Be ruthless on your script. Guess what? The reader will be.

Do not think, “Hey, this is wonderful.” when you read your script.
Think, “They’re going to burn my house to the ground for making them read this unless I can get it perfect.”

If you THINK it works, it doesn’t.
If you THINK they will like it, they won’t.

Read other scripts and see if yours is better.

As you write your first pass, you MUST think, “I’m a genius and this is great and everyone will love it.”
You HAVE to think that.
Or you’ll give up and quit.

But, once you have a draft, turn into Blofeld. And be very very very very hard on yourself and your work.

They have too much to read to spend time on a script that you have not beaten within an inch of its life.

Do not smile at your pages when you rewrite. Frown at them and wrestle them into submission.

Be ruthless.
Cause they are.

Tape a photograph above your computer of the badass dude from PAN’S LABYRINTH, sewing up his face with no anesthesia. That’s the reader. One tough cookie. Be ready for him.

You HAVE to be clear!!!!

Nice quote:

“We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.”
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, c. 35-100

The more I work with clients and their screenplays, the more I feel this is one of the toughest things about writing. Not just screenwriting. Writing.

What you think it means may not be what it means. To the reader. What you think it means, doesn’t actually matter. What it means, that matters.

There’ a drawing in my fabulous book, done by me, of a writer on one side of a room, writing. And a reader on the other side of the room, reading. The thought is formed in the writer’s brain, goes down to the page, and then goes up to the reader’s brain. That’s the way it works.

Brain.
Page.
Brain.

IT DOES NOT SHOOT LIKE A BEAM OF LIGHT STRAIGHT FROM YOUR BRAIN TO THE READER’S BRAIN.
Sadly.
Wish it did.
Life would be a lot easier were that the case.

What you see, crystal clear, floating above your computer as you write, has to go through the scrambler onto the page, and then, through the de-scrambler to the reader, so he (or she!) can see it, crystal clear, floating above the page in living color. Imagine those words were radio waves. Imagine you were transmitting them from Ice Station Zebra on the Polar icecap via a hand-cranked radio to a ham radio operator in the Fiji islands… you’d be very very very careful about your choice of words because your meaning might get lost in the static.

Pretty good analogy for writing, actually. Tickled I thought of it.

What you think it means is not necessarily what it really means.
Tie does not go to the runner.
If the reader creates a different image in her mind from the one you had in mind when you wrote… guess what? It’s not her fault. It’s yours, because you wrote it in such a way that it could be misunderstood.

So don’t do that.

Be clear.
Be very clear.

Easy to say. Excruciatingly difficult to do.

But at least, now, you know it’s possible to be misunderstood so perhaps, now, you’ll take precautions against it happening to you.

I sure hope so.

Good luck.

The “Don’t Repeat” thing is tough to root out.

Just finished giving notes to a client. A client I’ve given notes to twice before. So, they are used to what I hit on pretty hard.

One is proofreading.
I ended up telling her she has to find someone else to proofread her work. If you’re in this same boat, find someone else to proofread your work. If you’re not a good proofreader, you know by now. So don’t think “Hey, I’m magically going to get better at this!” It’s like saying, “Today, I think I’ll be taller.” Get some help if you need it.

Another is “Most important thing, last.”
A general rule, to be sure. But, it behooves you to go through your dialogue line by line and ask, “Hey, is the zinger in the middle or at the end?” Very, very often, it’s lost in the shuffle. A person says three lines in a speech, and the good one is #2. By moving that line to the end, you suddenly create power in the three lines… with the best one last.

Finally, the don’t repeat rule.
You can say the same thing twice in a row and not realize it.
Just like I’m probably going to do now.
You may not notice that one line and the other are pretty much alike.

So, you have to wear your “Am I Repeating?” glasses and check each line of action and each line of dialogue for just that one thing… “Am I somehow saying the same thing twice, by accident?” If you are, get rid of one.

She had an opening title card.
Fine. It set up her story nicely.
It faded out, and a second one came up. In the writer’s mind, it added emphasis. In the reader’s mind, it was overkill.

Saying the same thing twice, even if it’s slightly different (To You!) is not adding new information. It’s just more crap the reader has to plow through to get to the next piece of new information.

If you don’t believe me, make a short film. When you get to the editing room, you’ll cringe at every tiny line that you wish you hadn’t shot that you wish you’d trimmed in the script phase.
Nothing like sweating in an editing room to teach you, once and for all, that stuff that repeats will kill you in front of an audience.

Unless of course, you mean for it to repeat and did it on purpose.

Anybody ever made a film and found this to be true?

Surprise your reader! IRON MAN does, and in a great way!

Saw IRON MAN 3 last night.

I got a tad bored partway through, but it picked up nicely after the middle and had a strong finish. Especially if you like seeing stuff get blown up or Gwyneth Paltrow’s rock hard abs.

Anyway.

The bad guy is played by Ben Kingsley and he is FANTASTIC. Really amazing voice. Amazing character. And, partway through the story, via his character, you get a totally believable and gigantic surprise. Best thing in the whole movie, actually. The only thing I find myself thinking about half a day later…

It’s worth seeing just for that one screenwriting lesson.

And the abs.

Don’t set up without paying off…

A tough thing about writing is knowing the effect of your words on the unseen reader.

He or she is going to assign meaning to everything you write down. If you wrote it, it must be important, right? Otherwise, why are you making us read it?

An example of this is setting up without paying off. What seems like idle banter to you is going to be regarded by the reader as something worth remembering. o, if you have a guy say to his buddy, “You going to Jeff’s kegger tonight?” “Yeah, buddy, gonna be a blowout.”… and then don’t take us to the party… we’re going to feel left out.

If you have a football game where the hero’s team gets crushed, and the coach tells them, “We meet those bums one more time before season’s end,” we’re going to be expecting to see that final game and either get revenge or not. But, don’t set up that rivalry and expected rematch and then move your hero to the Bahamas for a steel drum festival for the rest of the movie.

If you tell us to expect something, consider very hard before you decide not to deliver it.

Get In Touch With Your Demons

I know it seems I’ve been ignoring you lately. I’m sorry, but I’ve been busy writing the sequel to my book.

To be successful at this writing game, you’ve got to give us something we’ve never seen before. You must give us something that is almost unbelievable in the extremes of what happens inside your story. To do this, you have to get in touch with whatever searing fire burns within you… your demons.

For a drama to succeed… you have to nearly be embarrassed to give it to someone to read. You have to be fearful they’re going to say, “What sick, twisted, bent-up mind created this mind-blowing story?” That’s what everyone fears. But what people don’t realize is that the reader is not going to associate the content with your life, your soul, your psychological mix ups. The reader is only going to say, “Wow! How did you think up all this amazing stuff?”

What is it that upsets you? What is it you’re frightened off? What is it you think, feel, worry about, wonder about… that you hope and pray no one ever discovers? What is going on inside the seething fire in your belly, that is so dark, so private, so awful, so terrifying that you don’t want anyone to know it exists inside you? That is the very thing that you have to write about. Because if you’re not getting in touch with your demons, if you’re not pushing the story as far as you possibly can in the direction of near-unbelievability, then the reader is not going to be interested.

The reader wants to be taken where she’s never been before. No one has ever been inside your library of horrors. So open it up for the world. Run the risk of being embarrassed. Run the risk of selling something.

If you’re writing about details from your own life, you have to risk upsetting the people who know you. I have a novelist friend. He published a story about something extraordinarily personal. When it came out, his brother was so angry, he didn’t speak to him for a year. Be willing to run that risk. If you are a writer, you are a writer. Family and friends beware.

Looking into yourself can be painful and difficult. Figuring out the awful things that squirm around inside you can either be frightening or useful. Or both! But, if you are writing something intense, you better go on and make it intense. Don’t be shy. Don’t push to the doorway at the edge of the chasm and then not open that door and jump through.

Your demons are there, waiting to help you. Use them. It’s about all they’re good for.

tooting the client horn!

Just heard that one of my consulting clients won the Nebraska Screenwriting contest and another was a finalist in the Story Pro contest.

Yay!