Getting to grips with your story
First I write a sentence. I get a tickle of an idea for how the words might come together, like an angler feeling a tug on the rod’s line. Then I sound out the sentence in my head. Then I tap it on my keyboard, trying to recall its shape. Then I look at it and say it aloud, to see if it sings. Then I tweak, rejig, shave off a syllable, swap a word for a phrase or a phrase for a word. Then I sit it next to other sentences to see how it behaves in company. And then I delete it all and start again.”
Joe Moran, First You Write A Sentence
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure”
Dr Samuel Johnson
You’ve chosen your story and the time has come to get down to work on turning it into a brilliant script. You sit down at the keyboard and the words just seem to flow. You’re obsessed with your plot and your characters; they take you over and occupy every waking moment of your life.
As your work progresses, you make discoveries that often take you in new and unexpected directions. It’s a hugely demanding process but also exhilarating and there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing.
Hearing some writers being interviewed might lead you to believe that this is what a writer’s life is like. These fortunate men and women never seem to be afflicted with self-doubt or lassitude. They never prevaricate or waste time, they never have trouble making decisions or sit for a whole morning staring at a blank sheet of paper.
In our world, the real world, we know very well that writing is a tough business and being a writer means that sooner or later you get to experience both the highs and the lows; the frustrating times as well as the times when inspiration comes easily.
The one essential requirement of a writer is, of course, the will to do it – and to keep on doing it even when it doesn’t come easily (as Mark Twain famously explained, ‘Writing is the application of the seat of the pants to the chair.’) Everything else rests on that attribute.
But for those of us who do have the occasional difficulty in building up momentum in our writing, there are a few useful questions we can ask about our work habits and our approach to the task. Being aware of potential problems in this area may not solve them automatically but it can show us where we should be concentrating our energies, as well as relaxing and letting ourselves ‘go with the flow’.
Right-brained or left-brained?
It can be helpful, especially when you’re starting a new project, to be aware of your natural instincts as a writer because everyone approaches their work slightly differently.
An identifiable difference is between those with a ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ orientation. Few writers belong entirely to one camp but most of us show a definite tendency towards one or the other.
Left-brained writers like to plan. Typically they will take lots of notes on their characters and their plot in the initial stages of their work. They will not begin writing their scripts until they have meticulously worked out their story outline and sometimes written detailed biographies for every character. Index cards are a left-brained writer’s friend; every scene, every act and every major plot turning point is usually carefully mapped out.
If your heart and imagination rebels against this, you are not alone in feeling that way. Quite a few successful screenwriters describe themselves as purely instinctive writers who do little planning.
The right-brained writer believes that creativity is all about discovery. Knowing too much in advance about your story or characters kills the creative impulse. Being too self-conscious about the structure of your script inhibits you and is often the death of originality. Instead of planning meticulously, you should develop a ‘feel’ for your story and let that lead you where it wants you to go. Above all else, you must try to hang on to the initial excitement and enthusiasm that drew you to the story in the first place.
(Charles Deemer refers to these two very different kinds of writers as ‘Tree People’ and ‘Forest People’ in his book “Practical Screenwriting”. You can read an extract here).
It has to be said that most of the books on screenwriting are aimed at promulgating a ‘left-brained approach’ to screenwriting. Many are about teaching a formula for success that’s based on structural principles and a prescriptive way of doing things. The danger is that the techniques used by ‘left-brained’ writers can sometimes frustrate and alienate those with a ‘right-brain’ inclination, yet this is the area where most can be accomplished in terms of shaping and disciplining – and therefore effectively ‘improving’ – your writing.
A plan of attack
Being aware of your predilections is another way of identifying your strengths as a writer and building your confidence. It should also help you guard against your more self-indulgent traits and deal with the things that block you and frustrate you.
Let’s talk about the way right-brainers work first:
Typically the right brainer likes to hit the ground running and will appear to be very productive, turning out page after page of their script without any seeming hesitation. There is a lot of ‘tortoise and hare’ in the way that right-brainers and left-brainers tackle a project but not necessarily always in the way that you’d expect.
Writers who work at this pace successfully rely on a very developed sense of form. They will be working on a scene or a sequence but simultaneously their minds will be ‘scouting ahead,’ looking at the overall shape of the story and developing little decisions into big ones. Quite often, this talent is a subliminal one and the writer isn’t even aware that she’s doing it.
The pitfalls of working this way are that it can use up a lot of energy without producing the desired result – that is a script that someone would want to produce. While there are a few exceptional talents who can get it right first time, a common fault is for a writer to become stubbornly attached to work that is essentially flawed.
Because you have created a body of work, and invested time and energy in it (even though it seemed to come quite easily), you find it difficult to admit that you were following ‘a false trail’. What you really need to do is throw it all away and start again; but doesn’t that mean you’ve wasted all that time and energy? You bet.
Many cannot bring themselves to do it and this is potentially fatal. There is a rigidity that sets in; because some of it works, you become reluctant to jettison those bits. In the worst instance, you pretzel your story into an ungainly and clumsy shape in order to cling on to them. Eventually, you lose all sense of what works and what doesn’t.
Flexibility is key. It is most likely that your first draft will be flawed in all kinds of ways and that is fine providing you acknowledge that you wrote it as part of an exploratory process. If you do decide to dive right in and ‘see what happens’, then you’ve got to be prepared to throw it all away and start over again. In fact, you can’t afford to become too attached too early to your writing because you end up blocking any further useful exploration.
The right-brained approach only looks to be faster but actually making real progress can be painfully slow. It can also be much harder work. If you are a writer who absolutely has to work this way, don’t try to suppress your instincts but do try to keep open and receptive to making changes.
The left-brained approach
The left-brained writer goes through the same process of exploration but in a very different way. Typically the approach is much more analytical and intellectual. The left-brained writer has to get to know his or her story as intimately as possible before they’ll commit one scene of action to paper.
The left-brainer focuses on the decision making aspect of writing, one of the crucial tasks a writer has to perform. Every step of story construction involves a decision; these vary from small decisions (the name of a character, the colour of his tie) to big ones (the fate of individuals or nations) and they all need to be made at some point.
The left-brainer wants to make as many of these decisions as possible in advance but he also wants and needs them to be the correct ones. The dilemma that the left-brainer faces is that some of these decisions will need to be tested. The left brainer will need to get their hands dirty, in other words, to commit something to paper and left-brainers can be notoriously commitment-phobic and insecure.
The pitfall for writers with a left-brained tendency is either to prolong the planning stage indefinitely in a quest for something that absolutely ‘feels right’ or to keep changing their mind over elementary things like the premise of their story.
The only cure for this is to take ‘a leap of faith’. If you don’t, there is the danger that your original feeling for your story will wither and die before it ever flowers.
Making a start
Don’t get it right, get it written … “
James Thurber
The most poisonous phrase in the English language is: “The work begins tomorrow.”
Read the biographies of famous writers and you’ll discover that many of them adopt a policy of just gritting their teeth and ‘getting on with it’, rain or shine, inspired or not. This is not a form of masochism, it is based on the simple notion that writing is an exercise like any other. It’s important to keep in practice, to maintain the habit. Even if what you write isn’t good, the activity itself keeps those all important ‘writing muscles’ lubricated and working.
Novelists like Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham set themselves a target number of words to be written and would stop the minute their target was reached – however exciting the story was getting. Discipline and stamina are the hallmarks of professional writers and the chief attributes that distinguish them from the amateur.
But if you are really so stuck that you can’t even make a start with your script, here are a couple of exercises that might help to get you off the fence and taking that necessary first step. (Any kind of action is better than inaction – any day of the week).
Exercise 1: Write a ‘key’ scene first
When you first conceive of your story, it’s likely that certain parts of it will be in ‘sharper focus’ than others in your imagination. You may not know the name of your protagonist, for example, or exactly what she wants just yet but you do know that there will be a scene in your film where she says goodbye to her family and boards a plane to New York.
Write that scene first. Writing it will compel you to make a lot of ‘small’ decisions. What colour is her hair? Her eyes? How tall is she and what is she wearing? These are easy choices but they will lead you inexorably towards the bigger ones. You’ll be surprised how much else you already instinctively ‘know’ about your story.
This is a good exercise for ‘left-brainers’ who may be having trouble committing themselves to make decisions.
Exercise 2: Write a step outline
This means breaking a story down into the steps that make up its basic progression. It’s a useful exercise but it’s important to keep it simple. You shouldn’t be thinking yet about scenes, acts or any other structural units. Just concentrate on the story itself:
Step 1: Goldilocks gets lost in the woods
Step 2: She finds the three bears’ house.
Step 3: She goes into the house and finds it empty … and so on.
The steps can be as small or large as you feel comfortable with. If it feels like too large a task, a variation on this exercise is to work out the steps between two plot points (a ‘plot point’ is a significant ‘landmark’ in the plot narrative) and focus just on that segment.
For example:
(1) A young girl witnesses the murder of her family. (2) She finds a martial arts master and (3) trains until she is a deadly warrior. (4) She returns and avenges the death of her family.
There are many potential ‘steps’ between each of these plot-points but if we focus just on those between (2) and (3), this might be one possible step progression:
Step 1: She is rescued from bandits by an old man with amazing sword skills.
Step 2: She begs the old man to teach her his skills but he refuses because she is female.
Step 3: She follows the old man and eventually persuades him to relent … and so on.
This is a good exercise for ‘right brainers’ who often need signposts to keep their stories on track. By breaking the story down into units and thinking carefully about the plotting, right-brainers can more effectively focus and harness their energy.
David Clough©2011