Play/Work/Screenplay/Scene Work

I'm of the belief that you're not truly a writer until you've been dumped for shouting "I'm working!" at a loved one through a door as you stare at an empty page one time too many. Writing is work.

I won't bore you with the old chestnut that writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, because you've heard it before. But it is true.

I know that writing is several kinds of work. From planning it out to developing characters to revising and editing to ruthless self-examination to god-knows-what the next script will demand of me. Few jobs require as many different skills as writing does. And I'm not even counting the business end here.

Writing is work. Writing wears you out. Writing builds muscles. Writing is The Man. Some days you need a few beers and burgers just to feel normal again afterward. I've done every imaginable job from Fedex courier to cab driver to teacher to manager to waiter at snotty, understaffed restaurants. Writing is the hardest.

So don't look at me funny when I tell you that writing is play.

Writing is play. Writing has to be play. To wit:

You can plan a screenplay to within an inch of its life. I mean this. While you must plan out your script if you hope to get anywhere, you can also kill a script by overplanning it. Where's the balance?

I know I've hit the limit on planning when I stop finding toys to play with. I plan to increase my enjoyment. I plan to find scenes I want to write and characters that will surprise me. I plan to take a trip that I want to take. I plan ahead. I plan to be surprised. I plan to be happy.

I used to plan for careful symmetry. I used to plan for Syd Field. I used to plan for meaning, for significance, for something literary.

Now I plan to tell stories. In a shockingly straightforward kind of way, that's all most storytellers really want to do.

Last night I was watching The Seventh Seal. For those of you not familiar with Ingmar Bergman's opus, it's the story of a crusader's return to a Sweden ravaged by the Black Death. I didn't actually choose to watch it. The boyfriend wanted to, and it seemed like a reasonable alternative to the unbearable pathos that Brooke Knows Best inevitably brings on.

What caught me up was the scene where the traveling band of actors is singing this very silly song about sheep laying eggs and hens meowing while Death goes for a walk on the beach. Off behind the stage, the actor who plays Death is busy seducing an entirely willing milkmaid. And I realized just how much fun Bergman -- yes, Bergman -- must have gotten from putting this all together. The Seventh Seal stopped being something you're supposed to watch. Something very heavy became very light.

How do you apply something like this to the work you've got in front of you?

I was coaching a student on building climaxes before the all-too-numerous act breaks in a Movie of the Week script the other day. It's one of those things that seems terribly complex until you get the hang of it. (Then it's a bit too boring/restrictive for words). And I remember back -- way, way back -- to when I was a grad student, and a friend visited me from the Soviet Union. He'd never seen a commercial in his life.

We were watching a movie of the week. He didn't speak English, and I was providing a kind of running translation. Just as we reached the first act break, the movie of course went to commercial. What? "What the $%^$?! Who is this woman on the TV? And why is she having an orgasm folding her laundry?!" How could anyone do something so mean-spirited, so tricky, so evil as to build the tension then try to sell you detergent?

I still don't have a good answer to those questions. But I don't think I could write an MOW without thinking of him.

Changing "The Narrative"

I do my best to avoid topics that will likely turn off readers. I want everyone to feel welcome here, whether we agree or disagree. It's nothing more than a screenwriting blog, yo. My politics aren't the issue.

I have been thinking about starting a blog about how the fundamentals of drama are moving out into the broader world. Now that we're all connected by intertubes, it seems only natural that this tendency will grow. You can control how people see events and characters by framing their context. There are some extremely effective strategies for doing this, and they've been around for thousands of years. Who wouldn't access this knowledge?

This is why Republicans and Democrats are constantly screwing with each other's back stories. This is why they're always muddying each other's inciting events. On and on. And this is the only conceivable reason I can think for McCain choosing Sarah Palin.

Unless you're staunchly anti-abortion, you were probably scratching your head on this one. Google got a bit of a headache from everyone trying to figure out who she was. Apparently McCain met her once before this week, so he wasn't exactly sure who she was either. For that matter, she wasn't too clear on what the VP job entailed.

So even if you think she's a great pick, you have to ask yourself how she got picked.

From a screenwriting standpoint it does make sense.

Old screenwriters love to sit around and talk about 'setting traps'. How do you do this? McCain's rewriting the narrative to make it more difficult for Obama. He's setting traps. It's not how well known she is, or what she stands for. Her main asset as a trap has more to do with how powerless and out of her element she is, in a way.

To wit: Obama attacks her for being inexperienced. McCain keeps the 'inexperienced' meme in the narrative. Obama's slogging through sand here. It's not so much that he's defeating his own argument as making it harder for Obama to make his.

The Obama camp attacks her for getting her ex-brother-in-law fired -- i.e. allegations of corruption. McCain keeps the Tony Rezko issue in the debate.

Whenever Obama's surrogates reference the excitement at a first black president, they're now cutting against the excitement about a woman in the White House.

In other words, all the obvious attacks backfire. In other words, this is not a stupid or reckless choice. It's not a choice made from a position of power. But it is a crafty choice. When does a screenwriter make a choice like this?

A screenwriter builds a trap by giving the trap a number of analogous traits to the hero. And they give the trap to the opponent. The hero can't really attack the opponent without damaging someone like themselves. They have to find a way to get to their goal without endangering this person like them.

The trap is a hostage. And I think this may well lay at the base of McCain's thinking. This is Princess Leia captured by Darth Vader, in a way. It's Saddamn Hussein's 'human shields'.

Yes, I know. She's a gun-toting Christian hockey mom who appeals to the Republican base. I know. Could he really not come up with someone better to make his point? I don't think he's interested in having someone he views as an equal on the ticket. Yeah, she'll pull a couple Clinton voters. But I can't see them really crossing over in droves. No one can.

In my view, McCain's probably made a mistake here. He's basically reacting to the hero's plot. He's thinking like a villain. He's casting himself as the villain in Obama's narrative. And villains have a knack for not winning in the end.

Or maybe that's just in the movies.

Film Arts Finally Goes Under

Film Arts Foundation, after a long history of supporting the creation of independent film in San Francisco, has officially gone under. This is a surprise to no one. It's been hobbling along for years now. It was always one of those organizations that you felt should be and do more than it is. But, as a friend of mine put it, there's no 'there' there. You tried to be good and faithful member. You'd try to see how you could access them for help making a film. But they weren't as relevant as they could have been.

The news is that the SF Film Society is taking over their filmmaker services. This seems a bit of a stretch. SFFS puts on the San Francisco International Film Festival. They have fancy screenings and the like. But their mandate has been about bringing independent film to viewers, rather than working with the film community here. That's a real shift in culture for any organization, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Why? There are a huge number of filmmakers in this town, with a great deal of energy. Most of them had run up against the limitations of FAF shortly after signing up for fiscal sponsorship. They ALL want a more vibrant center for filmmaking. I think most of them will give SFFS a shot.

Here's hoping, in any case. If you're interested in reading more, check out this article. It's well worth your time even if you aren't in San Francisco. There are a lot of changes going on in indie film. Some are great, some are not. The pattern is the same all over the country.

Immanuel Kant and Why You're Procrastinating

... or why we're both procrastinating, actually.

This is a posting about two of the most central elements to any rewarding writing life: intention and concentration. Just want to lay that out there before I crawl out onto a limb and hang myself.

Back in the 1700's The Enlightenment was in full swing. More happened to shape who we are in this century than most people realize. The arts, philosophy, science all snapped the tether that had leashed them to the church for over a millenium. Reason took hold and life in many ways became what we know today. This was the time of "I think therefore I am". It was the time of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the scientific method. It let Mozart write Don Giovanni one day and a mass the next. Isaac Newton and the apple. It was an astonishing time. Humanity saw itself in an entirely new light. Not all of it was good, of course. The French Revolution comes to mind.

There was an explosion of philosophers. Most of them can be seen as engaging in the untethering of thought from the church. It's like they're figuring out how to untie the boat from the dock. Some are cautious. Others not so much. 'I think therefore I am' replaces 'God made me, and therefore I am'. The Enlightenment allowed us to measure and manipulate knowledge without falling back on some mystical unknowable relying on faith.

Immanuel Kant was at the head of the pack. He came up with a couple swell ideas. We can't truly know the reality of other individuals -- only our perception of them. And we can't act on objects across a distance.

This adds up to a couple problems. First, well, you can't really know anyone else. There's a loneliness there. We're all separated out. It's depressing. This has been sinking in for a few centuries now.

Second, it makes no difference what we intend. By intention, I mean things like prayer. We can pray, but we're not affecting anything. Some supreme being may observe it, but we're not really doing anything but bouncing thoughts off our own craniums.

Like I said, it's depressing. (And by the way, I don't think he really even believed it. He just had to say it in order to win an argument.)

Frankly, I think Kant was dead wrong on this one. If he was right, we wouldn't be praying anymore. We'd probably distantly remember religion at best. We'd have truly outgrown it. If Kant was right, then quantum physics wouldn't exist. But it does.

If you have a positive mental attitude, you know the power of intention. If you meditate, you know the power of intention. If you worship in a church, you know the power of intention. If you psych yourself up before the big game, you're using intention. We all use intention in some way.

And of course, if you write, you know the power of intention. You can bring a world into being. You can create characters that breathe and act and doubt in the existence of their creator. Writing exercises that same capacity -- that muscle of thought. We all settle into cliches of 'being creative' and forget that we are truly creating something. And we're creating it out of pure intention. Readers recreate that world out of their own intention. So screw Kant.

Of course, intention requires concentration. And why is it so damn hard to concentrate? Why are you surfing the internets right now instead of writing that story? To my eyes, we're busy 'pinging'. We're putting out beacons, seeing if the real world is out there. We're fighting that loneliness. And most of the time we're losing. We're confirming everthing Kant

Writing is requires more concentration than the average individual has anymore. It works a capacity that our culture has largely forgotten we have. It takes work and practice to learn it again. So pray, intend, meditate, wish well, whatever it takes. Do it every day. And get writing.

The Dark Knight

I'm a little late out of the blocks on this one, so I'll keep it short. This is one of the films that managed to catch me up as a screenwriter and scare the pants off me. And it does it while largely centering on some fairly heady thematics about the nature of a hero in a society governed by random acts and raw power, an effective response to nihilism, America's deepening fear that it's about to eat itself, and, well... I'll stop now. The film searches for meaning in a way that few indie films dare without diminishing the blockbuster impact in the slightest. If you've got a budget of $185M, you can do both! It seems there are more and more big movies willing to mean something these days. It's a very good thing.

I'm overcoming my kneejerk reaction to John Truby here and linking to his post on The Dark Knight. I'd post a spoiler alert, but I think everybody's seen the movie anyway..

Check out Truby's article in Storylink.

Saturday Morning Inspiration

I was thinking I'd make this somehow screenwriting-relevant with some comment about planning being a boon to creativity or the like, but I'll pass. Living in a head full of visions is always better than a head full of nuthin. Next time you grimace at revision, think of this video and how much beauty there is in erasing it all and starting again.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

For more on the artist, check out the website.

Finding Perspective and Clarity

One of the best screenwriting tips I ever heard was this: write your synopsis for a distracted teenager. And, if you're lucky enough to have a distracted teenager at your disposal, test it out on them.

Why is this valuable advice? Studio readers aren't distracted teenagers (we hope). Big producers, directors, and agents don't watch TV while simultaneously playing Nintendo, texting friends, and updating their myspace page.

But they are busy, distracted people. They live in the 21st century, and therefore have short attention spans and an unquenchable need for constant information input. This makes them anxious and lazy at the same time.

Writing for your probable reader, rather than your optimal reader, forces you to be incredibly clear about your story. It requires you to think it through so it

1. makes sense and

2. is something other people care about.

(I forgot about #2 for the first decade of my writing career. But enough about me.)

This is very difficult, of course. Many (mostly new) writers punt on the whole synopsis issue, and wait to write it only after they've written the script. I'm not sure why they do this. Why wouldn't you want to sort out story problems on one page instead of spending months writing and rewriting a hundred or more just to get it to make sense?

But if writing for a difficult teen just isn't your bag, then consider some other options.

I'm working on a script that's aimed at an adult audience. It's about family and loneliness and all that good stuff. I tried writing it for a child. I made it a fairy tale.

What happens? The same thing that happens when you talk to a child: you break things down into simpler and simpler chunks. Often there's no way around the honesty that arises out of that process. You have to explain things carefully, and lay them out gently. My boyfriend's 6-year-old niece once froze me with the question, "Why do you and he sleep in the same bed?" Then I got on the kid level and answered, "Because he's my favorite person in the whole world." And she smiles and runs off to play. It's that simple. And it's true.

Do that with your synopsis and you're liable to find what you're really writing about, and why it matters. Your characters hew to type a bit. All your three-act gobbledygook transforms into some beautiful archetype.

Next I tried imagining the story from the perspective of my main character. He's a fifty-year-old functional drug addict who's shut himself off from the planet. It's a daydream as he glazes over in front of the computer. Some more issues come into focus: why he'd suddenly sacrifice his safe existence; what he truly cares about and won't let himself have; what he WOULDN'T do that I've been trying to make him do.

It's a worthwhile exercise. It's also very close to what professional writers do regularly when they tailor their synopses, treatments, and query letters to specific individuals.

But for now, realize that this is a tooling for *creating* your story, rather than selling it. These shifts in contexts remind us just how infinite stories are. One slight shift in perspective, and it's all new again.