The hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write

A short time ago, I was having dinner with a group of friends, and as is so often the case, the subject turned to movies. We talked about films we had seen, films we didn’t like, and what we liked or disliked about them, which covered a broad spectrum ranging from the acting performances to the editing and photography to the music, special effect, and so on. We talked about some of the great moments in films, lines of dialogue that still reside in our awareness, and while the conversation was intriguing and stimulating, what I really found so interesting was that nobody made any mention of the screenplay. It was as if the script didn’t exist. When I mentioned that fact, the only response I got was, “Oh yeah, it was a great script”, and that’s about as far as it went.
I immediately noticed a short pause in the conversation, and then one of the other guests, an actress and television talk show host, mentioned she had written a book and several of her friends wanted her to turn it into a screenplay. She confessed she felt she needed a “partner” to help her take her novel, her own story, and write it as a screenplay.
When I asked why, she explained she was frightened of “confronting” the blank sheet of paper. But she had already written the novel, I replied, so could she be frightened about turning it into a screenplay? Was it the form that challenged her. Or the visual description of images, the sparseness of dialogue, or the structure that frightened her? We discussed it for a while and as she was trying to explain her feelings, I realized many people have that same fear. Even though she was a published author, she was afraid of dealing with the blank page. She didn’t know exactly what to do or how to go about doing it.
This is not such an unusual scenario. Many people have great ideas for a screenplay but when they actually sit down to write it they are sized by fear and insecurity because they don’t know how to go about actually doing it.
Screenwriting is such a specific craft that unless you know where you’re going, it’s very easy to get lost within the maze of the blank page. The hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write. If you don’t know what your story is about, who does? Throughout my many years of teaching screenwriting, both here and abroad, people approach me all the time and tell me they want to write a screenplay. They say they have a great idea, or a brilliant opening scene, or a fantastic ending, but when I ask them what their story is about, their eyes glaze over, they stare off into the distance and tell me it’ll all come out in the story. Just like Miles when he tries to describe what his novel is about to Maya in Sideways. Great.
When you sit down and tell yourself that you’re going to write a screenplay, where do you begin? With the dream of a heroic action like the Max Fischer character (Jason Schwartzman) in Rushmore (Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson)? With still photographs that show us the era in which your story takes place, like the Great Depression in Seabiscuit (Gary Ross)? In a darkened bedroom, with a clock ticking loudly and two people moaning in a sexual passion, like Shampoo (Robert Towne and Warren Beatty)?
If you tell yourself you want to write a screenplay and then vow to commit weeks, months, or even years writing it, how do you confront the blank page? Where does the writer begin? It’s a question I hear at workshops and seminars all the time.
Does the writer begin with the person, location, title, outline it, or write the book first and then the screenplay? Questions, questions, questions. All those questions really reflect the question: How do you take an unformed idea, a vague notion, or a gut feeling and transfer that into the roughly one hundred and twenty pages of words and pictures make up a screenplay?
Writing a screenplay is a process–an organic, ever-changing, evolving stage of growth and development. Screenwriting is a craft that occasionally rises to the level of art. Like all literary arts, whether fiction or nonfiction, plays or short stories, there are definite stages a writer works through while fleshing out an idea. The creative process is the same no matter what you’re writing.
When you sit down to write a screenplay and confront the blank page, you have to know what story you’re writing. You only have a hundred and twenty pages to tell your story, and when you begin writing it’s apparent very quickly that you don’t have much room to work with. A screenplay is more like a poem than a novel or play in which you can feel your way through the story.
James Joyce, the great Irish writer, once wrote that the writing experience is like climbing a mountain. When you are scaling a mountain, all you can see where you’re going or where you’ve come from. The same principle holds true when you’re writing a screenplay; when you’re writing all you can see is what’s in front of you, that is, the page you’re writing and the pages you’ve written. You can see anything beyond that.
What do you want to write about? You know you have a great idea that will make an awesome movie, so where do you begin? Are you writing a challenging character study? Are you writing about a personal experience that impacted your life? Maybe you read a great magazine or a newspaper article that you know will make a great movie.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
A screenplay follows a definite, lean, tight, narrative line of action, with a definite beginning, middle, and end, though not necessarily in that order. A screenplay always moves forward toward the resolution, even if it is told in flashback like The Bourne Supremacy (Tony Gilroy), or American Beauty (Ala Ball). A screenplay follows a singular line of action so every scene, every fragment of visual information, must be taken you somewhere, moving the narrative forward in terms of story development.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Every screenplay is about something or someone and this subject becomes encased in the story you are telling. Can you define what you’re writing about? Who are you writing about? There are approximately one hundred twenty sheets of blank paper to fill in a screenplay. As we all know, the blank page is intimidating, a tremendous and formidable challenge. When you first set out on this writing adventure, you’ll probably only have a vague idea or an unformed notion about a character or incident running around in your head. You’ll discover when you begin to formulate the idea into a workable description it may take several pages of free-association and terrible writing just to reduce your story into a general line of character and action. It may take several days of thinking and scribbling before you can even isolate the main components of your story. Don’t worry about how long it takes. Just do it.
Before you can put one word on paper, you have to know what and who your story is about. What is the subject of your screenplay? For example: Your story may be about an attorney who meets and falls in love with a married woman, then kills her husband so they can be together. But he’s been set up and ends up in prison, while the woman ends up with a fortune in a tropical paradise. That’s the subject of Larry Kasdan’s Body Heat. It could also be the subject of Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder’s classic film noir. A Beautiful Mind (Akiva Goldsman) is the story of a physicist who loses touch with reality, overcomes his illness, and receives a Nobel prize for his scientific achievement. Action and character. The screenplay succeeds because there is a definite line of action.
The subject becomes a guideline for you to follow as you structure the action and the characters into a cohesive, dramatic story line. As a rule, you’ll find that either the character drives the action or the action drives the character.
What’s it about? Is the most challenging question you’ll ever be asked. In my experience, most aspiring writers seem to love the idea of writing a screenplay, but after talking with them I can tell they’re unwilling to commit the time and effort to face the challenges they’ll confront. Writing is hard work; make no mistake about it.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
If you know your subject then you can create a step-by-step approach that will guide you through the process of writing a screenplay. If we take a look at what a screenplay is, its essential nature, then we can define it as a story told with pictures in a dialogue and description and placed within the context of dramatic structure.
…………………………………………………….
The hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write.
If need be, let go of the reality of the person, incident, or event and fashion a creative reality based on the actual historical happening. Find the unreality, the theatricality of the event. This is a movie. Remember. You must communicate the people, the story, and the events dramatically. Make up your scenes based on the needs of the story while honoring the integrity of the experience.
There have been times when I’ve started with a location and used it to weave a story line. But even if you start with a particular place, it’s still not enough. You’ve got to create a character and action to build you story around.
Many people tell me they want to start with a title. That’s cool, but what then? You need to create a plot, but a plot about what? Plot is what happens, and since you’re sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper, it should be the furthest thing from your mind. At this point, you don’t know anything about the plot; forget plot. We’ll deal with it when time comes. First things first. What are you doing to research? You’ve got to have a subject.
Writing a screenplay is a step-by-step process, and it’s important to prepare one step at a time. First, you generate the idea, then break down the idea into the subject, a character and action. Once you have the subject, you know enough to structure it by determining the ending, the beginning, and Plot Points I and II. Once that’s done, you can build and expand your characters by writing character biographies, along with any other research you may need to do. Then you can structure the scenes and sequences, the content, of Act I on fourteen 3 X 5 cards. Next write up the back story, what happens a day, a week, or an hour before the story begins. Only after you’ve completed this preparation work can you begin writing the screenplay.
When you’ve completed this first words-on-paper draft, you’ll do basic revisions to this second stage of this first draft, and any rewriting that’s necessary to polish and hone your material until it’s ready to be shown. Screenwriting is a process, a living thing that changes from day to day. As a result, what you write today may be out of date tomorrow. And what to write tomorrow may be out of date the next day or the day after that. You have to be clear every step of the way and know where you’re going and what you’re doing.
………………………………………………………………………………………………….
No matter what story you are telling, there is only one place where the writer begins-with the blank page. If you set out on the arduous journey of writing a screenplay, no matter what genre-whether action movie, war movie, love story, romance, thriller, mystery, western, romantic comedy, or other-and you’re unclear or unsure about what story you’re telling, it’s going to be reflected in the script. But once you frame the idea into a subject, you can take that action and character and structure it into a dramatic story line. And, that’s the starting point.
Then you can structure it.
THE EXERCISE
Take your idea and begin to isolate the elements of the action and character of your proposed story line. Just throw down any thoughts or ideas on paper. You may need to free-associate the idea over several pages in order to see what you’re really writing about. Don’t be afraid to write three or more pages in order to gain more clarity on the story you want to tell. Then use your free-association essay to isolate the elements of action-what happens and the character to whom it happens.
Once you’ve done that, reduce it into three separate paragraphs, beginning, middle, and end. Start honing each paragraph by summarizing the beginning into a few sentences; specify the character and what happens to him or her during the course of the screenplay.
Reduce each paragraph to a sentence or two according to what happens in the action and then how it affects the character. If you want, start looking at the loglines of TV Guide to get an idea of what a subject looks like. That’s what you’re aiming for. Isolating your main character should present no problems, but defining the line of action may be a little more difficult. What’s the resolution? Can you incorporate that into the subject line? Be general in your descriptions at this point and not specific in terms of action.
Remember, it may take you three or four pages of horrible writing to figure out what story you’re telling. Just work in fragments, or notes. There’s no need to try for complete sentences here. Trust the process. If you’ve written several pages, wandering here and there, go through the material and highlight things that help define the action or character. Take your time with this; you’re taking a vague, general idea, and reducing it to a few sentences. Sometimes, it helps to give your character a name so you can become more specific. Read it out loud. Polish it some more. Do it until you are perfectly clear about your subject and can express it clearly and concisely in three or four sentences.
This is the first step in the screenwriting process.


-To be continued -
"The structure"