Category: Scriptwriting

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The Working First Draft

I finished a first draft last week. It’s what I call a working first draft – a partially muscled skeleton of a script that I don’t show anyone for fear of their never reading my scripts again. I think one of William Goldman‘s Screentrade Adventures – or was it Stephen King‘s On Writing? – had a name for it. Can’t find the reference. Anyway:

  • I have completed a draft;
  • it has a beginning, middle and end;
  • and I’m still excited by the idea behind it.

While I was typing out the epilogue, I found I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye – touching reminders of why I’m so attached to the story. It was great. If When I have that effect on the reader a few drafts from now, I’ll be pretty effin’ stoked.

The current draft is a pretty measly 85 pages long. The story’s a 120 page kind of script. The missing pages are currently in the form of, at best –

INT. HERO’S PARENTS’ HOUSE – EVENING

Our HERO has dinner with his MOTHER and FATHER.

HERO

– SAYS SOMETHING TO REINFORCE HIS ALREADY-ESTABLISHED RELUCTANCE WITH WHICH HE DINES WITH HIS PARENTS –

FATHER

– SAYS SOMETHING TO REINFORCE HIS PREVIOUSLY HINTED AT DISAPPOINTMENT WITH HERO –

MOTHER puts her cutlery down.

MOTHER

Stop it – just stop it!

HERO and FATHER look at her.

– or, at worst –

INT. HEROINE’S OFFICE – EVENING

PLACEHOLDER – until I decide how to establish our HEROINE as ‘a woman not to mess with’ without making her come across as having regular testosterone injections.

This week is time-out from the script. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

And I can’t wait.

(Big-ass fedora-tips to Mr August and Nima Yousefi for making the above scrippets available.)

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Alright Already

Okay. Alright.

So I blogged about a chicken – and a dead one at that – and tried to pass it off as being about supporting characters by bookending it with some weak-ass scriptwriting observations. It’s just that, in the aftermath of Wallace’s sudden departure, The Goddess said, If we’re like this over a chicken we’ve only known six months, we’re gonna be a mess when The Dog karks it.

And I looked at The Dog –

– and flashed on my earlier ramblings about her.

… Best not to think about it.

Anyway, I was going to post about the use/misuse/abuse/un-use of supporting characters but I ended up drafting something about finishing the first draft of a script.

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A Warm Egg

Introducing new supporting characters to an existing narrative is a challenge: they have to have a good reason to join up; they have to add value; and they better be damned interesting.

The Dark Brown One, The Light Brown One and The Mid-Brown One.

That’s pretty much how I felt when The Goddess decided to get some chickens – real chickens – earlier in the year.

So.

  • Good reason to join up? Because The Goddess said.
  • Do they add value? They lay eggs, silly.
  • Are they interesting? See below.

I never expected The Chickens to be interesting. They arrived stringy and without combs, and with the promise of egg-laying still a few months away.

As I struggled to adjust to a growing menagerie – there’s the beginnings of a post on the The Worm Farm somewhere on the hard-drive – an endless loop of Sesame Street‘s what-comes-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg tormented me during my waking hours. I had to find a place – like a pigeonchicken-hole in My World for them. In a feeble attempt to describe our homestead as Fortress Mamea, having established The Dog as our Rapid Deployment Force and The Cat as a Spec/Black Ops unit, maybe the fowl were our CAP. But it never really fit.

As summer slushed to autumn, and autumn torrented into winter, specific personalities emerged from these creatures whose brains could not be larger than my thumb.

The Light Brown One was flighty from day one, and is still nervous to this day. ‘N.S.’ best describes this one.

The Dark Brown One was the demanding one – the one most likely to flutter up and get first dibs on what you had in your hand.

And the Mid-Brown One was the adventurous, curious one – the first to try a grasshopper, and the first to discover flight (ie., to the top of the fence that separated their ‘meadow’ from the rest of the property).

Wallace – 2008

The Mid-Brown One – Wallace – was killed today. One of the neighbourhood dogs – a pure-bred mastiff – escaped his keep and the first we saw was him with a mouthful of very dead chicken. We’ve met the mastiff on a number of occasions: he’s a sweetie with an overabundance of slobber; and his owner is very conscientious about keeping his dog under control.

It was an accident: a dog got loose, saw something moving rapidly, gave chase, and that was all she wrote.

It’s shitty that it was the one with personality that got killed.

It’s ridiculous that I’m committing a post to a damned chicken that I was at pains not to get too close to.

But that’s how it is with supporting characters. Sometimes they get under your skin. You get to like them. And when they’re gone, you miss them and all their stupid little idiosyncrasies.

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Patience, Schmatience

So – in my true spare time, of course – I’m exploring the lastest distraction idea which, on the face of it, seems to offer an intriguing (high-concept) premise within an achievable (ultra-low) budget.

Burning questions are sketched out: who is it about? what needs to happen? does it make sense?

  Yes – I know what it’s about.
  Yes – I know what happens.
  But it’s not making sense.

I try rushing the idea from one-sentence idea to one-page concept in a lazy attempt to resolve the nonsensicalness. Uh-uh. No matter how creative I try to be, one plus two plus three will not equal the five that I want.

I refuse to be cowed.

  The idea is nifty.
  The concept is almost there.
  The budget is appealing.

Time, I suppose, to approach this with the patience and persistence of water on stone a spoilt child whining for some parental attention.

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Happy Sunbeam

Regular as clockwork: I’m two-thirds into a note- and aside-pepperedriddled first draft and bam! I’ve got an idea for another story.

I’m not worried about my current script because it’s moving.

Nor am I worried about being distracted – once I’ve racked up my minimum page-count for the day, I’m a free agent.

I think… I’m just glad I’m still getting ideas. I’m still getting turned on by the potential of new stories, and still loving it when the creative juices my writing mojo I can just make shit up.

(This post, I suspect, was brought to you by four straight days of no rain.)

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Motivation

Over at the Guild forums, Ben Reid has listed the various motivation styles of he and his fellow Wellington writing group members. I was surprised to realise that I’ve tried all of them.

Was each style a kind of stage in my development as a writer? Or a flailing about in search of One True Way to Write? Answer is currently in the Too Hard basket.

Meantime, some arbitrary categories:

Inspiration as Motivation

Watching films and television are equal parts inspiration and motivation… and de-motivation. Being motivated by a film or television programme is dead easy. The line between inspiration and de-motivation is fiendishly fine: Wow, that was soo freaking cool, I wanna do that! can oh-so-easily become I have nothing to offer, I am a hack, I am nothing.

When it comes to making up character backstories or synopsising, my first response is almost always that if I – that is, The Audience – can’t see it or hear it, why the hell do I have to write that shit? What I forget though is that once I’ve done the above bios or treatments, I find myself newly enthused – inspired, even – as I rediscover why I want to write the story in the first place.

Sharing as Motivation

I used to talk over various stages of my script with friends and family. If I wasn’t careful – and I certainly wasn’t in those early heady days – I discovered that their indulgent or polite smiles of heyyy, he’s a writer would eventually morph into looks of if he tells me about his script, I will stab him in the eye-socket with my teaspoon.

Co-writing is something I’d like to do although very probably for the wrong reason: I think all I really want is for someone else to do the heavy lifting. (There might be a future post in this.)

I don’t tell anyone about being competitive with my writing and career. It’s a secret.

Discipline

No matter how enthused – or sick to the back teeth – I am with a script, those ninety-plus pages and I need a time-out. It’s true: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Thinking ahead to the next project is more of an occupational hazard than a motivator.

And ooh, I just live for deadlines. Especially if I’ve been wreaking havoc with my mouse-hand and sleeping patterns on Call of Duty for most of the time I should’ve been writing.

The past while, I’ve been just writing – anything sometimes, any-goddamned thing just to bloody get something on-screen – hating every single keystroke, counting the pages until I can stop, and I know it’s rubbish, and that I’ll have to rewrite it.

But I also know that every element that I throw out has broadened what I know about The Story. That every little darling whose throat I’ve crushed, gave me something, even fleetingly, towards The Story.

And in those screeds of reluctantly tapped out script-moments, I know that I’ve taken just that little step closer to finishing.

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Kev and Me

I have fond twentieth century memories of an above-average cop show where Ken Wahl and his eyebrow went undercover to fight crime, befriended the bad guys, and becoming increasingly conflicted about his work with each season. It was called Wiseguy. This (and the long-lamented Unsub) plumbed moral ambiguities and twisted the TV-cop-show genre before the likes of X-Files and then CSI made ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ cool.

Each season of Wiseguy concentrated on one big-cheese villain that had to be taken down. Of all the mobsters and politicians and teamsters who would go into Mr Wahl’s little black book, two villains stood out for me: Tim Curry‘s rogueish music exec who was a hoot to watch; and Kevin Spacey‘s enigmatic and downright creepy criminal mastermind (and his too-intimate-for-comfort relationship with his sister played by Joan Severance).

Now that I think of it, maybe it was the actors’ approaches that were so memorable. At one end of the spectrum was Curry’s big-toothed scene-chewing, and at the other was Spacey with his looks, glances and loaded pauses. I think it was Spacey – and the writing of course – that forced me to think things like what did he mean by that? and I just missed a major clue, didn’t I?

Did Wiseguy really introduce me to my screenwriting friend, Subtext? I don’t know. But something happened when Spacey started running his lines in that show. It’s where an actor elevates the script without drawing attention. People thought that Spacey was the bee’s knees when they saw him in either The Usual Suspects or American Beauty.

I knew that already from his tour of duty on Wiseguy.

(And here’s an entertaining few minutes of Spacey and his imaginary friends. Fedora-tip: Eyes Wired Open.)

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Characters

The other week, fellow South Seas survivor Bern asked me: Do you live with your characters? She’d been to a writers festival Q&A session where a guest novelist said that they lived with their characters rather intensely for the duration of a novel’s creation and that, two years or so on, well after publication and book-signings, it was strange to answer questions about those characters; it was like thinking back to old friends or acquaintances or lovers that one didn’t keep in touch with any more.My first response, of course, was that The Goddess would not allow such nonsense in the Mamea household. But when Bern laughed politely for the prescribed amount of time and didn’t move, I gave the question a bit more thought.

Firstly, the amount of time a screenwriter spends with a character is much shorter than a novelist might spend. A screenplay can be drafted in a mere three months, with the following six to a hundred months spent being produced or touted around or, uh, developed. (I thought I was being a bit off-hand here until I read this.)

Secondly, filmmaking is a collaborative business and a willingness to kill one’s darlings is essential to retain one’s sanity. Let’s say your favourite character’s called Wendy, a girly-girl with an Annie Oakley-like affinity for firearms. You base Wendy on fond kindergarten memories of a girly-girl who you loved to tease so she could throw you to the ground and sit on you. But no matter how much you massage the script, Wendy’s not cutting it. She’s not believable. So she makes way for Rick, a lantern-jawed ex-special forces veteran who doesn’t need blunt objects to maim and kill.

And thirdly – and to actually answer her question – no, I do not live with my characters because they’re only part of the story I want to tell. Playwright and screenwriter Jose Rivera puts it quite tidily:

Screenwriting is like building furniture. It’s a craft in which the pieces must fit, and it must function.

A large part of the enjoyment I get from screenwriting is in getting the mechanics of it all to work in such a way that the audience don’t see the seams.

Maybe I’m writing arse-backwards by starting with a situation and then populating it. But it works for me. And it feeds my closet god-complex.

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Box Watch – “Mad Men”

When watching movies, I know I’ve found a new personal favourite when I’m grinning from ear to ear as the credits roll. It’s a recognition of the craft – the art – that went into what I’ve just witnessed. It’s the realisation of how slickly I’ve been played as an audience member. And the jaw-stretching grin is all the more sweeter if my expectations were pretty high beforehand.

In the last five years, that credit-roll grin has been hurting my face after just an hour – sometimes only half that – of television drama. From the oh-my-gods-I’m-exhausted elation/relief of The Shield and Bodies, to the what-the-heck-happens-next-gods-dammit addiction of The Wire and Sports Night – and let’s not forget the hot-damn!-that-was-good enjoyment from The Closer, The West Wing and the occasional Burn Notice episode.

So what is it about Mad Men that makes me griiin and whine cry out Finished already? each week?

Nothing happens. It’s about relationships – between a bunch of distinctly unlikeable rogues bastards in an era where women were little more than chattels, blacks were invisible, and every damned one of the characters smokes.

It’s those very things that I savour about Mad Men.

Nothing much may happen in an ep but we’re learning more and more about Don and Peggy and company – and what we learn not so much answers questions about them but deepens what we know about their characters. Where most other television dramas would portray the dick-swinging camaraderie with a post-Top Gun homoeroticism or symbolic gunfights and car-chases, the male relationships in Mad Men are so finely detailed that even The Goddess is forced to ask me What was that all about? And as for the show’s portrayal of the time and place: I salute creator Matthew Weiner‘s unflinching lack of gloss or veneer – ‘S how it was, baby.

In portraying a period of history as unflatteringly as one might cover current events, Weiner’s genius is in showing us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Where the choice on the box is usually between procedural (or procedural with a twist) and soap (or soap with a twist), it’s great to have a drama that – just like its characters toil at in advertising – gives more of the same, but different.

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