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The best day to start writing your screenplay
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I meet a lot of writers who are going to start writing their screenplay on one kind of day.
“Someday.”
They can’t do it now because they have young kids or aging parents or a demanding job or no quiet place to write, or no idea that feels good enough, or too many ideas that all seem good.
For those, I offer for your consideration the story of Georgina Carpisto-Gajdosik…wife, mother, and resident of Connecticut (oops, I turned into Rod Serling for a moment there). Anyway, as related in the Northaven Patch, she worked at a marketing company but wanted more creative satisfaction. With her husbad’s support she quit her job and decided to get involved with filmmaking–somehow.
One day she read in a newspaper about a local filmmaker and became his locations manager. In the process she decided she wanted to write screenplays. She read hundreds of screenplays and how-to books, mostly while her daughter napped.
Eventually she wrote a short film and shot it over six days in Scotland. It has screened in a bunch of festivals including, recently, the New York City Indie Film Festival.
She has written more screenplays including one that is getting good feedback. No deal yet, but it looks promising.
In the absence of a big deal, why am I using her as an example of success? Because to me success is doing what you love and figuring out ways forward when all the indicators are that you’re a bit crazy to even try.
Yes, she does have a supportive husband who made it possible for her to give up her job, but I have a feeling that even without that she would have found a way to discover and pursue her passion.
I’m not sure whether the day she started was a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, a Thursday, a Friday, a Saturday or a Sunday.
But it wasn’t a “someday.”
(Need help focusing your thoughts and your action? Get a copy of my book, “Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done,” published by Pearson and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)
Screenwriters: don’t forget to make us care
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If it was called Birds With No Particular Emotions, you wouldn't play it.
I read a draft of a friend’s screenplay recently. He wants it to have a documentary style and not to have any sticky Hollywood sentimentality. Unfortunately, as he acknowledged later when we were talking about it, he went too far in the other direction.
I’m not suggesting that your protagonist has to save a cat, but there should be something that evokes a strong emotion in us–even if just curiosity. Without that we won’t care what happens next. The Hollywood solution, at least in the big summer films, is to go for the 95% good guy vs. the 95% bad guy (they allow the hero to have an inconsequential little flaw, and the villain to have a smidgen of good in his past, before he went over to the dark side, but that’s usually as far as it goes).
In more sophisticated filmmaking, one of the pleasures for the audience is discovering the layers of a character–some admirable, some not so nice, and a lot neither good nor bad. Kind of like when you get to know people in real life.
However, it has to start, ideally in your first scene, with something that makes people sit back in their seats and settle in because they’re looking forward to getting to know this character better.
Without that, it’s unlikely the script will be bought and the film made. And if somehow it does get made and distributed, it won’t be too long before you’ll see the cinema light up from the phone screens of all the people checking their emails or playing Angry Birds. For which they should be catapulted from their seats, but that’s an other story.
(For some unusual but effective ways to create three-dimensional characters, see my book, “Your Writing Coach,” published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline book sellers.)
Your screenplay has to have a “why” not just a “what”
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Not long ago an aspiring screenplay writer excitedly told me that he was writing a script about a little-known historical incident. He gave me a brief pitch and it did sound kind of interesting, but I asked him why he wanted to tell this story.
“Well, it’s interesting and people don’t even know it happened!” he said.
“OK, let me change the question: why do you think people will be interested in it?” I said.
“I just told you, it’s interesting and hardly anybody knows it happened,” he said.
“Right, but what relevance does it have for today’s audience?”
“You don’t like it, do you?” he said.
I won’t try to relate the entire rest of the conversation, but the point I was trying to make was that obscurity and interestingness aren’t actually big motivators for many movie-goers. And actually, I did like it. Furthermore, without giving too much away about his story, I can tell you that I saw several possible aspects that might draw a modern audience–for instance, the fact that covering up embarrassing incidents and making up “facts” to motivate actions the government wants to take are not modern developments. However, this isn’t something he’d thought about.
I’m certainly not suggesting that your story has to have a moral or lesson, but if you take time to tease out what about it will resonate strongly with the audience, you can be sure to structure your screenplay in a way that emphasizes those elements–without hitting the viewer over the head with them.
A useful question I always try to ask at the start of writing anything is “Why will the audience care?” Sometimes I can’t come up with an answer. That’s usually a good sign to move on to another project.
