What sort of writer are you?

• Do you loosely plot out your story and then write the script and rewrite it, hopefully fine tuning it until it looks and feels like a script with a beginning and an end?
   

• Do you start at page one and hammer your way through all the pages, following the characters as they take on a life of their own, and finally hit page hundred and twenty and type the end?
   
• Do you think of a hot idea, sum it up in a pithy phrase, then carefully plot out a treatment, and finally write your script adding the dialogue over the top of the carefully plotted story?

If there is anyone exactly like any of these I would be surprised, but at one time or other we will do all these things. None of them are bad. Sometimes one can get lucky. But if we want to get lucky more often, we need to do a lot more.

The most common problem found with the scripts submitted to the Write Movies  competitions is that they are bad ideas for scripts!

It is not necessarily that they are badly written, have uninteresting characters or action that could not be filmed interestingly, it is that they are not about anything very interesting. Although it may be a popular misconception that Hollywood's movies are not about anything in particular, they usually have ideas at the heart of them that interest someone.

That is not to say that writers of no-idea scripts did not have some burning reason to write their script. They merely did not clarify what it was that would interest the audience. There may be lots of things in the script, or at least the process of writing the script, that has interested the writer, but they have not considered what the audience will be interested in or how to make that audience interested in the writers' vision.

Writers cannot expect the script's problems to be fixed in production. On the contrary, they can probably expect it to be ruined by the production! In the movies, many things can go awry between the script and the final product. A loss of insight into the script's nature, or merely the accidents of production, can throw a film off kilter.

While you are writing your script you must ask yourself what it is about? It is a simple question but few writers adequately interrogate themselves about this matter. They assume that miraculously the answer will emerge. It will emerge, but only if the writer constantly questions their decisions. When one begins to write, one very often makes notes to oneself. One wants a script about this and that. One wants characters of this kind, in situations of that kind, and so on. One maps out what one needs to know in order to make the story plausible. One looks for that opening hook!

The danger is that one merely asks what is the first thing that will grab the audience's attention! Often as not, the writer then fails to ask what is the next thing that interests and then the next thing and why should it grab anyone's attention?

The hook of the movie is more than the opening scene or the "ten page hook" or whatever you want to call it according to which screenwriting manual that you subscribe to. It is the deep structure of the movie. In Robert McKee's book on "Story" he goes into great reveries about the deep structure and the negation of the negation, meaning essentially that just as you think things cannot get worse, they get worse. For him there is a moral of sorts at the heart of every movie. True love is eternal and it demands sacrifices, so goes the moral he draws from the film Casablanca.

That is the idea upon which all else is based. Though one might think that the movie was sold less upon the moral and more upon the interplay of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. But it was a love story with lots of twisted conflicting loyalties that kept the lovers apart and unhappy. They suffered as part of the war effort against the Nazis and whatever you might think the movie ultimately means, you know that it has a lot of layers and that each layer adds to the drama of the situation. It plays ultimately with the idea of conflicting loyalties, or private concerns and public interest. Time, memory, misconceptions, half truths, disillusionment, and forgiveness all come into the mix somewhere, and we can pick out illustrations of our thesis, including the signature tune, "As time goes by." What motivates us to do that is that the coherence of the movie makes it possible for us to do so and all these elements make sense in each other's company. If the writers had thrown in a missing child as an added complication in the relationship, new motivations, new loyalties, new mythical considerations about the nature of childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, and lost opportunities or whatever, might have emerged and interfered with the sexual charge of the core relationship. A story of passion and sacrifice might have floundered upon the rocks of Family Viewing. Children brought into this equation might have had the audience wondering what that was all about, and probably not caring much to bother picking it over and sorting out from the mess what the message was.

Perhaps a movie could have been made with that mix, but it would have been a different movie, and it would have had to strike a different balance. It is when the writer has merely thrown in an ingredient, perhaps out of some belief that it would sell better, and not thought through its implications upon all the other components that one ends up with a no-idea movie despite the good intentions of the writer. Lots of ideas turn into nothing in particular because of conflicting issues of style and genre, psychology and philosophy, character and plot.

Did the writers of Casablanca think they would write a story about conflicting loyalties that ultimately lead to noble sacrifices and world peace? No, they just wanted to write a decent story of some sort and felt the war and refugees were topical and relevant to the audience of the time. In the 1940's many lovers had been torn apart and wanted to feel that there was something positive in all this. We might dismiss this sort of thing as propaganda nowadays. That largely depends on whether we consider Casablanca a good or bad film. There is some truth in the idea that propaganda is merely bad art, or perhaps untimely art. But whatever end of this debate you argue, it does not matter, because the point is that all great scripts create such a debate. They have layers. They have big ideas at their heart. They have clever ways of using the medium to illustrate these ideas. They have ideas that create drama.

Conflicting loyalties is a marvelous dramatic concept. If you set up a situation with conflicting loyalties you know that you will have interesting characters because conflicting loyalties creates internal contradictions. You as the dramatist must always know that stories with characters of that nature, are best filmed with more talk, more close ups, more bravura acting than simpler movies where the loyalties are clear cut and the characters merely heroes or villains. In those movies you have to have other ideas about how to make it interesting to the audience. With the big action hero movie one has to ask, what is the gimmick? What is the defining situation of this sort of movie? What are the big action sequences and how are they differentiated from all the other big action sequences that pepper the average Hollywood movie. Are your action sequences merely another car chase?

One might thus talk about the idea of The Idea. This takes into account what has gone before. You have to come up with something new for the jaded appetites of a movie going audience that has seen it all. Big action movies usually refresh themselves through new technological innovation. The movie Independence Day was not a great script. Its basic idea was so simple that one wonders how it got through the system at all. But it did, because it had an idea that was useful under the then present production circumstance. The big spaceship blowing up New York was now capable of being rendered spectacularly by computer graphics. As for the rest of the film's components, it fed off myths of spacemen in captivity in Roswell, green concerns, and just plain American Patriotism. Why else call it Independence Day and declare America the saviour of the world? The pitch for this might have been, "Hey, we have Christmas Movies with Santa Claus stories. We have Spring Break Movies! We have New Year movies! We have Thanksgiving Movies! But do we have a July the 4^th movie?" And of course, they opened the movie on July 4^th.

By choosing a season in which to base your story, you are learning something about the mindset of the audience at that time. Simple minded patriotism is perhaps acceptable on July 4^th. After that, one might become more skeptical and supply something like American Beauty, which if launched on July 4^th might well have bombed in the box office.

The writers of even such simplistic movie as Independence Day knew what they could include in it and what had to be excluded. There were no ironies in this movie, no characters pointing to the sky and saying, "hey, maybe those there spacemen have their problems too!" Funny though it might have been to lampoon such moral equivocation, the screenwriters left that out. Knowing exactly who you are writing for, what you are writing, what the ruling conflicts at the heart of your characters and between your characters, and the film environment in which you wish to stage it all, is the job of the screenwriter. You do not merely write a script, you design it.

I am not arguing here that one should merely pander to momentary lapses in the taste of the audience, but one must take the audience into account and design one's stories bearing in mind what the audience expectations at any given moment are. You have to seduce the audience into seeing things your way and knowing from which position you are going to be viewed, is to know how you have to tell your story.

So you need to ask yourself a few questions about your project as you work on it. Can you, for instance, sum it up in a few lines or paragraphs and still have it sound interesting? That is one of the major tests. That will tell you if you have a project that can work its way through the production process and come out the other end intact, and find its audience. If you cannot, then maybe you still have a script, but you are hoping someone else will tell you what it is about. This happens. Writers often, while in the midst of writing something, do not clearly know what they have. But there will have to be a time in the process when you do. Maybe, when you do, that is when you have finished the script.

On the way to that position you might like to think of different ideas. Your first idea might sound interesting and get you writing, but as the writing progresses, you find other ideas. That is good, but you must not merely throw everything in. That leads to confusion. You pick and choose according to some plan. And any plan is better than no plan. But a strong starter of an idea will make it easier to write a better script, even if the end product has added complexity.

Screenwriters often hate having to pitch their idea in a pithy manner. If the idea could be written in one paragraph, they say, then that is probably all that it is worth! As it is, a screenplay is a complex animal. However, great scripts often can be summed up in several ways that are equally valid and often as not just as interesting. Here is another test of your story, can you sum it up badly and still have it sound interesting?

This might seem contradictory but try to pitch Hamlet for instance. Here is my attempt at summing up Hamlet:

This might not be your Hamlet, and I am sure there are many different ways of telling this story. But all of them sound interesting. You cannot tell this story so badly that someone cannot find interest in it. They are interested because things connect, because the drama is large, but also personal. The conflict between the characters has to play out against the background of courtly manners and political behaviour. Nothing can be said publicly because nobody can be trusted. A king may smile and smile and yet be villain, but a hero cannot kill a smiling king until everyone else knows the truth and the truth is not easily proven, least of all to oneself. Everything here is full of danger for Hamlet. The psychology rings true. The situation rings true. Sex and violence have never been done better.

Did Shakespeare know all this when he started writing the play? No. A lot of the plot had been worked out before he got hold of it. There was another play about Hamlet's revenge that Shakespeare had actually acted in. He was aware of the nature of this piece and cleverly added his own take on it. We cannot all be so lucky to have the sort of support system that Shakespeare had for his craft, but we have to make it for ourselves. Because of the laws of copyright, we are now all obliged to start from scratch, but we must in the end get to know our story thoroughly and know why we are intrigued by it. We then must express it in a manner that will intrigue others.

There are many ways of doing this. We write notes to ourselves. We synopsize our ideas and test them out. We talk with others. We write first drafts of scripts. We ask ourselves what if we wrote this instead of that, would it thus change the thing for the better? We ask what messages are we sending in the current environment? We write treatments, sketches, one line pitches, and then finally we have a dossier on the subject and a through line in our head that allows us to let rip with a good fluent script that seemingly writes itself. And even then the job is not finished. We ask, is that as good as it gets?

If we tire in the process or feel bored or find that there is little in this subject that really works, we should abandon it, or at least put it aside until one can take a fresh perspective. Maybe conversation with others can give us that perspective? Maybe we could show samples around and take on board other ideas? Wherever we get our ideas from, does not matter. It matters that we have better ideas and that we build upon them rather than undermine them.

The test is that finally you must be able to have a synopsis that reads as well as the one for Hamlet. Maybe it can be better written, but it is not the style of the prose that matters. It is the content of the story. A strong story shines out from the sketchy notes one might use to explain it to others. And at the heart of it, we find a strong idea, or rather, many strong ideas that somehow all seem all of a part.

When you come to Ideatosale, you should come with the intention of helping to sort out your key ideas. By formulating and explaining them to a third party, you will learn more about them. Finally, you develop these into a treatment and if that treatment has the sort of quality that the outline of Hamlet has, then you can move onto writing the script. Though, maybe in the process you have already written sample sections of the script. Essentially one works at all stages simultaneously, but presents them to others in the sequence of pitch, treatment, and then first draft. This is why talking over the project at the beginning can save a lot of time. When you present your ideas, we ask you questions. It is also why one should spend a lot of time on the treatment, for it is quicker dealing with the story at treatment level than at script level. One looks at the ideas a little more nakedly before one attaches a strong voice to them. Good dialogue can sometimes be the hardest thing to cut, but if it is not part of the story, then cut it should be. It is better to know as much about the story as possible before one wastes good dialogue on irrelevancies.

It would be nice to have a checklist of all the things that one should ask of one's stories before one starts. But each story and each writer requires a different list. There are broad rule of thumbs that one might like to think of. Ask yourself where is the thing that we might find interesting? What is the twist on this kind of story that is new? Where is the antagonist for that protagonist and why should we care about any of the characters?

Understanding the genre of story and the audience classifications are great helps. Horror stories obviously have different ingredients to Comedies. Black Comedy and Light Comedy play differently. Family Movies assume values that quirky independent films mock. In the novel writing world there is a difference between the genre blockbusters and the prestigious literary general fiction novel. One is written for a reader, who is not interested in the literary debates of the time, where the other is written in their light. Similarly one finds the movie industry split between the Hollywood Movie and the Art House Independent, with one aiming at the maximum box office revenue and the other aiming at the festivals and prizes. The ideas on the former are obviously going to be more conventional than the latter, though the techniques of both happily feed of each other.

Even the daftest, dopiest, dumbest, Hollywood Movie is about something, even if it is only about Gwyneth Paltrow playing a fat girl. Hopefully your movies will be about a few things more than that. However, perhaps ultimately the writer has to remember that they are merely writing a script for one movie and not a script that encompasses all of the things that movies can do, thus ending up doing none of them. In short, know your choices, and make them smart ones.

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