is completely different depending on who is working on it. The more different interpretations a scripts can hold, the more value it has.

Writing about something that (you think) you understand is not being truthful. Understanding (and opinion) has no place in dramatic writing. It is a limiting dead end. It is preaching. As an audience, I am not interested in what you know or what you think about any subject. Dramatic writing is not about teaching. Preachy writing can only do two things: 1) make me feel good about my belief system, or 2) make me feel bad about my belief system - and neither of these is helpful.

Writing is about revelation - about exposing. I write (or I would like to) to get through something, to work it out - or to celebrate something (I wish).

Ideas are not stories. My experience is that the greatest idea in the world does not necessarily make a good movie. It is very easy to fall into the ‘idea trap' where you come up with this wonderful concept only to then become a slave to it - you end up not writing about what you need to write about but about what you think you should be writing about. Ideas or concepts can be helpful in small amounts - a little bit goes a long way.

In my experience, ideas in a script emerge during rehearsal and performance or even during editing. They are not forced or pushed out but are revealed through the process of movie making. The audience (in a theater production) will tell you what your script is about. Their reactions, positive and negative, will give meaning to your story - you cannot give meaning to your story - you can only write what's in your heart and mind. You cannot express and interpret at the same time - it is an impossible task. There are some things you can do two at a time but that pairing is not one of them. If whenever you spoke to someone were interpreting your intentions and their reactions it would tie you in a knot (as many people are when they speak).

 

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