SCREENWRITING IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS: PART 7 - WHERE NOT TO START
Previously I’ve stated that an excellent, dependable, reliable, flexible PROCESS will help you not only shape your projects but actually help you choose your projects as well. Specifically, it will help you choose stories that matter to you and that you will enjoy working on and that possess both commercial and artistic merit.
It’s extremely important that you work with ingredients that fascinate you and deeply resonate with you on a personal - even emotional - level. And having some fun along the way is incredibly important, too. So, always remember that…
The process is for YOU.
The product is for YOUR AUDIENCE.
You need to write screenplays that energize and fascinate you. Stories that haunt you. But, before we get to how and where to find such stories, let’s quickly talk about where NOT to start.
I want you to remember that you are new to this and that in all the excitement, it can be really easy to bite off more than you can chew. So, with that in mind, I strongly suggest you avoid the following 3 types of stories during the early stages of your development as a screenwriter:
1. Stories that are too COMPLEX
Avoid stories that are too complex structurally or conceptually such as:
A) NON-LINEAR PLOTS where events are portrayed out of chronological order, or in other ways where the narrative doesn't follow the direct causality pattern of the events featured, such as parallel distinctive plot lines, dream immersions or narrating another story inside the main plot line. (This is a device often used to mimic the structure and recall of human memory)
(examples: Pulp Fiction, Memento, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind)
B) DAISY-CHAIN PLOTS with multiple characters, no central protagonist, and all character narrators connected by a single object.
(examples: Cloud Atlas, The Red Violin, Dead Man’s Gun)
C) ENSEMBLE PLOTS where multiple character storylines are shared to give a picture of a place/event rather than one character with a goal.
(examples: Crash, World War Z)
D) REPEATED ACTION PLOTS where a character repeats the same actions again and again with different results.
(examples: Groundhog Day, The Edge of Tomorrow, Run Lola Run)
E) REPEATED EVENT PLOTS where an event repeats over and over again and we experience it through different characters to gain more insight.
(examples: Vantage Point, Elephant)
F) SYMBOLIC JUXTAPOSITION PLOTS where the plot is a series of thematically related elements rather than one character or one event, and the themes introduced and implied with this sequence form the plot of the story.
(example: The Tree of Life, Mother! )
2. Stories that require
too much RESEARCH or EXPERTISE
Avoid stories that will require more experience than you currently have or more research than you can commit to. Consider the film The Big Short (2015): It was very challenging to communicate - in detail - not only how the American mortgage market worked, but how it ultimately failed so that the audience could appreciate and understand that incredibly complex story.
If you want to set your story inside a police department, hospital, or courtroom, or somewhere very unusual such as inside a facility researching black holes and dark matter, or a stock exchange in 1700s Amsterdam, you’ll need to do considerable amounts of research which might be too cumbersome and slow for you to manage. Some films take YEARS to properly research before they can be effectively written, so be conservative and keep it simple.
And be aware that choosing to write a period piece that takes place decades or centuries ago or something that takes place in the distant future or on other worlds will be much harder to pull off than something set on modern-day Earth. This is obviously because your audience already understands the world we live in, but you’ll have to explain how those other times and worlds work in perfect detail to avoid confusion. Period pieces and fantasies are also a budgetary concern because they are far more expensive to produce.
WARNING:
The two categories listed above will be easier to avoid.
The third one below is the most dangerous and trips up a lot of new screenwriters.
3. Stories that are TOO CLOSE TO YOU
Avoid stories trying to literally translate events from your real life that have affected you or those close to you. It will be impossible to make the creative choices necessary to write an effective screenplay if your greater loyalties lay with accurately portraying the facts or your relationships with the people that you write about.
Consider this scenario: something life-affecting happens to you or someone close to you. You may have recently experienced it or you may have been carrying around some kind of baggage related to this event for years. Now, you want to write a screenplay dramatizing this life-changing event because you think it’s a great story and because it is important to you.
PLEASE DON’T.
Do not make yourself choose between accurately depicting what happened to you (or someone you care about) in real life and writing an effective screenplay, because you can only have ONE MASTER.
If you try to faithfully recreate an episode from your life in screenplay form, I promise you it will be an awful mess. It will be impossible to serve both your life and your goal of writing an effective screenplay without failing at both. It’s either going to be 100% faithful and accurate to the events and people in your real life or... It’s going to be a good movie.
I’d love to share an example of a film that was made from a screenplay like we are talking about, but THERE AREN’T ANY. And, that simple fact should help reinforce my point. You simply cannot write an effective screenplay based on a faithful retelling of your own life events. It cannot be done, so please do not put yourself through that.
Incredibly, I’ve been made aware of attempts like this numerous times in my career. Several people I know have talked about it. I’ve even been asked to help write them, and every time, I very carefully decline because it is a recipe for disaster.
High-profile biopics are famous for heavily reworking the facts to make certain the story works and delivers a satisfying experience for the audience. Even then, the person being portrayed does not typically write the story themselves for the very reasons I’m describing.
Madonna has tried to get a biopic of her life made and has - to date - failed. The members of Queen famously made all kinds of demands on their biopic Bohemian Rhapsody and… how did that turn out? There are many, many messy attempts and failures in this space.
Even documentary filmmakers understand that they are selecting, crafting, and omitting an infinite amount of details from the real-life story they are using as their subject. These choices ultimately color the final film in a very particular and carefully engineered manner - all with the goal of creating a more satisfying experience for the audience.
If it’s real, it’s not a movie.
If it’s a movie, it’s not real.
Many of the narrative devices that must happen to create an effective and successful film such as contextual setup, narrative progression, rhythmic escalation, naked exposition, subtextual dialogue and imagery, structure, cathartic resolutions, and such rarely happen in real life the way they are depicted on screen or in a screenplay. Life is just not that tidy and polished. Life is, in fact, often really boring - which films can never be!
It may feel like real life when you are watching it on the screen, but it is all a carefully engineered illusion.
No one would care about the accuracy of a film or TV show if the story was boring. And perfectly accurate details almost always get in the way of better stories. That’s why during the opening credits of numerous TV series including Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico it states:
“This dramatization is inspired by true events.
However, certain scenes, characters, names, businesses, incidents,
locations, and events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes.”
It’s the “inspired by true events” and “fictionalized for dramatic purposes” that I want you to focus on. By all means, get inspired by real-life events. Absolutely. But fictionalize the story and create some distance from it or you’ll never be able to maintain control.
It will control you.
A story can be completely believable and not have anything to do with the real world and vice versa. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is clearly not a real person, but, watching the film, we believe in him because his story feels authentic. And it feels authentic because of the successful implementation of the many narrative tools and techniques of filmmaking.
That’s how it works best: fold in details from the real world that are authentic, but not the ones that are too important or precious, or literal to you. As I’m about to talk about in the next section, IDENTIFYING YOUR BRAND, you want - and, in fact, need - to draw from the deepest, darkest emotional wounds from your personal history and to use them as your creative fuel, but it’s equally as important to avoid using literal events from your life.
“Truth is terrific, reality is even better,
but believability is best of all. Because without (believability),
truth and reality go right out the window.”-William Goldman
(Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men) from his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade
SUMMARY:
I want you to take on a story concept that is manageable for you at your current skill and experience level.
I strongly recommend keeping it simple. Small in scale and more familiar in nature. Don’t try to write the next AVENGERS: ENDGAME. That movie took three hundred million dollars and over 60 years of pop culture success (initially as comic books) to make! You likely won’t sell something like that at any point in your career, but you certainly won’t when you are very new. Massively popular IP franchises like that or Star Wars or James Bond etc. NEVER hire unproven screenwriters. EVER. Do not frustrate yourself writing those for any reason other than your own entertainment or perhaps as a “writing sample”. But, NEVER expect to sell such a thing.
Keep it simple - at least for now.
Okay, we’ve spent quite a lot of time resetting expectations and talking about how to take care of yourself and manage your process. Thank you for reading or listening to it all. It’s a lot, but it’s something I feel particularly passionate about and I hope it has been useful to you, because …
I want you to succeed.
I want you to love the process.
and
I WANT YOU TO HAVE SOME FUN.
NEXT:
In the next post, we’ll talk about how you can stand out from the crowd by writing stories only you can write. It’s time to answer this question:
WHAT IS MY BRAND?
Would a FREE Consultation Help?
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Just a friendly chat with someone who would love to help you reach your goals.
If you feel stuck or frustrated for any reason and you’d like to talk about
any aspect of screenwriting or our programs in particular, reach out at this address:
jordan@thescreenplayfactory.com
Tell me a little about what you’d like to discuss, and we’ll schedule a convenient time to chat.
I dare you! Honestly, what have you got to lose?
