5. Abide the Rules

I crave order, but I don't like rules. That's not true. I like rules . . . that make sense to me. If they seem arbitrary and lack sound reasoning they can go straight to hell. Of course one must factor in the consequences of going against any particular rule. As for screenwriting, my thoughts on rules are well documented. There are many books that tell us what to write on what page by dissecting great movies and shoehorning them into a mold. Great movies don't fit into molds. They make their own. These books are destructive in two major ways:

1. They make writers who are NOT storytellers imagine they can follow a template and poof a great script into existence.

2. They arm studio executives, who are also NOT storytellers, with information to make them think that they know something about storytelling. While these rules might help them to weed out the dreck, they also serve to help them destroy anything special.

No, my character doesn't need to save a cat on page 12, and she certainly doesn't need to time travel on page 30. What makes the siren song of these books so powerful is that they are based on a lot of sound examples. They are arguments that can be defended and rationalized. While I deride their use I also can acknowledge their usefulness if mined properly.

So are there any rules to writing a screenplay? If you are a storyteller then you will naturally be able to understand the ebb and flow of your story. You will feel how your characters should change or resist all efforts to do so. After thinking some time on this I've come to the conclusion that there are indeed some rules to screenwriting. These items are things I think you cannot overlook when writing. And if you don't at least consider them, you risk producing something pedestrian.

Rule #1 - Convey to the viewer/reader the unique and interesting qualities of your story AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. In the first syllable of the first word if possible. You've got to hook your audience quickly. You have to give them a reason to root for your story. If you are writing a superhero story, you've got to tell them why it is different than every other superhero story ever made (in a good way). If it's a legal drama, I need to know why it isn't Law and Order. If you are writing on spec you've got to do it with definitive action and dialogue. If you are writing something that will be filmed then you can do it with less action as long as your environment is foreign and intriguing. When I read an unfamiliar script I'm always looking for that reason to keep reading. I need to be compelled. And it could be the smallest thing. It has to be something that sparks your imagination, that begs you to begin to fill in the blanks for parts yet to come. Recently I watched the movie 500 Days of Summer. Going in I was expecting some sort of romantic comedy. I wasn't too excited. Preceding the start of the movie was a black screen with white text:

"Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely accidental ... Especially you, Jenny Beckman ... Bitch."

Before frame one. Before the story even started I smiled. I instantly liked this movie. All it had to do from that point forward was keep the promise it had just made to me. It did. When I first saw Field of Dreams I heard it was good and knew it had something to do with baseball, but I was otherwise ambivalent and half-expecting to leave with a shrug and a sigh. In the first scene the cornfield spoke. Instantly I knew I was where I wanted to be, and to my delight the movie delivered on the promise it made in that Iowa cornfield. Star Wars opens up with a huge space ship chasing a smaller ship. Then we see a firefight followed by a mysterious and malevolent black armored figure. The imagination sparked in those minutes would sustain me over six movies (three of them horrendous).

So please, please, please know why your story is unique and compelling and find a way to bring that out as quickly as possible. If you don't clearly know why your story is a breath of fresh air in a crowded genre then why are you writing it at all?

Rule #2 - Take the path less followed. During story creation the vast majority of us will think in terms of all the movies we have seen and in doing so we will invariably craft familiar feeling scenes and sequences even if our overall story is inventive. So our task as screenwriters is to go over our story sequence by sequence, scene by scene and ask ourselves an important question: How do these situations typically resolve themselves in an average movie? Unless you are thinking outside the box 24/7 you are going to run into a fair amount of situations that resolve themselves in a predictable way. You need to evaluate each and every one of these situations with a critical eye and in situations where the expected outcome isn't completely and utterly necessary (which is most of the time) you need to think of a solution that will make the audience both surprised and delighted. They might be forced to rewrite the story that is unfolding in their heads while watching, but it is a welcome, subconscious rewrite. That is a round and about way of saying that you need to keep the audience guessing and asking questions that aren't WTF?.

Rule #3 - I wanted at least three rules because three rules are like badass, but you know what. I can't think of another. Anything else just seems like a pep talk (be true to yourself) or reiterating stuff from #2 (be your harshest critic and accept only excellence). So that's it. Two rules. Anything more would just be story theory and there's plenty of that excrement already flying around. Told you I wasn't much for rules.

And so that concludes my screenwriting manifesto: Know your audience. Be a storyteller, Keep it interesting, Character starts with the animal. Abide the rules. These are the five pillars of screenwriting. And what gives me the authority to make these reckless proclamations? What makes me different from some guy shouting through a bullhorn atop a milk crate? Nothing. I'm just some schmuck with an opinion. An opinion that may or may not survive the test of time. I hope to reflect on this list when I am wiser and better traveled. I don't know if this is the answer or if there even is an answer, but for now these talking points seem like common sense. Your mileage may vary.

4. Character Starts with the Animal

So you have an audience, you can tell a story, and you can make it interesting. I'm guessing, at this point you'll need characters to fill this story. And while you will certainly have some idea of character during story creation, you really need to drill down and understand your characters at a primal level if you hope to make your story affecting and real.

Make no mistake, we are physical animals first and foremost. Beneath our intellect is a powerful and primal urge. This is the urge to stay alive. The urge to procreate. This undercurrent influences us in odd ways, and in the case of screenwriting when characters are put under maximum strain, the animal rears its head unless he or she has the wherewithal to suppress it. Humans are also pack animals and share a lot in common with wolves and gorillas to name two.

There are the dominant and there are the submissive. Overriding it all is the need to belong to a pack and a society. This basic need is what advertising thrives on. It's the source of brand loyalty. It's why we all want to belong. Even if we reject our group and its values, we seek out like-minded brethren to consort with. On a side note there is a fascinating documentary about a colony of baboons and how the ones under the thumb of the alpha exhibit a lot of stress and they compared it to human beings in a corporate setting. Excellent stuff.

OK, so we have the animal. So what makes us different than an ape or a wolf or a cat? Intelligence is certainly key. Intelligence makes everything possible, but to me there is a key element that makes us different. Animals are slave to their instincts. Humans can be heavily influenced by instinct, but what makes us different from all others is that we are self-aware. Dolphins and whales are smart. Whales even have bigger brains than we do, but I don't know that they are self-aware. "I think, therefore I am." doesn't cross their minds. I don't know that they can choose to act counter to their instinct. Being self-aware gives us free will, and free will lets us do whatever the hell we want. Free will introduces ethics. It introduces the possibility of right and wrong. It gives us the ability to make judgments.

But the intellect isn't separate from the animal. If it was we'd all be Spock. It is intertwined and the most dangerous aspect of ourselves because it becomes difficult to tell how emotion affects the intellect. This is the space of rationalization, of justifying in our minds what we want. I saw an interview with Louis Farrakhan a number of years ago. I don't know that I care for some of his ideals, but he said one thing that stuck with me (paraphrased): "A man is incapable of doing wrong. In order to do wrong he must first justify it as the right thing." This is the selfish nature of the animal manipulating the intellect to get what it wants. I think this is the source of the most interesting character moments.

Everyday I get quotes from famous people. Sometimes, I think they shed light on the human endeavor. I'd like to share one of them. I can't remember the author, but to paraphrase: "If something makes sense to you, you require only the most circumstantial evidence to claim it as fact, but if something doesn't make sense to you, you require overwhelming evidence to accept it as truth." Ideally, we take all information on face value and judge it. If it happens to be against what we previously believed we simply change our belief. People don't work that way. Often times people will cling to their beliefs long after they've been thoroughly and systematically disproven. They will cling to the very shred of any anomaly as a way to continue their belief. Never underestimate anyone's ability to maintain their belief system. People can write themselves out of any corner. It's both amazing and disheartening.

I think that by understanding the human animal we, as writers, can sculpt more realistic characters in our screenplays. Perhaps, in the process, we can shed a light on ourselves*.

* That would be too easy.

3. Keep It Interesting

Interesting is the spackle of the creative world. Interesting is a get out of jail free card. Interesting let's you break the rules.

But most of all, Interesting keeps people watching.

There are many rules floating around about story structure. Some good. Some completely arbitrary. As far as I'm concerned Keep It Interesting is the final arbiter in all matters. If the audience wants to know (preferably has to know) what happens next you've done your job. No caveats are needed here.

In the original Star Wars, Luke isn't even introduced until about twenty minutes into the film. Even then, he's not an especially strong character. We don't mind because we are interested in this alien world that we've been introduced into, and this Darth Vader guy, he's a badass. If not for the strong and interesting characters that surround Luke we might lose interest before they even get off of the planet Tatooine.

In Patton there is a scene where Patton visits some ruins and talks about his belief in reincarnation. Completely unnecessary from a story standpoint yet one of the things that really standout as exceptional to me.

The story of Avatar is serviceable but ultimately lackluster compared to everything else the movie has to offer, but I'd watch it again (in 3-D) in an instant because the world Cameron creates is extremely interesting and detailed and well thoughtout. Did I mention the 3-D is mind-blowing? People say the story needs to stand on its own. I think that if you are interested and entertained and your not looking forward to leaving that world then the filmmaker has done his or her job. Avatar seems to end and then start up again. With a runtime of just under 3 hours you'd think that a bad thing, but I was happy it lasted that long so I could spend more time in the world.

2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the best example of this though. This film is propelled almost solely on interest. If you are not engaged on an intellectual level, you will be bored to tears. There isn't really much of a story or a character to be found. It's as emotionally void as space is empty. And yet to me it is perhaps the finest and most perfect film I have ever seen.

The trick of it all is that these deficiencies are noticed only during post-mortem evaluation. If you are sufficiently interested, none of the things I mentioned will occur to you in the least, because you are being thoroughly entertained and under the trance of the storyteller and that is, in the end, what matters most.

Academics will deconstruct and analyze the merits of films and declare one more technically sound and therefore superior to another. And they will argue the finer points and that's all fine, but it doesn't really mean much. It's an attempt to objectify the subjective, to make the formless concrete. There might be some use there, but to me it's mostly people trying to appear smart.

I feel that I must offer at least one qualifier. I'm not saying that if you string together 50 interesting moments that you have an interesting movie. The story, above all, must be interesting and if you just start throwing randomly cool things around the story stops being interesting and the audience starts to wonder why they shouldn't leave and start clicking on random YouTube links.

So the next time you are writing and you find yourself wanting to violate point of view or leaving in an unnecessary scene ask yourself how interesting it is and then determine if it will jar the audience out of the world you've put them in. If the answer is no and it's interesting enough* then leave it in.

* That's the key isn't it. Trust your gut. If you know your audience and are trying to honor your duties as a storyteller it should be apparent whether you should kill this particular baby.

2. Be A Storyteller

Too many times I see it. Young screenwriters fretting about their story not fitting into some predefined template. I'm guilty of it at times. I mean who can resist the siren call of act one finishing near page thirty? When you hit it, you feel like a screenwriter. You feel like you have a handle on things. Maybe even like you belong.

The fact is that in movies you are a storyteller first and a writer second. You have to be able to tell a story without looking over your shoulder at what beats you are or aren't hitting. You need to feel the pulse of the story and instinctively know where the peaks and valleys are. You can't rely on some book or some system as a yardstick any more than you can type jokes into a computer program to determine if they are funny.

Throw away the books and the scholars and write. Write your story. If you truly understand the nature of movies. If you understand why they work and how they work and your intention is to make a movie then the story that comes forth will be a movie. It's really not that hard.

Except that it is hard. It's exceptionally hard. Thus the reason for all the books and the teachers and the beat sheets. They have their function, and that function is in learning about story and analyzing your work trying to figure out why something doesn't work. Like a lot of creative professions, you have to learn the rules, understand the rules and why they are there, and then ignore the rules trusting they will surface naturally.

I write a lot of sentence fragments. A lot. More than maybe I should. It's not that I don't know the rules of grammar (I know most of them, I swear), I just choose to ignore them on occasion because I think it promotes the ideas I'm trying to get across in an informal and entertaining way. Maybe you think it makes me look like an uneducated, talentless hack. While my mom has a right to her opinion* I have to hope against hope that at least 51% of the remaining people feel otherwise.

Here's the main problem with all of this. The problem that pretty much cocks everything up. The people with the money to make your movie aren't storytellers. They are gambling their reputation on the voodoo that you do, and that gives them ulcers. So what do they do? They read all those books and listen to all the teachers. That makes them feel like they know what you *should* be doing. And when your inciting incident doesn't happen on page 12, they demand that it be there. And unless you can convince them otherwise, hello Cookie Cutter Action Movie 12: The Sequel. Or so I've heard.

But you can't worry about that. You have your imagination and a blank page. For now it's the movie you want it to be. Be a storyteller. Be arrogant enough to know what's interesting, what the audience wants but doesn't know it yet. When you are finished writing, go back and read your work. Use the books,beat sheets, and teachers to analyze the parts that are broken and fix them.

When in doubt, be interesting. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Stay tuned for part three: Keep It Interesting.

* My mother doesn't actually think that, but it was a joke I couldn't pass up. Sorry Mom.

1. Know Your Audience

I've been away a long time. Too long. In my attempt to come back and do some regular posting I thought I'd just jump right into the heavy stuff and start writing about my grand theories of screenwriting and storytelling. Every writer has their own (I hope) and these are mine. These posts are more for my personal posterity than to zealously scream my thoughts as the truth and the way. Since the line that divides my private/public life has all but worn away I figured I'd share and maybe drum up some discussion in the mean time.

1. Know your audience

I've struggled with whether to put this one first, but in the end I think it belongs here. More than just about any other medium, the audience is why we write. Screenplays are written to be produced. Movies get produced with money as an investment and a gamble that the investment will be recouped with ample dividends. It's the stark reality of the situation. We write so that others can see and enjoy our work. For my taste, the more the better.

And size is where we start because need to know the size of your audience. You shouldn't write a 300 million dollar fantasy film that appeals only the the art house crowd. This seems fairly obvious, so I won't waste any more space on the matter.

Moving on. The audience makes all the rules. Those rules spouted by charlatans like McKee and more honorable people like Aristotle are observations about what audiences find pleasing. We are playing their game and if they don't like what we are doing, they will take their ball and go home. What are the rules? That's another post, but I will say that there are a sparce few that feel concrete, the rest are up to a fickle audience who are free to change them without filing an amendment with The Guild.

Now you must write to your audience. What does the audience want? They want it the same, but different. This is a round about way of saying, know your genre and its conventions and create something fresh. Why didn't I just say that? Because I think it's important to acknowledge the base from which everything springs. And in the end they are the final arbiter. You write to please the audience. End of story.

DO NOT PANDER TO THE AUDIENCE! But Tom, that's exactly what you've been advocating. No it isn't. It really isn't. Just like in interpersonal relationships, the audience can tell when they are being sucked-up to, coddled, or patronized. It's kinda like. No, it's exactly like talking to the most beautiful woman in the room. You've got to be confident that what you have she wants and you have to show her that you're different than the gaggle of other guys vying for her attention. Do that and you might have a chance to get divorced somewhere down the road. But I digress.

I know some of you (maybe all of you) are saying that you have to write for yourself, that you can't write to the audience, that you shouldn't write to the market. And believe it or not I agree. First off you can't write to the market, because the market is today and not tomorrow. You've got to write what you feel is interesting and relevant to your audience.

So how can you write for yourself and the audience at the same time? That's the key isn't it. I think that if you are a writer and storyteller (two distinctly different things) then your ego says that you know what the audience wants because YOU are the audience and what you like many others will also like. That's not a license to write anything you want. Well, depending on the size of your ego, perhaps it is. I'd like to think that the good screenwriters understand where the lines are drawn and use their knowledge of themselves and the audience to weave a story the thoroughly satisfies both. I write stories that I want to see and specifically stories that I feel haven't been expressed properly on the big screen to date (as remembered by the collective conscience). Am I a good screenwriter? Ask me in twenty years.

Now all of this isn't really something you think about consciously. It's something you acknowledge and move on. I think it comes into focus more during the editing phase, when you are trying to make a sequence work or taking a calculated risk when straying from the path.

At any rate just respect the audience. It keeps you grounded and honest. Think about pro sports. The athletes that get it have a slight humility about them and know that without an audience they cannot play a game for a living and be paid handsomely at the same time.

The ones who don't are arrogant jerks.