Category: Scriptwriting

From December 2007:

From November 2007:

Let’s say I have to write a scene with corporate suits speaking corporate-speak. I want it to be fluid – a language that’s appropriate to the characters but still accessible to the audience. Minutes and minutes of talking heads yakking at each other – but interesting. Touchstones are Oliver Stone‘s JFK, the ‘law’ halves of Law & Order episodes, and any episode in Aaron Sorkin‘s West Wing.

My first instinct is to just write the scene and get it over with. This can be difficult if I’ve little or no idea how suits talk to each other. In the past it’s become a war of attrition: the objective of narrative-propelling talking heads can be forgotten in a distressing and dispiriting fug of expository dialogue, with an end-result of dropping the scene completely, followed by a period of self-loathing whimpering in The Goddess’ compassionate and patient arms.

I know what I want. I can almost taste the scene. The problem is writing the scene that I want even though I very probably have no idea what happens in it.

The solution is awfully simple: take tiny steps. Write what I know. Then write it again. Repeat until well done.

I’ve noticed a pattern to how some of these scenes take shape. Below are the stages of development that a scene can undergo:

–  the nugget,
–  the description,
–  as good a start as any, and
–  a work draft.

As you can see, each draft gains more depth and colour and tone – I’m building on what’s gone before and with each tiny step I’m that much closer to what I want. What I wanted in the first place and what I end up writing may be two very different things but that’s for another post. What matters is that I’ve now got something to really work with.

Another seventy-or-so more scenes to go.

From June 2007:

Danny Stack‘s latest Story Vault about dramatic need, along with Jane Espenson‘s post on the need for story/character stakes, got me thinking.

My path to film analysis was as follows:

• blind acceptance –
Okay. She has to go back into the house for the cat because she loves widdle Ferdie.
• followed by a curious questioning –
But why would the previously right-thinking Bindy go back into the house she’s just escaped from? Shaka the left-handed half-blind machete surgeon IS STILL IN THERE!
• until I realised that there was a correlation between the VCR counter and such out-of-character behaviour –
[With 0:62:25 elapsed and 0:28:42 remaining] Bindy has yet to run Shaka through the bandsaw, detonate the C4 in the basement, and have a topless clinch with Chad the newspaper boy*.

It was likely after a three-hour-long (subjective) ninety-minute film that I had my I could’ve done better’n that moment and, still in that bubble of complete and utter naivete, started plotting my ideal action film:

• Draft one:
The Hero’s dog is killed. Vengeance is sought. A helpful dog joins our Hero as the Sidekick on his journey. The Baddies are vanquished. The Sidekick is adopted.
• Hm. Draft three:
The Hero’s family is massacred. Vengeance is sought. A helpful Waif joins our Hero in his quest. The Waif is kidnapped by the Baddies but not killed. The Baddies are pulped. One. By. One. The Hero rescues the Waif and they kiss.
• Meh. Draft fifteen:
The Hero’s family is threatened – there’s a close call involving the Baby. The Hero and his Plucky Family hit the road but the Baddies are always a step behind. The Hero’s Dog is revealed to be a mole. The Hero is conflicted but is interrupted by an extended Woo-drenched firefight, at the end of which the Hero sacrifices himself for his Plucky Family – but is saved by a last-minute, redemptive and fatal act by his Dog.

I learnt an important lesson during those rewrites**: if I don’t make the reader care it’s just another exciting-but-quickly-forgotten carnival ride (or an excruciatingly interminable cuppa with your parents’ friends).

*    How do I know all this? Because these scenes are in the trailer I’ve seen a dozen times already and they haven’t happened yet (although in this instance I’m going to be short-changed by Chad and Bindy sharing a chaste kiss before an abrupt end-credit-roll).

**   I also learnt that reusing elements from earlier, discarded drafts is Writing Smarter.

From April 2007:

Jed Mercurio, creator of the excellent, visceral, Bodies, wrote this about adapting novels for the screen. What I found most interesting was –

As an audience member, I must confess to a double standard: I want more of the same – but different.

I work hard at trying something completely new though. How else could I have found and sworn by Bodies or The Wire – or even Green Wing or The Insiders Guides to Love and Happiness?

What I admire most about these series is the sheer depth, and complexity of story and character that’s packed into each forty-five minute episode. It didn’t matter if it was a procedural or soap. The writing, directing and acting is so good that the underlying structure is barely noticed.

Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman are my poster boys for giving more of the same… but different. They showed that even the tired superhero, horror and fantasy genres of comicdom – and their audiences – could be treated just as seriously as any other form of ‘real’ literature – with maturity and intelligence.

I returned to comic-reading in the last few years – one could hazard that it was a precursor to my true return to reading. And upon my return I’ve found the pleasures of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson‘s blistering Transmetropolitan, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon‘s heart- and gut-wrenching Preacher, and David Lapham‘s mindblowing Stray Bullets. These – and more – are just proof-positive that, just as the good doctor purred,

(Heads-up courtesy Lee Thomson.)

From April 2007:

A recent re-watching of Ronin may not have helped what I’m currently writing but it was inspiring nonetheless.

The Goddess gets places quicker than I do. It’s a fact of life that she’s a faster, more aggressive assertive and experienced driver than I. (I have the odd daydream that I can beat her in an Auckland point-to-point race – except that sweet victory would be tempered with my vehicle being written off by race’s end.)

My driver education was pretty boring compared to The Goddess. I didn’t get my licence until I was in my twenties – I lived in central Wellington which has an integrated, efficient and reliable public transport (unlike, say, Auckland’s). Then my circumstances changed. I had driving lessons. I drove under supervision. And then I got my licence.

The Goddess’s driver education, in contrast, was not so much ‘how to control your vehicle’ but ‘how to wring the best performance and handling out of your car’. This was due to her Mini-Mad Uncle and her Speed-Demon Gran.

At age fifteen, she got behind the wheel of her uncle’s 1969 Mini 850 and was advised to put it in a ‘hard lock left’ and, once in gear, to plant her foot down on the accelerator. I will always envy her very first driving experience of doing what modern-day anti-boy-racer legislators refer to as ‘doughnuts’.

Her grandmother’s orange Austin 1100 was made available for on-road driving experience. The Goddess has never forgotten being confronted with a Big Yellow bus pulling out ahead of her and her gran telling her to “just put your foot down, dear”.

Yep. Hard to beat formative experiences like that.

We may be different in our approach – it’s her canny skills of vehicular control versus my cold application of speed and momentum – but we both enjoy driving.

I’d be lying if I said that The Goddess’s quicker driving doesn’t pinch some small, dark, obdurate corner of my male ego. But at least I know that if I want to get places double-quick and The Goddess is available, not only will there be no question who’ll be behind the wheel, I’ll arrive at my destination on time, fresh and unruffled.

From February 2007:

I write my scripts with Word.

Yes, I do. But let me explain.

I learnt on WordPerfect way back when. I knew no better: its WYSIWYG was non-existent and its interface was spartan if not downright ugly. But I managed to publish a newsletter with it, complete with pictures and two- and three-column layouts, all courtesy of the wonderful and powerful ShowCodes feature. In pre-mouse days, that kind of stuff needed DTP-capable Macs.

Then I changed jobs and had to learn Micro$oft Word. It was a painful transition. It wasn’t just the different way of doing the same things, it was the range of inconsistencies in one package (one package!) that made me want to toss the CPU out the window. In those early years when I wrestled with The Transition, it took a long time for Word to catch up to the capabilities of WordPerfect.

I still use Word. Fifteen years of contemptuous familiarity will do that. I’ve survived each of Micro$oft’s updates with cascades of epithets. But I’ll allow this much for it: now it’s a powerful flagship wordprocessor and if you know what you’re doing, you can be pretty shit-hot with it.

A few years back, I migrated from the Blue Screens of Death and onto some Apple goodness. And lo, having coughed up for Office for Mac out of necessity, I discovered that WordPerfect for Mac was not only downloadable, it was free, too.

Of course I downloaded it. And upon installation it looked so… Eighties. Call me shallow but its optimised-for-640×480 look clashed too much with the 1280×854 resolution of everything else on the desktop. Any thoughts of full-migration were dashed by a complete lack of forward compatibility. And so it sat patiently on my dock for a couple of years, a gesture to the good ol’ days and nothing more.

Some work-avoidance surfing last year put me onto OpenOffice.org and its cousin NeoOffice. The idea of a free, open-source productivity suite seemed too good to be true. The time and effort required to retrain both my fingers and whatever options it offered seemed wasteful since I was already using Micro$oft Office. But… I wondered what it might have in store for me. In a lull between shooting anything that moved, I gave NeoOffice a go.

I was quietly impressed. It will do almost everything Office for Mac does, most of the time the same way, it’s compatible with at least twice as many programs out there (as opposed to, say, Word and its ability to open… Word documents), and best of all, it’s free.

Yeah, it’s crashed. Once. A damned nuisance but heck – c’est la vie for a free program. (And who’s Micro$oft to snigger? Of all the apps I use, it’s the Micro$oft apps that fall over the most often.) After the crash, I upgraded and updated appropriately and NeoOffice has been the suite of first choice since last December.

I may have taken a backward step by migrating from the devil-I-know Word to an open-source app. But it feels good – I exercised choice, something almost forgotten on this Micro$oft-infested planet.

And as for the scriptwriting – will I plunk down for a professional program like stalwarts Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter, or upstarts Celtx and Sophocles? Why should I? I can generate industry-standard scripts with both NeoOffice and Word already.

I’ll migrate to a professional program eventually. But until then, it’ll be me and my new bud, NeoOffice.

Postscript: I’m still with NeoOffice with general wordprocessing but when it comes to the ‘real writing’, I’ve come to Final Draft, by way of CeltX. I could go on about how could I have gone so long without FD but I won’t, suffice it to say, I’m a convert.

From November 2006:

Show me a gun and I can reel off its specs without once squinting at the slide or housing. Hand it to me – and after I’ve ensured its safety is on and the chamber’s empty, its business end pointed at my foot the ground the whole time – and I’ll list any number of films and tv shows it’s been used in.

I like guns.

The Goddess – who Knows These Things – could very probably trace my fascination with weapons of destruction to my Y-chromosome, my television addiction (one of my earliest memories are SWAT and Starsky and Hutch), and my all-too-male predilection for all and every thing phallic and destructive.

She’s probably right.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend as I get older though. No longer is it funny for a character to wave a pistol around in blithe ignorance. Nowadays, I actually appreciate a denouement where the villain’s life isn’t taken with a bullet. And most disturbing of all, I find myself flinching at set-pieces which only a decade – even a half-decade – ago I would have revelled in each round’s subsonic track through the air, each squib’s slo-mo explosion… a symphony of stylised, choreographed violence on flesh.

It wasn’t Peckinpah’s blood-sodden Wild Bunch or even Mann’s bullet-ridden Heat that was the turning point for this action junkie. It was a 1986 telemovie: In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders. It was a typical procedural based on a true story: a couple of guys get a taste for armed robbery, the local law enforcement begin tracking them, and the inevitable showdown ensues.

It was the showdown that left me horrified – a real-time set-piece, faithful to the FBI reconstruction of the actual bloodbath. No whizz-bang cutting between the shooters. No slo-mo heroics with rousing music. Just people killing people. Very messily.

I’ve listened to gun-nuts and veterans espouse their philosophies. I’ve shot some pistols at some very obliging pistol clubs. The Goddess is ‘why have guns at all’ while I’m ‘guns don’t kill people – people kill people’.

I like guns. But only on screen and/or under strict supervision.

From November 2006:

Nothing can surpass Alan Moore’s description of where ideas come from in his ‘Behind the Painted Smile’ article that accompanies the V for Vendetta trade paperback. The boys at How to Write Screenplays – Badly have an outrageous methodology which is just begging to be taken up en masse.

But for me, it usually starts with ‘what if?’

What if a bunch of ninjas were to arrive in some suburban kitchen, intent on silent death, but are thwarted by a teenage girl and her grandfather?

What if our story starts with some crazy-eyed guy running down city streets, going faster and faster, until he dead-ends in an alley… and his gasps for breath turn into sobs of despair?

What if… yeah, you know the drill.

For every idea that I explore, countless others don’t make it onto the page. There’s any number of reasons why they don’t get used: it’s a cliché; I’m being lazy (and I know I’ll pay for it later in the story); I’m being wanky; it adds nothing to the story; and whatever other reason I make up at the time.

The clichés and stereotypes I try to forget wholeheartedly. The straight-up stupid ones do a fancy dance and flash a bit of leg before they’re exposed to be straight-up stupid ideas.

And the rest of them, including homage-worthy situations, conventions, archetypes and stereotypes, they go into a holding pattern, waiting for a story for which they’d be the perfect ingredient.

And a few of those morph into ‘what if?’-type ideas. At first they’re patient, pacing back and forth, unwilling to be ignored, until some other ideas attach themselves, elevating their combined mass into A Story.

From October 2006

If I learn nothing more from this year, it’s that contracts are a sign of how serious things are. (To those of you for whom this is, like, so obvious, what can I say? I am – or was – an idealist.)

So. The first thing the Writers Guild told me when I joined three years ago? Don’t work without a contract.

And what’ve I done in that time? I’ve worked in good faith. It’s gone like this: the terms of the contract are verbally agreed in the early days; writing commences whilst a draft contract is bounced around; the script is finished; a contract is agreed and signed; and throughout, money changes hands. In the end, someone has themselves a script, and I was paid to write it.

Sure, I’ve had a few projects explode in my face, some of which has provided fodder for my writing. But for the most part, I’m a trusting soul and I like to give the benefit of the doubt. This doesn’t mean I’ve provided all the work to date with the copyright already assigned. I try to be reasonable and flexible; sometimes this has been interpreted as being easy.

As I shift towards projects with ‘real’ money, what I’ve noticed is that the expectations and the contractual/political manoeuvring move up a level. Besides my writing having to be more than professional-looking, each gig is a potential career-maker or -breaker (or -extend-just-a-little-longer). The expectation as a writer I can deal with. But the contract shenanigans… oi vey.

All that stuff that was verbally agreed up front? Worth the paper it was written on. All the work that’s been done in good faith? Taken for granted and/or leverage to get you to continue to work in good faith and/or a very possible waste of your time.

The earlier that contract is signed, the sooner everyone knows how to behave.

Negotiate and sign that sucker now. Work long. And prosper.