Recently a student asked me the following question:

Can I write a synopsis/storyline, complete with time era, scenery and plot for a movie, and have someone else develop the characters and dialogue?

This is essentially what producers do in Hollywood.  But it’s very, very hard for young writers to sell movies this way.  And it’s even harder to actually develop a script that captures the spirit of your idea in the way you imagined it unless you’re writing it yourself.

The Long Road To Development Hell

As much as we all dream of the magical writer who can sweep in from the sky and make our ideas come to life, if you know much about the development process in Hollywood, you know this hardly ever works.

Hollywood is full of great ideas.  And producers spend millions of dollars paying professional writers to turn these ideas into scripts.

But no matter how glowing the writer’s past track-record, scripts that are generated this way are rarely successful.

Projects end up being written and re-written by dozens of writers, and seem to get worse with every re-draft.  These scripts end up languishing in what producers like to call  “development hell,” that eternal purgatory of screenplays that will never be made.

Create The Script You Really Want

It’s a safe bet that if writing someone else’s script is this challenging for a million-dollar-a-script writer in Hollywood, it’s certainly going to be even harder for the young writers you can afford to hire as a young producer.

Most writers do their best work when they are writing from the heart, exploring themes that are resonant for them, and discovering their character’s journey as they write it.  Not when they are “painting by numbers” and filling in the gaps of someone else’s story.

So most likely, if you want to see your project come to fruition, you’re going to have to write it yourself.

Take a class.  Grab a pen.  Sit down, and start searching for your character.

Tell the story you wanted to tell, as only you can tell it.

You’ll be happy that you did.

As discussed in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this series, the structure of Toy Story 3 is built around the theme of loyalty, and desperate desires of both its protagonists and antagonists to be loved and played with by children.  Love is the currency of Toy Story 3, the one thing that every character wants, and the one thing that has true value. In order to earn that love, the characters must each come to terms with loyalty in their own unique way, and come together to overcome the corrupting force of the greatest antagonist to loyalty: doubt.

Let Your Characters Earn Their Happy Endings

Just as the choices we make in response to the challenges of our lives define us as people, so too do the choices the toys make define them as characters.

In overcoming Lotso and the doubt he represents, the toys come to terms with their own lack of faith, and recapture their loyalty to Andy and to each other.

In doing so, they earn the true fulfillment of their own greatest wish, when Andy bestows them on a little girl, and plays with them one last time before moving on to the next phase of his life.

And that, of course, is why we cry.

Because as silly and zany as Toy Story 3 might be, it draws its structure upon the real emotions, the real desires, and the real losses that we all share as we grow older, say goodbye to old phases of our lives and move on to the new ones.

The desire to be played with.  The desire to be loved.  The desire to relive those cherished memories one last time.

Every Journey Begins With A Want

Just as the journey of your character begins with a simple want, so too does your journey as a screenwriter.  Take a moment to think about what you want today.  And what steps are you ready to take to achieve it.

Then come check out my upcoming screenwriting classes, now available here in New York City, and streamed live ONLINE via the internet.

Your journey begins today.

As discussed in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series, Toy Story 3 does a brilliant job of exploring diverse aspects of the theme of loyalty, through an emotional structure built upon the toys’ shared desire to be loved and played with by their owners, and the gigantic obstacles that stand in their path.

In this context, one of the things that makes Toy Story 3 so emotionally powerful is the way the question of loyalty, and the desperate desire to be loved, governs not only the actions of the good guys, but also the base desires of Lotso, the evil strawberry-scented Teddy Bear.

Choose The Right Antagonist

Just like our protagonists, Lotso believes he has been abandoned by his owner.  But rather than remaining loyal to his owner or his nature, he has become twisted by his feelings of betrayal, and lost his ability to love  and be loved.  Even when the good toys risk their own lives to save him, Lotso chooses betrayal over loyalty, and anger over love, abandoning the other toys to death by incineration at the garbage dump.

Mustache Twirling Villains Don’t Scare Us

Whether you’re writing a comedy like Toy Story 3, a drama like The Squid and The Whale or a thriller like Cape Fear, the most dramatic antagonists are usually frighteningly human.  They too have needs and desires, and in their map of the universe, they see themselves as the hero or as the suffering victim.

By humanizing Lotso, the writers of Toy Story 3 deepen the emotional journey of their main characters, by exploring yet another variation on the theme of loyalty.  Lotso is more than just an external threat to the toys, he’s a physical manifestation of the danger of giving up on loyalty, and the way the desperate desire for love can twist a character into an evil mockery everything he once represented.

In this way, Lotso becomes more than just an antagonist.  He becomes a walking symbol of toys worst fears, about Andy, about the world and about themselves.

Check in tomorrow, for the final installment of the series: “Let Your Characters Earn Their Happy Endings.”

As discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, the structure of Toy Story 3 is built around a simple desire shared by its characters, and unified around a simple theme, loyalty.   As Andy grows older and heads off to college, the desperate desire of the toys to be loved and played with leads them to question their loyalty to Andy, and his loyalty to them.  This leads the toys to seek out a new home, and new love, at a daycare center, only to discover that the very thing they most want is likely to be their destruction.

But one of the things that makes the structure of Toy Story 3 so successful is the way it explores different variations of the same theme, though the journey of its main character, Woody the Cowboy, the one toy Andy still loves enough to take with him to college.

Push Your Characters To The Limit

Unlike the other toys, who turn their back on Andy when they think he doesn’t love them anymore, Woody is a character governed by his loyalty.  But it’s easy to be loyal when you’re the most loved toy in the toybox.  So Woody too must be tested.

The structure of Toy Story 3 is designed to test Woody to the greatest extent possible, by forcing him to choose between the one thing he truly wants, to stay with his beloved Andy, and saving his friends from certain death at the hands of the daycare toddlers.

Remaining loyal to his friends, Woody risks losing the one thing he truly wants,  and proves himself worthy of Andy’s loyalty, and of ours.

In the process, he leads his friends to rediscover their own loyalty and their own faith, in Woody, in Andy, and in each other.

Wants Are The Foundation of Structure

As a writer, when you clearly establish your characters’ most deeply held desires early in the script, you arm yourself with the structural ammunition you need to build the kind of emotionally powerful story that moves your audience to laughter and tears.  Structure can then grow organically, as you inspire your characters to seek their desires, and create obstacles that test and challenge who they are, and what they believe in.

Check in for tomorrow’s installment: “Toy Story 3, Part 3: Create The Right Antagonist”

As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, Toy Story 3 does a wonderful job of building its structure around the greatest wish of its main characters: to be loved and played with by children.  When the toys feel that their owner Andy no longer cares about them, this desperate desire forces them to question their loyalty to him and seek out love and attention from new children at a daycare center.  By establishing the character’s most deeply held desire clearly from the start, the writers of Toy Story 3 give themselves the foundation they need for a great structure.

The Beauty of Unexpected Consequences

Great writers know that however beautiful or benign the character’s greatest wish may seem, they must explore both the best and the worst possible implications of fulfilling that wish.  And the toys of Toy Story get a heck of a lot more than they bargained for.

Trapped in a playroom ruled by a psychotic strawberry scented bear, and filled with insane toddlers, the non-age-appropriate toys are literally tortured by the fulfillment of their own greatest desire, played with nearly to death, until the best thing they can hope for is to somehow escape to a life of confinement in Andy’s attic– the very fate that they were fleeing when they came to the daycare center in the first place.

When you can make your main characters run from the very thing they most want, you know you are succeeding as a writer.

Toy Story 3 pushes this irony even further by exploring yet another riff on the theme of loyalty: the journey of the one toy Andy still loves enough to take with him to college: Woody the Cowboy…

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of the Toy Story 3 Series:  “The Foundation of Structure.”

If you’ve read the reviews, seen the movie, or talked to a friend, you know by now that just about everybody loves Toy Story 3.  Audiences cheer.  Critics gush.  Grown adults laugh and weep like children.  So what makes this movie work so well?  And how can you use its secrets to improve your own screenwriting?

Throughout the week, I’ll be exploring some answers to these questions, through a series of articles about the elements that make Toy Story 3 so successful.

Spoiler Alert: For those who have not yet seen the movie, please be aware that this series may reveal details of the story beyond what you’ve seen in the previews.

The Structural Engine of Your Character’s Desire

For all its emotional complexity, the engine of Toy Story 3′s structure is remarkably simple: a single want, shared by each and every one of its characters (just like it’s shared by each and every child): the desire to be loved and played with.

And the big problem which each and every character (just like each and every child and adult) must face is that kids get older, move on, and stop playing with their toys.  

How does a good toy stay loyal in a world like this?  And how does a boy stay loyal to the toys of his childhood?

These questions become the basis of the theme of Toy Story 3, and the glue that holds the emotional structure together.

Characters Who Shape Their Own Destinies

Like any good protagonists, these beloved toys aren’t just carried along by their fate.  Instead, they take action to control their own destinies.  Losing faith in Andy’s love, and believing they’ve been abandoned by the only owner they’ve ever had, they seek out a new life at a day care center, where their desperate desire to be loved and played with can be fulfilled by other children.

Of course, it can’t be that easy.

Check back for tomorrow’s article “Toy Story 3, Part 2: The Beauty of Unexpected Consequences”

Now, You Can Be A Part Of My Screenwriting Classes No Matter Where You Live!

Through the power of the internet, you can now join my upcoming “Write Your Screenplay” Monday Night Workshop from anywhere in the world.  It’s the next best thing to sitting in the room.

A Different Kind Of Online Class

Writing classes are about trust, community, and real-time give and take between student and teacher.  So unlike “online students” at other writing schools, you won’t be dealing with typed out lectures posted to impersonal online bulletin boards, or exposing your work to strangers that you don’t even know.

Instead, you’ll be catching the class live, and fully integrated into the discussion, with real-time video chat.  You’ll see us, and we’ll see you.  Ask questions.  Join the conversation.  Just like any other student.

• Real-time integration into my Summer Screenwriting Class here in NYC.
• All you need is an internet connection and a telephone.
• You can see us, and we can see you.
• Ask questions, give feedback, and participate actively, just like if you were in the room.

Pioneer The Program, and Save 30%

This will be my first time offering these classes, so in exchange for helping me work out the kinks, 5 students will have the opportunity to pioneer this program, beta test this brand new class and save 30% off the normal cost.

I am strictly limiting the number of beta testers to assure that we have time to address any technical issues that come up.  Beta testers will participate in a post-class survey which will help me to stream-line the system for future offerings.

Sign up now to reserve your spot.

Write Your Screenplay (Online)

With Award-Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger

July 12th – August 30, 2010
Mondays, 7pm-10pm, 8 Weeks
Only 1 Spot Left!

Cost:$550
Online Beta Tester: $385  Save 30%!

Read the whole Feedback series:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

It’s a simple fact.  Writers don’t like most of what they write.

And they don’t like most of what they read either.

Writers can be like rabid bloodhounds, ready to sniff out every flaw in a screenplay at a moment’s notice.

This isn’t your fault.  Countless years of English teachers, writing groups, screenwriting books and well-intentioned writing professors have trained you to approach a project in this way.

The problem is, when it comes to the creative process of writing, all that sniffing around doesn’t necessarily help.

In fact, if you’re on the receiving end of that kind of feedback, you probably know what it feels like to be the bird in the bloodhound’s jaws.

Not exactly inspiring.

How To Talk About The Bad Stuff

Whether the project is a fully developed work of art, or little baby script in need of some tender love and care, chances are that without any effort at all, you can uncover about 1001 different things that you would like to change.

But if you want to actually make a difference, your notes are going to need a context.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, the first step in talking about the bad stuff is to begin by thinking about the good stuff. (more…)

Read the whole Feedback series:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

All writers give and receive notes all the time.  We give notes to our friends, our colleagues, our writing buddies, and most importantly to ourselves.  We receive notes from producers, directors, teachers, agents, friends, family, and fellow writing students.

But how many of these notes actually help?

If you want to learn to give notes that actually help, both to yourself and to your fellow writers, there are two things that you absolutely must remember:

1)  Don’t try to fix anything, just concentrate on sharing your experience.
2)  Begin with what works.

When you begin your feedback with criticism, you can be pretty sure that the writer won’t hear a thing you say after your first sentence.  Inside their heads, their own private monologue will take over, subjecting them to a level of criticism you wouldn’t bestow on your worst enemy.

If you start with the bad, they’ll never hear the good.

On the other hand, when you begin with what works, you help a writer to see the potential in their writing, and open the doors that make moving forward possible.  At that point, the writer will follow you anywhere– and be able to process even your most brutally honest criticism in a way that is helpful and productive. (more…)

As I discussed in part 1 and part 2 of this series, writing is a highly intuitive process.  When notes take us away from our organic connection to our scripts, they tend to do more harm than good, no matter how helpful they may seem.

Whether you are a professional writer, or just picking up the pen for the first time, you’re going to have to deal with notes all the time.  From producers, from actors, from directors, from other writers, from family, from friends, and even from yourself.

And guess what.  You’re going to need them.

A New Approach To Feedback

If you’ve taken a class with me, you know that to succeed as a writer, you must learn not only how to give feedback, but also how to receive it.

Writers need to develop a filter between themselves and “good advice”, allowing the helpful stuff in, and filtering out the brilliant ideas that aren’t going to help you, before they can sway you one way or another.

The First Step

Whether you’re giving notes to another writer, or revising a draft of your own writing, the first step of this process is letting go of your desperate desire to immediately “fix” the screenplay, and instead to focus on communicating your experience, without judgment or advice.

Knowing how to give and receive feedback is not only vital to discovering your voice as a writer.  It’s also an invaluable tool in communicating with yourself as you evaluate your own writing.

In tomorrow’s article, I’ll be discussing the elements of truly helpful feedback, and the questions you can ask yourself to help you discover them.

As I discussed in yesterday’s post, it’s easy for most writers to identify a obviously terrible note.  The real danger occurs with the ones that often seem to be the most intelligent.

The Danger of Other People’s Ideas

If you’ve ever been part of a certain kind of writing group, you know what I’m talking about: the feeling of being blown back and forth from one brilliant idea to another, until you have no idea what you’re actually writing anymore.

For all the conscious thought writers put into their screenplays, writing is an organic, intuitive process.  And when we lose that instinctual connection to what we are writing, our scripts tend to fall apart, no matter how brilliant the ideas we are serving.

And yet we NEED help.

We need feedback.  We need classes.  And we need teachers.

So what the heck are we supposed to do?

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, in which I’ll be introducing a new approach to feedback that can change your whole experience as a writer.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!

When I finished my first screenplay, I did what any self-respecting screenwriter does.  I sent it to my mom.  She read the script, and called me gushing with pride.

For about half an hour, my mom waxed poetic about every nuance of the script: the story, the imagery, the profound metaphorical qualities.

She only had one question.  Even though it all “worked”, she was a little bit confused about why the characters were saying certain dialogue to each other…

“EXT. STREET – DAY” for example.

That was when I realized I was in trouble.

She thought the slug lines were dialogue that the characters were speaking them to each other.

And she loved me so much, she actually enjoyed it!

Good Notes And Bad Notes

As good as it feels to receive praise (and sometimes even helpful advice) about our scripts, we have to be extremely careful about who we take feedback from.

Very few people actually know how to write a script that works.  And though I like to tease my mom, the truth is that much worse notes have been given by countless screenwriting teachers, development executives, and well-meaning professional writers.

Whether it comes from a big time producer or a loving family member, it’s fairly easy for writers to recognize an obviously bad note.

It’s the helpful ones that are truly dangerous.

As Writers, We Desperately Need Feedback On Our Work.

But when writers try to solve each other’s scripts, they usually end up doing more harm than good.

Over the next week, I’ll be adding a series of posts about how to give feedback, not only for other writers, but also for yourself.   Make sure to come back and check them out.

It’s no wonder that some of the greatest writers began their careers as actors.

The art of writing and acting have always been profoundly intertwined. All of the greatest writers have had an instinctual understanding of the actors craft, the ability to create a character, to play with and against text, and to shape a journey over the course of a play or movie.

And every great actor has an instinctive understanding of a writer’s craft as well: the ability to cultivate a compelling arc for a character, by exploring the dramatic structure and the conscious and unconscious desires that lie underneath the text.

Dramatic writing could not exist without acting. And acting could not exist without dramatic writing. Yet strangely, these interrelated fields are often taught as if they were separate disciplines, with actors receiving little training in writing, and writers receiving even less training in acting.

As any of you who have taken my classes know, for precisely this reason I’ve always integrated acting concepts into my writing classes.

Now, I’m offering a brand new class, which will allow you to experience screenwriting from the other side of the page:

ACTING FOR WRITERS
An Acting Class With A Writing Twist

Next Offered: Fall 2010

READ MORE

CONTACT US to Join Waiting List

Under the guidance of acclaimed director and teacher Isabel Milenski, you will discover how to knock down the walls between you and your characters through the magic of performance.

You’ll not only learn how an actor approaches a play or screenplay, you’ll have the experience of physically inhabiting a character, taking with you a new perspective that will forever change the way you see both writing and acting.

So, whether you’ve always dreamed of being on the stage or screen, or simply want to deepen your own writing by understanding the actor’s craft, you’ve got to take this class!

No experience is required. Only a desire to explore and create.

Kick Ass! Does Just That…
It’s rare that you see a big budget action movie that succeeds on as many levels as Kick Ass! Hilarious, high stakes action sequences, directorial vision, fabulous characters, bold acting choices, and more-fun-than-you-can-shake-a-nunchuck-at combine to make Kick Ass! the kind of action movie producers and audiences alike can salivate over.  (The audience last night was literally cheering through the credits when the movie ended).  

The Promise of the Premise
Every movie makes its audience a promise– what I like to call  The Promise of the Premise.  This promise is the built-in anticipation that convinces your viewers to pay their 12 bucks on your movie instead of some other flick.

Fulfill the promise of the premise, and your audience will be happy to appreciate your deep meaning, thoughts about the world, brilliant dialogue, and symbolic image systems right along with it.  Fall short, and it doesn’t matter how brilliant your writing is, no one is going to make your movie.

Make The Promise of the Premise Work For You
Unless Brad Pitt is knocking down your door right now, when it comes to selling your script, The Promise of the Premise is the only thing the producer can depend on.

For writers, the adaptation and revision process has many aspects.  But for producers, there’s really only one aspect that’s important: narrowing the gap between The Promise of the Premise, and what the script actually delivers.

As a writer who wants your work produced, you can harness this knowledge to focus your adaptation and revision process– whether that’s you’re adapting an idea for a movie into an actual script, revising a rough draft into more polished form, or creating a film version of a true life story, a novel, or a comic book like Kick Ass!

The best movies don’t just fulfill The Promise of the Premise.  They exceed it.

Make YOUR Premise Kick Ass!
From the title alone, you know the promise of Kick Ass!:  A tongue in cheek, goofy as hell, ass-kicking good time in which the least likely super heroes in the world will triumph over some serious bad guys.

But what makes Kick Ass! so successful is how it takes that promise and pushes it to the extreme, exaggerating both the comedy and the darkness of the main character’s journey, taking it further than he, or his audience, could ever have expected.

The result is a movie that is not only a rollicking good time, but also captures the best elements of the comic book form, to say something real about personal responsibility and how hard it is to actually take action against the things that are wrong in the world.

Stop Selling Out, and Sell In…
Young writers often think fulfilling The Promise of the Premise means selling out.  They then make the mistake of either rejecting the promise of their own premise as an affront to their artistic integrity, or trying so desperately to write something “commercial” that they end up creating nothing but a hollow shell as a movie.

Whether you’re writing a hilarious action spoof like Kick Ass! or a deep character driven movie like A Prophet, your job as a screenwriter is to discover your premise and push it to the max.

But The Promise of The  Premise isn’t something you impose on your script from the outside.  It’s something that’s already there, suggested in every facet of your characters journey, and in every word you write, just waiting for you to discover it and bring it to the surface.

That’s not selling out.  That’s the art of the screenwriter.

And the good news is, you can learn it.
If you’d like to learn how to harness the promise of your own premise, I invite you to join my upcoming screenwriting workshop Adaptation & Revision, starting on Monday April 19th @ 145 W 28th Street, 3rd Flr, NYC.

Whether you’re starting from scratch with a new idea, working on a screenplay adaptation, or revising an early draft of an existing screenplay, this class will forever change the way you look at screenwriting.

Curious?  Come check out your first session for only $20 bucks with no further obligation.

Thanks to Chaweon Koo for forwarding this great memo from David Mamet to the writers of his Emmy-nominated series The Unit.

It’s amazing how even professional writers still need to be reminded of the fundamental principles of writing.

I particularly appreciate the way Mamet differentiates between the producer’s (often misguided) desire to make things clear with “information” and the writer’s need to create drama.

As Mamet puts it: (Please excuse his capital letters.  He’s an excitable guy!)

“ANY DICKHEAD WITH A BLUESUIT CAN BE (AND IS) TAUGHT TO SAY “MAKE IT CLEARER”, AND “I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT HIM”.

WHEN YOU’VE MADE IT SO CLEAR THAT EVEN THIS BLUESUITED PENGUIN IS HAPPY, BOTH YOU AND HE OR SHE WILL BE OUT OF A JOB.”

That’s because, as Mamet so brilliantly points out, nobody watches a movie for exposition.  They watch a movie for an experience.  And creating that experience is all about character.

Put all your focus on taking care of your audience, and despite all your hard work, they’ll be snoozing in their seats.

Focus on your character, and your audience will follow you anywhere.

That means creating a character who wants something desperately, tries to get it against overwhelming odds, and in so doing undergoes a journey that will forever change his or her life.

This is what Mamet calls drama.  Again, in his words:

“QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.

SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.”

Mamet follows up with a “crock of shit” list of  important rules for seeking out and destroying non-dramatic scenes. As all of you know, I’m suspicious of any rules when it comes to writing.  But these are definitely worth considering. Here are some of the highlights:

“ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.”

“ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.”

“IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.”

“IF YOU DEPRIVE YOURSELF OF THE CRUTCH OF NARRATION, EXPOSITION,INDEED, OF SPEECH. YOU WILL BE FORGED TO WORK IN A NEW MEDIUM – TELLING THE STORY IN PICTURES (ALSO KNOWN AS SCREENWRITING)”

“LOOK AT THE SCENE AND ASK YOURSELF “IS IT DRAMATIC? IS IT ESSENTIAL? DOES IT ADVANCE THE PLOT?  ANSWER TRUTHFULLY.  IF THE ANSWER IS “NO” WRITE IT AGAIN OR THROW IT OUT.”

Of course, like any rules, these too have exceptions.  Watch the opening of Inglourious Basterds for example, and tell me if that scene would have been better if it had been written like a silent movie.

Or take the completely non-essential “McLovin’ and the cops” sequences out of Superbad and see if you still want to watch the movie.

I think what distinguishes these exceptions is that even though they violate many of the rules of Mamet’s memo, they are true to the three principles that create drama:  a character pursuing something he or she desperately wants, against tremendous odds, and in a way that will forever change his or her life.

And of course it doesn’t hurt if you’re funny.

So I open it up to you.

What do you think about Mamet’s rules?

Do you have an example of a successful movie,  in which two characters talk about a third in riveting ways or break other rules from the list with breathtaking results?

Do you have a thought about a film that could have been saved by a generous dose of David Mamet?

Go ahead and chime in.  Respond in the comments section of this post, and I will put a list together.

You can read the full David Mamet memo here.

Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! just might be the most dangerous book out there for writers.

And you should read it.

But first, you need to recognize how to harness what’s valuable in Save The Cat!, while understanding the principles that make it so potentially destructive.

Blake Snyder isn’t dangerous because he is wrong.  He’s not.  He’s not dangerous because his ideas about how to build a script around a great premise aren’t brilliant.   They are.

Blake Snyder is dangerous because he doesn’t teach you how to be a writer.  He teaches you how to be a salesperson.

What’s Right About Save the Cat!?

You’re going to need a lot of money to turn your script into a movie.  That’s true whether you are writing a tiny independent film that you are going to shoot in your backyard.  Or the next incarnation of Avatar.

Unless you are ridiculously wealthy, or have a generous uncle waiting with a check in his hand, making your movie is probably going to take more money than you have.  And that means you’re going to need to convince people that they should put their own hard earned money behind your production.

We call these people producers.  They tend to make writers pretty darn angry.  That’s because they couldn’t care less about your artistic vision, the integrity of your writing, or how your script is going to change the world.

When a producer invests in your movie, he or she is investing in one thing: the chance that your movie is going to put butts in seats.

Without butts in seats, your movie is going to lose money.  And no matter how brilliant your artistic vision, it’s not going to change the world, make anybody laugh, cry or buy an overpriced barrel of popcorn.   Because no one is ever going to see it.

And that’s where Blake Snyder is right.  No one is going to go see your movie unless the producer knows how to sell it.  That means you need a great premise, that grabs the audience’s attention and makes them want to see your movie.  And once they’re in the theater, you’ve got to out-do the promise you’ve made to your audience, so that they can go and talk to their friends about how cool your movie was and drive even more butts to the theatre.

The Save The Cat! approach is to basically turn your script into a giant sales pitch.  A living, breathing advertising device that looks so irresistible that audiences can’t help but see it, and producers can’t help but buy it, whether it’s any good or not.

Sounds like a pretty good idea, right?

Except that it’s not going to work for you.

That’s because, unless you happen to be born into a Hollywood family (Snyder’s father was producer Kenneth Snyder) or already have a multi-million dollar hit in your back pocket, nobody who is anybody is going to take a chance on your crappy script.  No matter how good the premise is.

Selling Out Is For Professionals

It’s true. Hollywood is filled with writers who sell bad screenplays with great premises, and make a lot of money doing it.

And you can too.

That is, if you already happen to be a big time writer.

The problem is, if you’re like most writers, it probably means that you don’t have a multi-million dollar hit in your back pocket.  And in that case nobody who is anybody is going to take a chance on your bad script.

This may seem like an unfair double standard.  But it’s not.  And if you don’t believe me, just answer this question:

Whose next script is more likely to make you money on your investment: Quentin Tarantino’s or Joe Smith’s?

You don’t even know what the script is about, but you already know the answer.  Tarantino has a whole track record to point to.  Joe just has his script.

If Joe is going to convince anyone to take a chance on him, that script had better be good.  Real good.  It had better make them believe in it so strongly that they’d put their own reputation, and their own hard earned money, on the line to make it.

The truth is, “great ideas” in Hollywood are a dime a dozen.  And so are writers with impressive track records.

But genuinely good scripts are incredibly rare.

A good script is gold in Hollywood.  And you can write one.

Blake Snyder Can Show You How To Sell It.  But He Can’t Show You How To Write It.

There’s a reason Blake Snyder’s magnum opus was Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot.

Whether the movie you’re writing is a deeply moving drama, a popcorn munching action flick, or a teen sex comedy, there’s no short cut around the writing process.  At least not if you want to write a good movie.

The Four Phases of Writing

In my classes, I break down the writing process into four phases.  I’ll be detailing them further in future newsletters, but for now, here’s a brief overview:

1. The ME Draft
2. The AUDIENCE Draft
3. The PRODUCER Draft
4. The READER Draft

What Blake Snyder is describing in Save The Cat! is actually simply the PRODUCER phase of this process:  the stage of adaptation and revision that focuses on amplifying the most marketable elements in your screenplay to turn it into candy for producers.

It’s a great place to end up.  But it’s a lousy place to start.

Don’t Spend Your Writing Life Feeling Like A Used Car Salesman

No offense to any used-car dealers out there, but you’re not going to break into an industry as competitive as the film industry by peddling a broken down jalopy with a fancy paint job.

You may fool your Aunt Ida.  But a real producer can tell when an engine isn’t running.

Open Yourself To The Process

If you let yourself be seduced into thinking about the pitch before you even have anything worth selling, you’re not going to get where you want to go.

Just like the kid who talks the most smack on the basketball court is probably not going to the NBA.  At least not until he learns to shoot.

Learning to shoot in the world of screenwriting begins with discovering your character, and taking him or her on a profound journey.

It means getting in touch with your subconscious creative mind, which could care less about marketability, and sales-pitches, and creating a story that exceeds your own plans and expectations.

Then, when you decide to “Save The Cat”, you’ll be doing it for the right reasons:  to amplify and focus what already makes your screenplay great, and to shape it into a form that the producer can salivate over.

Don’t worry, you’re going to have plenty of time to sell out later.  But you have to become a writer first.

Learn To Understand The Four Phases of Writing

Curious about learning a more effective way to  “Save the Cat” in your own writing?  Come check out my upcoming screenwriting workshops.

Rather than imposing a cheesy sales pitch from the outside, you’ll learn to identify the underlying hook that already exists in your work, and focus your writing to bring it to the surface, intensify your character’s journey, and shape a story that grabs your audience and won’t let them go.

There are many reasons to brave the shocking violence of Thomas Bidigain and Jacques Audiard’s new film, A Prophet (Un Prophéte).  This brilliantly crafted screenplay, which takes you into the brutal world of a French prison through its main character, Malik, makes the prison world of The Shawshank Redemption look like daycare.  As you follow Malik’s haunting and deeply affecting journey, you are forced to empathize with people and actions you would normally consider unforgivable, and discover the humanity in characters whose defining traits are not only immoral, but downright horrific.

As screenwriters and screenwriting students, we often worry about the “like-ability” of our main characters.  In fact, entire books (Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat for example) have been crafted around the principle that unless your main character is a “nice” person– a saver of cats, a lover of children, a hooker with a heart of gold– an audience will be unable to connect with them or care about them.  Writers who cling to this principle often find themselves cut off from their characters, and with them, from their writer’s voice.   Much as we often do in our personal lives, such writers find themselves covering up their character’s “true self” for fear of offending some unknown audience who might judge, hate, or worst of all, stop caring about a character who doesn’t conform to society’s ideals.

The result, of course, is boring, lifeless, one-dimensional characters, who neither live, breathe, nor make mistakes: characters who are less real than the people who write them, and therefore not worthy of our attention.  Building your movie around a character like this is like taking a cruise in a leaky boat.  Without a real character around whom to build your structure, you’re going to spend most of your time bailing out water.

You spend all your time trying to create a character who is likable– only to discover that nobody likes them anyway.

So how do Bidigain and Audiard get away with it?  How do they manage to make an audience fall in love with a cast of horrible people– while you can’t even get anyone to care about the most noble character in your whole movie?

Read on.

But first, a spoiler alert.  If you haven’t already seen A Prophet get yourself to a theatre!  This movie is way too good to miss.  And far too instructive as well.

To understand how Bidigain and Audiard can make your heart break for characters who should, by every definition, be “un-likable”, we only need to examine one scene.  It comes toward the end of the movie.  Cesar Luciani, the white-haired Corsican crime boss, has spotted Malik, our hero, in the yard, standing with his new Muslim friends.  This is a huge change, especially in the racially charged atmosphere of the prison.  Up until now, Malik has spent every day in the yard with Cesar, forsaking his own Arab people for the protection of Cesar’s Corsican gang.   But today, everything is different.  Though Cesar doesn’t yet know it, Malik has betrayed him.  Cesar’s once powerful connections, both inside and outside the prison, are gone.  Malik is the only thing he has left.

Cesar gestures to Malik with a gentle nod of his head to come over.  But Malik doesn’t move.  Cesar nods again, more desperate now.  Still no response from Malik.

Cesar makes a decision.  He stands up, and walks across the yard toward Malik, crossing the invisible line that divides the Corsican from the Muslim prison population.  Malik sends two thugs to intercept Cesar, but the old man pushes right past them.  As weakened as he may be, we know what Cesar can do– his limitless capacity for violence.  And at this moment, seeing how much power remains in the old man, we fear for Malik.  It seems like truly nothing can stop Cesar.

And then, one swift punch from a nameless thug, and Cesar is lying on the ground, writhing in agony, exposed for exactly what he is– an old man for whose only remaining connection in the world has just been severed.

At that moment, your heart breaks for Cesar.

Even as you feel the emotion, you’re shocked that it’s even possible to feel this way.  After all, this is the man who targeted the young Malik, without provocation, and brutalized him until Malik was forced to bend to his will.  This is the man who forced Malik to commit the bloody murder that changed him forever, in a scene so shockingly violent that the man in front of me at the theatre started whimpering and waving his hands in front of his face, unable to contain his visceral reaction.

This is a man who has nearly removed Malik’s eye with a spoon, has beaten him, humiliated him, corrupted him, brutalized him, called him an Arab dog, and treated him like a slave.  A criminal, a racist, a brutal, corrupt man without a noble or kind bone in his body.

How is it possible that you can feel this way about this truly horrible person?  Can your heart really be breaking for him?

Of course it can.

Your heart breaks because you know Malik’s heart is breaking.  And of course it is.  Because at this moment, Malik is losing the best parts of himself: his compassion, his humanity, and even more.

This orphan, this troubled child, raised in a group home without ever knowing his father or mother, is losing the only father he ever had.

Cesar may have been a terrible father.  But he is nonetheless a father.  He has protected Malik, provided for his physical needs, given him protection, opportunity, power, access, leave-days from prison, and even the possibility of parole.  He has bestowed affection and praise.  He has turned Malik into a man– and into an image of himself.

In my classes, I often talk about archetypal structure: using supporting characters in a Jungian fashion to reveal the repressed aspects of your main character, and to force your main character to come to terms with the parts of himself that he doesn’t want to even admit are there.  In true archetypal fashion, Cesar is both the biggest threat to Malik– the key to unlocking the darkest aspects Malik’s personality– and the loving father Malik so desperately needs.

And at this moment, Malik has murdered him.

He’s done so literally, by betraying Cesar to the powerful Italian crime boss that Cesar had plotted to kill, and metaphorically, by leaving the old man trembling in the yard at the moment he most needs him.

For just as Cesar has been an archetypal father for Malik, so too has Malik been the closest thing Cesar has had to a son.

And at this moment, Cesar is losing him.

That’s why, at this moment, you find yourself silently pleading with Malik.

Go to him.  Go to him.  Don’t leave him there, trembling on the ground.

A “like-able” character would do it.  He’d run to Cesar, embrace him like a father, and the two men would be reconciled, like Billy Elliot and his own terrible father after the final dance sequence.

Malik doesn’t.  He makes the “unlikeable” decision.  And you understand.  You empathize.  And you care.  Because Malik doesn’t have a choice.  He has to steel his heart against Cesar, or Cesar will destroy him.

You empathize, because Malik is struggling with the same desire you are feeling as you watch him.  The voice in his head saying Go to him.  That desperate desire we all have: to reconcile with those who have most hurt us, to be a compassionate person, to have everything be okay.

Empathy doesn’t come from like-ability.  Just like back in high school.  Remember that annoying kid who always wanted to hang out with you?  It didn’t matter how nice he was.  You didn’t want to spend time with him.  Because he wasn’t being himself.  He was being who he thought you wanted him to be.

Empathy comes from allowing your characters to be who they are, and to pursue what they most want and need, against impossible odds.

Empathy comes when you make it hard, and allow your characters to make the decisions, right or wrong, that only they can make.

Wow!  It’s hard to believe we’ve already reached the official end of the 2010 Screenwriting Challenge.  To everyone who participated, congratulations!  You’ve made a huge commitment to your writing life that will continue to pay dividends far into the future.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the fabulous Challenge Party last night.  We had a great time!

Classes start TONIGHT (Feb 1st) so I’d like to take this opportunity to invite you all to come check them out (remember, you can check out your first session for only 20 bucks)

Where To Go From Here

Even if you didn’t do the challenge perfectly, if you’ve stuck with it, you’ve probably found by now that you’re in a pretty good rhythm.  In fact, you may even notice you start to feel strange on days when you don’t write!

Take a moment to celebrate and commemorate your success, and then keep that rhythm going!

Remember, writing begets more writing.  Obey that little clock in your head that says “oh, it’s time to do my pages today!”

For those of you who have struggled to find your rhythm, or are still finishing the challenge, remember, each page you write brings you one step closer to the rhythm you’re seeking.  So the best way to get to where you want to be is to build upon where you are.

Take a moment right now to celebrate what you have accomplished.  Forget for a little while about where you fell short, and concentrate instead on where you succeeded.  If you’re writing more now than when you began the challenge, you’re already a success.

So celebrate the days you did write, rather than bemoaning the ones you didn’t.  Even writing once a week can become the foundation for a writing life.

You may also want to spend a little time examining things that are getting in the way of establishing your rhythm.

Have you been beating yourself up over the quality of your work, rather than keeping the focus on how many pages you are generating?

Are you allowing yourself to enjoy the feeling of success that comes with completing your pages, or are you cheating yourself of the joy of writing by focusing on your failures?

Are there activities that are getting in the way of your writing, favorite procrastination techniques that make writing “impossible”, or small changes you could make to your day to carve out the 15 minutes you need?

Do you have the support you need to get you through the difficult writing times?  Or is it time to sign up for a workshop, master class, script consultation, or hypnosis session?

As you look back at your pages, you may find that you have many pages you love, or there might just be a few.  Focus on the things that you can build on.  It might be just one page.  It might be one line.  It might be a character you’re curious about, an image that resonates for you, or a rhythm you want to explore.

You can use these exciting bits to inspire the next phase of your writing journey.  Some of them may even grow into complete screenplays!  Others may seem useless now, and then surprise you when they pop back into your head as the perfect answer to something you are struggling with in your writing.

Whatever rhythm you have established for yourself, make sure you keep it up.  These three pages you write every day are sacred– one of the few times you get to simply play as a writer, exploring ideas without the need for “usable” pages, “good” writing, or a “finished” product.

Stay tuned for my next newsletter, in which I’ll be discussing some steps you can take to set yourself on the next phase of your writing journey.

If you’ve completed the full 30 days of writing, please drop me a line and let me know about your experiences!

Here’s a great, FREE teleseminar for any of you who are struggling with procrastination.  Audrey Sussman is more than just a brilliant hypnotherapist… she’s also my mom!

I’m sure you’re going to love her teleseminar.  And you don’t even have to go anywhere to experience it!

CONQUERING PROCRASTINATION
A Workshop For Creative, Intelligent People Who Get Stuck
With Dr. Audrey Sussman, PhD, LCSW, NBCCH
Thursday, January 28th at 9:15pm

Here’s a link to sign up:

http://www.actionsendsprocrastination.com/freecall/

You can learn more about all the wonderful work she does at her website:  http://www.anxietycontrolcenter.com

A question from a student:

Question for you: I wrote a short script that this guy wants to film and possibly enter into some festivals. I just want the writing credit, no money- do you think a contract is necessary in a case like this? Or is a gentleman’s agreement usually good? Luke S.

Jake’s Answer:

Glad to hear about the upcoming move and even more exciting– the good news about this guy making your script.

Although I’m not a lawyer myself and can’t give legal advice, my suggestion, for both of your protection, never ever ever ever ever do a deal without a contract.

Get a standard, boiler plate contract (you can probably find one online or ask a lawyer or agent friend to find one for you). Have a lawyer friend make any modifications necessary, and make sure your lawyer friend looks it over before you sign anything.

Do not negotiate a deal yourself. Do not make up your own contract. Most likely neither of you know enough about the law or standard practices in the industry to make a deal that will actually protect you.

Written contracts clarify what both of your expectations are– and without them, many of the best partnerships can end up being destroyed– not only when things go badly, but also when they go well.

For example: Your movie ends up becoming the all time biggest festival hit ever. Hollywood decides they want to turn it into a feature… they’re offering a ton of money.

If you have a contract: You know in advance how much of that money you get, and your buddy knows how much he gets. You’re both happy and delighted and get to go have a drink and celebrate your success together.

If you don’t– you and your buddy now have to fight over how much of that money you deserve. He argues you would have had nothing without his producing. You argue he would have nothing without your script. Before long, you hate each other, and possibly even end up killing the deal because you can’t work out your side of the bargain and neither of you can move ahead without the other’s consent.

I can tell you from experience that fight will happen no matter how good a guy your friend may be– because people do crazy things when that much money is on the table.

Another example: The studio wants to make the movie, but they want to hire a bigger name writer. If you have a contract, your buddy tells them “sorry guys, I’ve got a contract with this guy– I can’t do it”.  If he doesn’t– he now has to make a choice between taking a stand for you, and possibly blowing not only the deal but his relationship with the studio, or saying yes to their demands and destroying his friendship with you. Not a fun situation to be in.

Use a lawyer. It won’t cost you nearly as much as the pain you suffer later if you don’t. Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts may even help you for free. And it may very well save your relationship.

Come party with me at the annual:

2010 SCREENWRITING CHALLENGE PARTY!
Sunday, January 31st, 2010, 9 pm
Playwright Tavern*
202 W 49th St.
(between 7th Ave & Broadway)
New York, NY 10019
212-262-9263

*Make sure not to confuse it with the OTHER Playwright Tavern on 8th Ave. We won’t be there!

Celebrate your achievement, win prizes, share your experiences, indulge in discounted drinks, and make some new writer friends!

Whether you’ve participated in every day of the challenge, or are just getting your feet wet in the writing world, this party is for you.

You’ll also have the opportunity to mingle with some of my Master Class Writers, who will be celebrating the completion of their reading series!

Hope to see you all there!

We’re now more than halfway through the 2010 Screenwriting Challenge. For those of you who are still writing every day, congratulations! You’re taking a giant step toward becoming the writer you want to be.

But what if you’re struggling? What if your writing schedule is spotty or uneven? What if there were some days when you didn’t write a word.

Even the best writers have days when they feel like they just don’t have it in them. So this newsletter is about understanding where writers block comes from, so you can start turning those tough writing days into days that you can be proud of.

Also, please save the date for the annual CHALLENGE PARTY!

2010 SCREENWRITING CHALLENGE PARTY!
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
9 pm
Location To Be Announced! NYC Area.

Celebrate your achievement, win prizes, share your experiences, and make some new writer friends!

Hope to see you all there!

ARTICLE
WHAT TO DO WHEN IT’S JUST NOT COMING
Understanding the Causes of Writers Block

Read The Article

WHAT TO DO WHEN IT’S JUST NOT COMING
Understanding the Causes of Writers Block

It’s the most coveted time for writers. The rare moment when the words are just flowing, when writing feels effortless and the ideas are coming faster than you can write them down. During times like these, it’s easy to think of yourself as a writer.

But how are you supposed to think of yourself as a real writer at times when the words are NOT flowing? What do you do when you find yourself staring at a blank page, wondering if you even have anything worthwhile to say.

The way you respond to these difficult writing times will define your life as a writer, and the happiness and longevity of your writing career.

The times when things are not flowing are as natural a part of the writing process as the times when things are. But because these times can be so trying emotionally, we often experience them as writing failures. One perceived failure builds upon another, and before long we start to fear writing. Under these circumstances, even the thought of sitting down to write can become painful.

This is often the real source of writers block, a long chain of negative emotions, linked together until you feel completely paralyzed in your writing.

In order to break through these kinds of blocks, you need to break the chain of fear and pain associated with writing. One of the ways I do this with many of my coaching clients is through hypnosis.

The experiences of your creative life do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are interwoven with other elements of your life, and the millions of other emotions you experience every day.

In fact, you can imagine each event in your life like a single domino in the most complex arrangement of dominoes in the world. Within this arrangement, your creative experiences are mixed in and interwoven with the emotions of your entire personal history, spanning from your childhood all the way into the future. Family conflicts, romantic relationships, dreams, successes, failures, old traumas and new hopes, everything is included, and more importantly, interconnected.

It’s no wonder then that positive or negative feelings you associate with writing can profoundly affect the way you feel in every other aspect of your life. After a successful writing day, you feel fully charged, confident, hopeful, ready to take on the world. But on days when it’s just not coming, negative emotions can spill over from your writing life into the rest of your experience, leading to feelings of grief, fear, hopelessness, or even depression.

The result is often a vicious cycle. The more the negative feelings pile up, the more blocked you become, and the more you beat yourself up emotionally. The negative feelings associated with this self abuse get attached to the ones that got you blocked in the first place. And instead of releasing your blocks, you end up reinforcing them.

The first step you can take toward freeing yourself from writers block is recognizing the cycle of self abuse when it’s happening, and forcing yourself to put a stop to it.

But for some writers, this may not be enough.

The deepest creative blocks reside at the unconscious level, so to deal with them effectively, you may need some unconscious help. Imagine if rather than trying to consciously wrestle with each and every emotional “domino” in your chain one by one, you could use the power of your unconscious mind to simply track your creative block directly to its source. Push down that first “domino”, release that emotion and everything else on the chain falls into place. Just like an arrangement of dominoes.

If this sounds good to you, it’s probably time to set up a private hypnosis session.

More information about hypnosis and upcoming screenwriting workshops.

We’re now nearly 11 days into the 2010 Screenwriting Challenge, and the response has been tremendous. I’ve heard from so many of you, expressing the excitement of those who are enjoying the challenge, as well as the questions of those who are struggling with it.

Here are some of the common questions that tend to come up with the challenge and some answers that may help you jump-start your writing.

I’d also like to make you all aware of a special offer that will allow you to check out any of my upcoming classes and workshops for only $20 bucks!

If you missed the first newsletter and you’re not sure what all this Challenge stuff is about, find out more here.

Common Questions About The Challenge:

Question:
I really wanted to participate, but I missed the deadline to get started. Should I just wait until next time?

Answer:
It’s never too late to join the challenge. Go out today, buy yourself a journal, and get started. Give yourself 30 days, and start writing. The important thing is the commitment to writing every day, not the day you start or finish.

As writers, we often feel the urge to put off our writing for the “right” time, when we are less busy, less stressed out, have more time, more money, etc. We imagine some nearby future when we’ll have the time to pursue our passion. But as we all know too well, the “right” time never comes. We are always just a little too busy, too stressed, or too broke. And of course, the fact that we’re not writing makes those negative feelings even worse.

There’s only one guaranteed way to make the “right” time come, by carving out the tiny bit of time you do have right now, and using that to build the future you want.

Question:
I’ve been doing the challenge, but I hate everything I’m writing. And now I feel like I’m starting to lose steam.

Answer:
As writers we play a strange game with ourselves. Instead of dwelling on our successes, we focus on our failures as evidence that we were not meant to be writers. Usually this has more to do with fear than anything else. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Fear that we don’t have what it takes.

When your judgment of your writing is based on fear, it has little connection to reality. You may dismiss brilliant writing as terrible simply because you are afraid that others won’t like it. Or you may fall in love with scenes that are not working, simply because they feel safe to you.

There are many ways to overcome these kinds of fears. Many writers find that it helps to join one of my Workshops or Master Classes, where you can receive honest feedback about what is actually working or not working in your writing, rather than playing out your worst fears in your head.

Writers block isn’t just about the actual writing. It’s about the subconscious, underlying emotions that get in the way of writing. For deep rooted emotional blocks, many students set up private coaching sessions with me. In these sessions, we use cutting-edge hypnotic techniques to get under the surface, uncover the subconscious roots of your creative blocks, and eliminate them at the source.

Here’s something you can do today to put yourself on the path to discovering the writer within you: give yourself the permission to write badly.

All writers write badly, all the time. Even the true greats leave hundreds of discarded pages in their hard drives, never to see the light of day. Accepting that this is a natural part of the process allows you to focus your energy where it belongs: not on judging the pages, but on creating them.

When you give yourself permission to write badly, you are actually allowing inspiration in. You will notice that your writing becomes more fun and exciting, freer, and fuller. Writing ceases to be a chore, and begins to feel like an adventure. Before long, you’ll discover that you no longer have to drag yourself to your journal in the morning. You actually want to write!

Of course, there is a time when judging your work is important, when it’s time to invite the editing brain to the table, and give it free reign to pull apart the pages you’ve written. But it is not during the initial creation of your work. Remember, it is only by writing the bad stuff that you discover the good.

Question:
I started strong, but then I missed a day and got totally out of rhythm. Now I’m three days behind and it doesn’t seem worth it anymore. Maybe I’m not really dedicated to this after all.

Answer:
Usually when a writer is thinking about giving up, it’s more about fear than about rhythm. But there are times when we simply get off our game. Here’s the key: don’t let a couple of missed days get between you and your life as a writer.

If a vegetarian accidentally takes a bite of a burger, it doesn’t mean he is no longer a vegetarian. It just means he took a bite of a burger.

But countless writers will interpret a day or two of missed writing as evidence that they are not really dedicated to their craft.

Usually the truth is the opposite. If writing was just a hobby for you, you wouldn’t be agonizing over your missed writing days. You’d just find another hobby.

In fact, it’s probably your fierce dedication to being a writer that’s causing you so much agony. Because you’re not writing and you don’t understand why.

Dwelling in the past is not going to help you overcome this problem. The only way to get back into rhythm is by allowing yourself permission to not be perfect. There are going to be days that you miss. There might even be weeks. The key is recognizing when you get off rhythm, and picking back up as soon as you do. Grab your journal, hide out for 15 minutes, and write today.

Soon, you’ll discover that you don’t even have to try to find your rhythm. Your rhythm will find you.

POWER YOUR PLOT
With These Vital Structural Elements

Today seems like a good day to talk about completions.

Not just the kind of completions you make in your life.  The kinds of completions you make in your scenes.

Completions are the single most important element in distinguishing a successful scene from an unsuccessful one.

No matter how creative you are as a writer, no matter how compelling your characters, no matter how well observed your dialogue may be, if your scenes don’t have completions, they’re not going to drive your story forward.

Completions are the key to making the leap from scene to structure– making your scenes actually DO what you need them to do in order to serve your story.

Get them right, and you can screw up a lot of other stuff and still tell a great story.

Get them wrong, and all you’ve got is a bunch of smoke and mirrors, no matter how brilliant you may be.

So what is a completion?  And how can you use completions in your own work?

Every Scene Begins With A Character

Before you can fully understand what a completion is and how to use it in your movie, it’s important to begin by understanding what a character is.

Now, this may seem like an elementary question.  We see characters every day.  Your girlfriend, your brother, your boss, your best friend, they’re all characters.  But as writers, we must understand character on an even deeper level, so that we can begin to discover a structure for a movie that tests your character and forces her to expand or change in a profound way.

Doing this does not require an intricate road map of every psychological nuance of your character.  And it certainly doesn’t require a “paint by numbers” outline of the plot of your movie.

All it actually requires is a simple want: what the great acting teacher Stanislavski would describe as an “objective” for the character to pursue in the scene.

Objectives can be as big as saving the world, and as small as a drink of water.  But to serve you structurally, a couple of things should be clear about the objective.

1) The Character Had Better Want It BADLY.
2)  It Better Be Hard To Get

When objectives are easily achieved, they don’t mean much structurally.  But when they’re hard to get, and deeply desired, they become the guideposts to understanding a character’s journey.

Remember the scene in Trainspotting in which Ewan McGregor climbs into the “worst toilet in Britain” to retrieve his opium suppositories?  Of course you do.  If he’d simply been able to get high in a normal way, you might have been grossed out, but you’d have forgotten the scene long ago.  And more importantly, you’d never really understand the profundity of his addiction.

Every Scene Ends With A Completion

Scenes happen when a character, in his or her own unique way, battles against an obstacle to get what he or she wants.  But no matter how big your obstacles and how strong with your objectives, without completions the structure of your movie can’t take shape.

Completions occur when one phase of your character’s journey ends, and another begins.  When a want is either achieved or abandoned, leading to a new objective and a new obstacle.

Because film is a visual medium, these completions should be visual as well:  a series of images, either literal or metaphorical, which if you laid them side by side would capture the entire journey of your character in relation to her most deeply held desires.

This string of objectives and completions will ultimately become the fundamental underpinning not only of your character’s journey, but of the organic structure that will lead you there.

Four Kinds Of Completions

I used to classify completions into three categories, however at the recent suggestion of one of my students, I’ve begun to include a fourth more nuanced variation as well.  (Thank you, Jonathan!)

To illustrate each of these ideas, we’re going to riff on the Trainspotting “worst toilet in Britain” scene.  In simple terms, Ewan McGregor’s character Renton has sworn off heroin, and desperately wants his last fix. Unable to get any real heroin, he has procured some opium suppositories, but after an unfortunate series of scatological events, has lost them down the most disgusting toilet in Britain (and possibly the world).

1)  The Character Gets What He Wants

In the film, Renton proceeds to reach, and then ultimately climb into the disgusting toilet in a surrealistic sequence as he searches for his fix.  That’s how bad he wants it, and what he’s willing to do to get it.

COMPLETION:  Renton returns home with the recovered opium suppositories.  He holds them up and they twinkle in the light.

Having gotten what he wanted, his last fix, Renton can now set his sights on the next step of his journey, attempting to live a life without heroin.

2)  The Character Doesn’t Get What He Wants

Let’s imagine a different version of the scene.

Renton reaches into the toilet but cannot reach his fix.  He forces his hand deeper and deeper into the toilet and perhaps even undergoes the fantastical underwater journey, but just as he has the suppositories in his grips, his movement causes the automatic sensor to flush the toilet.  In his desperate attempt to get the drugs, he rends the toilet from it’s foundation, spraying water (and worse) everywhere, and even reaches into the sewage plumbing but the drugs are gone forever.

COMPLETION: Renton sits amidst the broken wreckage of the toilet, trembling from withdrawal.

His quest to retrieve the suppositories having proved unsuccessful, he has no choice but to come up with a new objective, which will lead him to the next obstacle and the next completion.

3)  The Character Gets Interrupted

Interruptions occur when a character abandons his original objective for an even more compelling one.

For example:  Renton is searching for the drugs in the toilet when the woman he most loves enters the bathroom and almost vomits with disgust before dashing out of the bathroom.  As much as Renton wants the drugs, at this moment he has a stronger objective– to somehow explain his actions to her and avoid losing her forever.

COMPLETION:  As Renton races after her out of the bar.  The twinkling suppositories dissolve and disappear in the murky toilet water

His previous objective has been replaced by a new one, which leads him to the next phase of his journey, rescuing his relationship with the girl.

And finally the new fourth variation:

4)  The Character Gets Part of What He Wants

Renton has finally caught up with the woman he loves.  By now he is already starting to feel the withdrawal symptoms, but he still pleads for her to understand.   She presses a wad of money into his hand, and tells him to get himself a fix.  Then she turns her back on him, leaving forever.

COMPLETION:  Renton puts the money in his pocket, turns around, and walks back toward the bar, where he can procure his next fix.

Having achieved the drugs, but lost the girl forever, Renton will once again be forced to develop a new objective.

Completions Give Meaning To Scenes

As you can see from the examples above, the visual completion you choose for your scene can vastly change its structural effect on the character’s journey.  Even more importantly, when you build strong completions for your scenes, those completions organically lead you to new wants, new obstacles, and new plot points that can comprise the structure of your character’s transformation.

Completions give your scenes the movement you need to drive your story forward, and the visual clarity to track each step of your character’s change, and to force your character to make active choices that drive his experience.

And the great thing about completions is that you can adjust them to create the most dramatic journey possible for your character, just as we did with the new versions of “worst toilet in Britain” scene above.

If Your Movie Isn’t Moving, You Probably Need Better Completions

Over the next several weeks, as you go to see movies or read screenplays, pay attention to the completions of each scene.  Notice how filmmakers use these visual completions to lock in the story of the main character, clarify their wants, and track the shape of their change.

Then, as you return to your own work, think about the completions of your scenes.  Are they as strong as you would like them to be?  Clear enough?  Visual enough?  What can you do to make them even more powerful?

The stronger your completion, the clearer the shape of your character’s journey, and the easier it will become to organically discover the structure you need to power your plot.

What Are The Obstacles To Your Objectives?  And What Will Your Completion Be?

The world is not built for artists, and as writers we all face profound obstacles.  The demands of family, friends and jobs.  The inertia that gets in the way of charting a new course.  The old habits that lead to procrastination when we want to be creating.  And the self doubt that leads us to turn our backs on the creative life we so desperately need.

As your 2010 begins, consider the shape you’d like your New Year to take.  What is the creative journey you will create for yourself?  How can you power the plot of your creative life? And what are the steps you will take so that your next year can build to the kind of completion you have always dreamed for yourself?

Take The First Step Today

Check out my upcoming classes.

Begin Your New Year WRITE!  With Jacob Krueger’s 2nd Annual

2010 SCREENWRITING CHALLENGE

Why The Challenge?

Let’s face it, the holidays are a brutal time for writers.

We all do our best writing when we get into a rhythm. But during the holiday season that rhythm can be impossible to maintain.  Schedules get jammed with Christmas parties, gifts to buy, family visits and a little too much vacation time and the next thing you know you haven’t written for a month.

But that’s not the real problem.  The real problem is starting up again.
Ideally, writing would be part of your daily routine.  As natural as brushing your teeth, getting dressed for work, or drinking your morning coffee.

But for most writers this is rarely the case.  Many of us write in fits and starts, waiting desperately for moments of inspiration, and spending most of our time beating ourselves up when that inspiration doesn’t come.  And then, just when we get started on a rhythm, something happens to interrupt it.

I’m always amused when I participate in writing panels.  Invariably, an eager young student asks a question about building a life as a writer. “What real writers do is write” insists one panel member after another, striving to out do each other as they speak of their unceasing dedication to their craft.

Having worked with writers for most of my professional life, I know the truth.  It doesn’t matter if you’re an Academy Award Winner or a first time writer.  Most of what writers do is NOT writing.

What writers really do is PROCRASTINATE.

Writers are brilliant at finding “important” tasks to interfere with their writing.  Set aside a couple hours to write, and suddenly those dirty dishes start to call to you.  The next thing you know you’ve cleaned your whole kitchen, scrubbed your shower tiles to a sparkling shine, reorganized your closet, updated your facebook photos, and still not written a single word.

You’re furious at yourself.  But at the same time, a part of you feels like you didn’t have a choice.  Time just got away from you.  “I’ll write for twice as long tomorrow,” you reassure yourself.  But tomorrow comes and four hours seems like an impossible amount of time.  Even if you do manage to bang out a few pages, it’s impossible to derive any joy from them.  And the next thing you know, you’ve gone a whole week, month, or even year without writing.

Under these circumstances it’s easy to doubt if you’re really a writer at all.  You may even be tempted to give up on writing entirely.  You feel so blocked that you don’t see any way out.  But at the same time you know that giving up on writing would be giving up on the best part of yourself.  So what are you supposed to do?

The difference between successful and unsuccessful writers is not that one group never gets blocked.  The difference is that successful writers know how to maintain their creative rhythm even when inspiration is not flowing.

Start the New Year right by getting back into the rhythm of writing with this simple challenge:

Jacob Krueger’s
2010 SCREENWRITING CHALLENGE

On January 1st, go out and buy yourself a nice journal.  Find something that speaks to your personality, and makes you feel like a writer.  It’s okay to spend too much.  Think of it as an investment in something you’re going to use every day.

On January 2nd, set your clock to wake you up 15 minutes early, and as soon as you open your eyes, grab your journal and start writing.  You have 15 minutes to write three pages.  You have no time to edit or even to think.  Just go ahead and write whatever comes out as quickly as you possibly can.  It may be a scene or parts of a scene.  It may be a line of dialogue, or a monologue, or just thoughts about your character.  It may flow together, or it may not flow together at all.  Don’t even try to make it good.  Just allow your first instincts to find their way onto the page.

You’re going to repeat this process every day until January 31st, writing three pages every morning until writing is such a natural part of your daily routine that it occurs without even thinking about it.  Don’t read the pages you’ve written in the past.  Just wake up, and start writing.  You may find yourself continuing one storyline, or writing a new one every morning.  If you get stuck, rewrite the scene from the day before from memory.  It’s not important what you write.  It’s important THAT you write.

It’s this rhythm that is going to make you a writer.   So, if you sleep through one day, find 15 minutes to catch up later.  Take your journal with you on the subway.  Lock yourself in the bathroom at work.  Stay up 15 minutes later that night.

On January 31st, you’ll complete the challenge, and read your pages for the first time.  You’ll be amazed at what you see.

Then we’ll have a party to celebrate the work of everyone who has participated in the challenge, to share our experiences, and to make some new friends. (There will also be a raffle for some super screenwriting prizes!)

Register now by submitting your name and email address below, and you’ll also be entered into a special drawing to win a free screenwriting workshop!

	Join The 2010 Screenwriting Challenge! Email:

Happy New Year!  And Happy Writing!

Jacob Krueger

It’s no wonder that some of the greatest writers began their careers as actors.

The art of writing and acting have always been profoundly intertwined. That’s because structurally, movies grow out of character. And character is the thing that actors understand best.

So what is character from an actor’s perspective? And how can that help you as a writer?

CHARACTER BEGINS WITH A WANT

As writers, we are often seduced by “characteristics” when we try to create character. Characteristics can be adjectives like “pretty”, “ugly” “eccentric”, “angry”, “jealous”, “selfish”, “generous”, “wacky”, or they can be elements of carefully crafted backstories “was abused by his father”, “studied chemistry”, “works as a plumber”, “grew up on a farm”.

You put a lot of work into thinking up all these elements, so you’d hope they’d lead to great characters. But unfortunately, more often than not, instead of helping you to create the kinds of characters you’d want to follow for 100 pages, they lead to stereotypes and cliches that neither capture an audience’s attention nor drive your stories forward.

If you don’t believe me, just turn on your TV. Watch any soap opera, and you’ll be amazed at the intricate backstories that have been created for these paper thin characters. Watch an episode of any lousy sit-com, and you’ll see characters with tons of highly unusual characteristics, that nevertheless feel like you’ve seen them before.

As any trained actor will tell you, the reason for this is simple.

Characters are not adjectives.

They’re not backstories. They’re not characteristics, no matter how interesting those characteristics may be.

Characters are verbs. And these verbs begin with a want.

WHAT DOES YOUR CHARACTER WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING?

When a great actor looks at a screenplay, that’s the question they’re asking. What does this character want more than anything? And what are the unique ways this character pursues that desperate desire, that are different from the way any other character would do so?

These wants affect every aspect of character. The way they speak. The actions they take. The choices they make. The way they dress. And of course, they also affect the choices actors make in performance.

Take a moment to observe the people around you, and you will notice that this is true in life as well. People do bizarre, unexpected, sometimes even incomprehensible things in pursuit of the things they want.

It is the unique way that they do these things that distinguish these people from anyone else in the world, that make you love them or hate them or fear them or desire them.

Take away that want, and all you have is quirk for it’s own sake– a paper thin shell with nothing underneath, like an M&M without the chocolately center.

Let your character pursue the want, and all the other aspects of his or her personality will reveal themselves to you. And when you crack that shell open, you’ll have all kinds of deliciousness to enjoy.

OBJECTIVE AND SUPEROBJECTIVE

Within a scene, the wants that drive a character are called Objectives. They can be as simple as a cold glass of water, or as profound as to reconnect with a lost love. The only thing that matters is that the character wants it desperately, and is willing to go to extraordinarily lengths to get it.

Within a larger movie, these small objectives point toward a larger Superobjective, a big want which governs in some way every choice the character makes, and everything that happens to the character, within the structure of the movie.

As an actor breaks down a script, he or she will find the Objective and Superobjective underlying every line, every action, and even every image, in order to craft a memorable character that pursues those wants in unique but believable ways.

Using an actor’s approach to think about your own characters in this way will not only help you to discover the qualities that differentiate your character, but also point you toward the structural moments to which your plot must build.

Once you learn what your character wants most desperately, you know what you can take away from them, how to test them, and how to make them change. And that, in fact, is the essence of screenplay structure.

ACTORS GET MOVIES MADE

The craft of the writer and the craft of the actor are inextricably intertwined, not just by process, but by business as well. Whether you’re producing your movie yourself, or trying to sell it to a big Hollywood studio, to get your movie made you need to be able to attract great actors. And that means knowing how to think like an actor, so that you can create the kinds of roles they want to play.

Objective and Superobjective are just the beginning. The more you know about the actors craft, the better writer you will become at creating characters, and the more likely you will be to attract the kind of star who can bring your movie to fruition.

Yet strangely, these two interrelated fields are often taught as if they were separate disciplines, with actors receiving little training in writing, and writers receiving even less training in acting.

That’s why all of my screenwriting workshops are fundamentally woven around acting concepts, as well as ideas tied to Jungian psychology, directing, and even editing and cinematography.

Learn more about them here:  SCREENWRITING WORKSHOPS

Don’t throw away the baby with the bath-water. As with any screenwriting book, there are some good things to be discovered in Robert McKee’s “Story”. But there’s also a lot that can be misleading, confusing or even just plain wrong. And for young writers who take his words as gospel, McKee can pose a real danger to finding your voice, truly understanding your character, and discovering the organic structure of your screenplay.

I believe that a big part of that is because McKee teaches screenwriting from a critic’s perspective, rather than that of a writer. He teaches rules (he’d call them “principles”) extrapolated from finished screenplays, rather than the process that the writer uses to get there. In McKee’s bluster, it’s easy to forget that screenwriting is a complex art, not a simple A-Z process to which he holds the lock and key.

Here’s a Vanity Fair article that points out some of his flaws, particularly related to his discussion of the horror genre:

Read the Vanity Fair article.

Thanks to Joshua Dysart for sending this article my way!

Script Analysis: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t yet seen Where The Wild Things Are, you may want to check it out before you read this article.

Let’s set aside the question right now of whether or not Where The Wild Things Are is a good movie. Let’s set aside the question of whether you liked it or not (or were a little bit embarrassed for liking it as much as you did).

And if you feel like you wasted your twelve bucks on a movie in which essentially nothing happens, let’s set that aside too.

Love it or hate it, Wild Things is a movie worth studying, because of the bold and unique ways it is structured to reflect its authors’ premise, both in its most wonderful, and its most problematic elements.

PREMISE? WHAT PREMISE?
Wild Things is governed by a simple idea– or at least a strong suggestion– that we are seeing the whole world through the perspective of a young boy– as he works out his rage over his isolated life (and more importantly, his parents divorce) by playing with a bunch of stuffed animals in his room.

The writer-director team of Jonze & Eggers make a very strong (and very risky) decision that nothing in the world of the Wild Things is going to exist outside what a boy Max’s age could reasonably imagine. This is embodied in every element of the film:

In the dialogue and actions of the Wild Things (who reason and dream and play and rage and even accept the impossible just like children).

In a plot limited to events that a moderately intelligent child could be expected to dream up–more interested in reflecting the way children play (with exaggerated simplicity, loose ends, and non-linear and non-sensical elements) than it is with telling a linear narrative story.

In the production design– which looks a lot more like what a child like Max might think was “cool and magical” than what we’ve come to expect from the grown up Hollywood minds that bring us movies like Harry Potter or Pan’s Labyrinth.

In Where the Wild Things Are, boats to magic lands show up out of nowhere, Wild Things instantly accept little boys as Kings, and torn off arms drip sand and not blood. We are in a little boys world of stuffed animals, and if things seem cheesy, overly simple, or just plain goofy, it’s because they’re supposed to.

Because of these choices, the experience of Where The Wild Things Are completely violates almost everything we’ve come to expect in a Hollywood movie. We come expecting magic and spectacle, and are given only the simplest special effects. We come expecting a smooth ride, that’s safe for kids, and fun for adults, and instead are taken on a chaotic journey that floats along the impetuous currents of Max’s joy and rage. We come expecting a “well-made” film, and instead experience the inner world of a child at play.

STRUCTURE? WHAT STRUCTURE?
Most Hollywood movies are built around simple structural rules. If a character shows up at the beginning of the movie pretending to be King, the movie isn’t over until he’s learned what it is to be a real King. If a character shows up at the beginning of the movie in a land where a bunch of otherwise lovely creatures are filled with rage and misery, the movie isn’t over until he’s healed their pain (and his own) and found a way to bring them peace.

As you probably noticed, Wild Things doesn’t play by these rules. Max doesn’t heal the Wild Things. Max doesn’t learn how to be a good King. Max doesn’t even “finish” the story. Rather, he leaves abruptly (if reluctantly) abdicating his crown like a child called inside for dinner.

For the most part, nothing happens in Wild Things. And yet, from a character perspective, so much happens.

The difference is that unlike almost every other Hollywood film of its genre, Wild Things builds its structure not linearly and logically, but emotionally and symbolically, through the use of archetypes.

WHAT THE HECK IS AN ARCHETYPE?
Archetypes are an idea derived from the work of psychologist Carl Jung, and later seized upon by Joseph Campbell and a slew of his disciples as they sought to better understand story. You could spend years studying the different ways different critics, professors, and authors of screenwriting books have described and categorized archetypes.

Fortunately, you don’t have to.

Your job as a writer is not to categorize or memorize archetypes, but to understand them. And understanding them begins with this simple concept:

An archetype is a character who embodies some repressed element of your main character’s psyche, and exists structurally in your movie to force your character to deal with that repressed element.

All movies have archetypes. Big Hollywood movies. Tiny independent movies. Broad Comedies. Serious Dramas. Even big dumb action movies. They all have archetypes. They have to. Otherwise, your main character would never have to deal with the repressed elements in his or her psyche, and wouldn’t have to go through the story.

The difference is that within Wild Things, instead of existing in a traditional linear plot, these archetypes exist within an emotional and symbolic one.

THE NORMAL WORLD
One of the truly remarkable things about Where The Wild Things Are is how quickly screenwriters Jonze & Eggers establish all of the real world emotional and symbolic elements that will comprise the structure of Max’s mythical journey. His isolation and loneliness. His emotional and physical pain. His feelings of betrayal by his sister and his mother. HIs feelings of being left behind as his mother and sister build relationships with new people that he doesn’t like or understand. His shame at being out of control. And most importantly, his violent and destructive reactions to those feelings.

These emotional elements have symbolic counterparts: The Snowball Fight That Ends In Tears. The Destroyed Fort. The Heart He Made For His Sister (which he destroys when he trashes her room). And the moment in which he Bites His Mother after seeing her with her new boyfriend.

THE EMOTIONAL/SYMBOLIC WORLD OF THE WILD THINGS
On a metaphorical level, Max’s journey in the world of the Wild Things is quite simply an attempt of a child’s mind to make sense of his own destructive rage. Each emotional and symbolic element of the normal world has its Wild Things World equivalent, creating a system of metaphorical mirrors through which Max ultimately can see himself and his world more clearly (as he self soothes his way through the guilt and trauma).

The Wild Things bite, just as Max bit his mother. The Wild Things destroy their homes, Just as Max destroyed his sister’s room. Max attempts connect with the Wild Things by building a fort and throwing dirt clods, just as he once built a snow fort and threw snow balls at his sister’s friends. The connections are simple, giving the movie the clarity and through line it needs to take the audience along for the journey. But also complex, honoring the complexity of Max’s pyschology, as he navigates the complexities of his parents divorce and his feelings about it, by navigating his relationships with one archetypal Wild Thing after another.

CAROL: The loving, but violent father, with whom Max’s mother no longer wants to live despite Max’s love for him, and whose behavior Max is emulating in his own.

KW: The perfect mother figure, who “inexplicably” no longer wants to live with Carol, and is instead enamored with “boyfriends” Bob and Terry, the owls that neither Max nor KW can understand.

JUDITH: The embodiment of his jealousy and discontentment– who feels like it’s Max’s job to make her feel better, just as Max wants his mother to do for him.

Even Max himself is an archetype: the quintessential Jungian “Hero”. The developing Ego that wishes to be King of his own world.

Over the course of the story, by interacting with his archetypes and attempting to do for them what he wishes to do for himself, Max develops empathy and understanding that prepares him to return to his new world. He is forced to confront who his father really is, who his mother really is, and even who he really is. He is forced to confront the consequences of his choices, and the terrifying idea that he may not be in control, that he may not be King, that he may, in fact, just be a “boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be a king” and that in fact Kings may not exist at all.

It ends with the gift of a heart that Max has made. Not coincidentally, it looks a lot like the one he once made for his sister, and destroyed at the beginning of the movie.

Linearly, not a darn thing happens. But metaphorically, emotionally, and symbolically, Max undergoes a profound change. He must, otherwise he wouldn’t need to go through the story.

THE WRITER’S JOURNEY
On an archetypal level, Max’s journey echoes the journey of every writer. We must reduce ourselves to children, allow ourselves to play, breathe life into our own archetypes through the words and actions of our characters, create metaphorical and symbolic equivalents for the confusing and contradictory events of our own lives, and ultimately create a structure that forces us to unearth our own repressed emotions, and takes us, and our main characters, on a journey that changes us both forever.

Though your own work may not be as structurally radical as that of Where The Wild Things Are, if a movie in which so little happens can create such a profound journey for its main character, imagine what exploring these emotional, archetypal, and symbolic elements could do for your own work.

Curious about archetypes, emotional and symbolic structure and how to apply them to your own writing?  Learn more in one of my upcoming classes.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but thought this David Brooks NY Times Article about the film was an interesting discussion of character. I’ll weigh in with my thoughts after I’ve seen the film.

Movies are a lot like professional sports. The things we notice tend to be the big plays, the brilliant scenes, the moments that make us say “wow!” But what actually makes movies work is a lot like what makes sports teams successful: not the brilliant moments, but the fundamentals. In football, those fundamentals are blocking and tackling. In movies, they come down to the fundamentals of character: strong wants, huge obstacles, and a profound journey that changes the character forever.

When these elements are working, it’s easy to forget them. Just like it’s easy to forget those big ol’ offensive linemen blocking for the quarterback. But when they break down, bad things happen. And suddenly you’ve got big problems.

Just like professional athletes, even the best writers can lose sight of their fundamentals, especially when they’re striving to make the most out of an exciting premise, push their writing to new levels, or come at a scene in a new way. Once we’ve learned the fundamentals, we tend to take them for granted. And sometimes we forget that we need to practice our fundamentals, even as we strive to master the fancy stuff.

Because fundamentals tend to breeze by unnoticed in truly successful screenplays, sometimes it can be even more valuable to analyze problematic scripts, where the fundamental mistakes, and the problems that stem from them, can be seen more clearly.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet seen Surrogates and plan to, you may want to stop reading here.

Michael Ferris & John D. Brancato’s script Surrogates is built around a truly seductive premise: a new technology that allows people to experience the world entirely through robotic surrogates. It asks a profound question: what would happen if you could look exactly the way you wanted to look (ie. a man one day, a woman the next), and do whatever you most wanted to do, without any physical risk to yourself. How would it change society? How would it bring people closer together? And how would it keep them apart?

Clearly, this is a question worth exploring. Yet, despite its brilliant premise, as a story, Surrogates falls flat, mostly because the writers forget their fundamentals.

Your Premise is Only As Seductive As Your Main Character’s Journey.

As a writer, if you’re spending your time explaining the world of your story, you’re probably boring your audience. It doesn’t matter how interesting the world of the story may be, or how many brilliant nuances you’ve created. If things aren’t happening, your movie isn’t moving. This is especially true of an action movie like Surrogates. Things have to happen quick. If you spend your precious pages feeding information to your audience, you’re pretty much guaranteed to bring your story grinding to a halt.

In successful scripts, worlds are revealed through the actions of the main character. Contrast Surrogates with films like Gattaca, Pan’s Labyrinth or even Ferris & Brancato’s own highly successful thriller The Game and you’ll immediately see the difference.

These scripts drop you into the world, treat that world as a reality, and let you experience it as the characters do. They don’t waste time “telling” the audience what the world is like. Instead, slowly but surely, they reveal the rules of the world as the character pursues what he or she wants against incredible odds.

The tremendous obstacles that the world creates for the character reveal its nature in a visceral way, compelling the audience to imagine themselves within the world, as they root for the main character to triumph over its obstacles.

On the other hand, when you simply spoon feed the world as information, as Surrogates attempts to do, you accomplish the exact opposite. With no visceral link for the audience to connect to, the movie starts to feel like school. Before long, even the most potentially interesting details are reduced to a litany of boring information. The audience is left twiddling its thumbs, waiting for the movie to start; once you’ve lost them it’s hard to get them back.

Force Your Character To Change in a Profound Way

Bruce Willis plays Tom Greer, the one person (in mainstream society) who dislikes the idea of surrogates because he feels they cut him off from real connections that make life worthwhile. At the beginning of the movie, he begrudgingly uses his surrogate in his job as an FBI agent, but really just wants to connect person-to-person with his wife, who only wants to interact through her surrogate.

When a terrible weapon surfaces that can cause people to die while in their surrogates, it forces Tom Greer on a journey, through which he discovers… drumroll please… that surrogates cut people off from the real connections that make life worthwhile.

See the problem?

Tom has already gone through his journey before the movie starts. This leaves him with no place to go as the story unfolds. He doesn’t NEED the story to happen to him, because he already sees the surrogates for what they are. This robs every action he undertakes of any real meaning– we’re left with smoke and mirrors– “exciting” external plot twists duck-taped together with no visceral journey to support them.

Imagine if the action of the story forced Tom to become seduced by the world of the surrogates he once rejected, so that despite his expectations at the beginning of the film, letting go of his surrogate would be the hardest thing Tom had ever done.

Imagine if Tom felt a profound connection to his surrogates, and the action of the story forced him to realize what they actually were doing to him and his family, and then make a decision between the danger of connection and the safety of isolation.

Imagine if Tom’s wife was the main character– with her desperate need to live through her surrogate to avoid dealing with the death of her son– and was tested in the same way Tom was, by having to deal with life outside of her surrogate.

When characters don’t change, stories don’t move. And when stories don’t move, audiences aren’t moved by them.

Make it HARD. And then make it HARDER.

Of course there have been movies, especially action movies, that succeed despite the lack of a profound character change. Indiana Jones does confront his fear of snakes and reconcile with the woman he wronged over the course of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he’s still pretty much the same guy he was at the beginning of the movie. Similarly, by the time he gets to the third installment of the series, The Bourne Ultimatum, Jason Bourne has already, for the most part, come to terms with his identity.

Both of these scripts succeed for a simple fundamental reason. The writer makes it REALLY REALLY HARD for the main character. Jason Bourne never stops running– racing from one external obstacle to the next– and overcoming them in such unexpected and spectacular ways it’s hard to care if he’s changing or not. Similarly, Indiana Jones is constantly dealing with such fascinating and escalating challenges, there’s no time to wonder about his psychology.

Get this fundamental right, and you can get away with a lot.

Make it hard. And then make it harder.

Make it easy, and you get Surrogates, a potentially spectacular idea, that falls short because it gets seduced by its own premise, and loses track of the fundamentals that make movies work.

Learn More

Want to learn more about the fundamentals that make your writing successful? Come check out one of my upcoming classes.

Have a Question About Screenwriting?

Have a question about screenwriting? Email me here and your question could be featured in a future blog entry or newsletter.

This article comes in response to a question I was recently asked by a screenwriting student.

I think it describes a challenge almost all screenwriters face:  finding balance.

Balance between the planning phases and the writing phases of creating your screenplay.

Balance between the demands of your life and the demands of your writing passion.

Read on and find some suggestions!

There are just a few spots left in my upcoming Write! Write! Write! classes, so if you haven’t signed up yet, make sure to do so right away to reserve your spot!

WRITE! WRITE! WRITE!
Monday Night Workshop, begins September 14th
Tuesday Afternoon Workshop, begins September 22nd.

QUESTION:

“My question is in regards to a story I have been working on for a few years now… I have been writing and writing and I’ve done outlines and character beats and research and all of the back story I can think of and I am still at an impasse. I’ve put the story down for the past four months and have now just started a new internship and really struggling to find the time to write it. There is time, granted, but not enough I feel to adequately devote to what this story needs to separate itself from being mediocre… Is this fair to my story?”

ANSWER:

Not having time is a game we often play with ourselves when we’re feeling nervous about writing.

If you think about it, even if you just wrote one page a day, by the end of the year you’d have 365 pages. That’s three screenplays! (or more likely three drafts of one screenplay).

In your case, it sounds like the thing that’s really locked you up is trying to figure out the whole movie before you’ve actually written it.

The beauty of writing is that it is an act of discovery, so my advice to you is to let that pressure go. Stop planning, and start writing.

Come up with a goal that you know you can achieve, one page, half a page, 15 minutes a day, whatever it is. And then go and achieve it. To give yourself even more support in your endeavor, you may want to sign up for a good screenwriting class that helps you out with deadlines, writing techniques, and quality feedback on your writing.

At this point, your goal should be quantity, not quality. You can’t control whether pages come out great or mediocre. But you can control how many pages come out. And the more pages you generate, the more chance you have of stumbling onto something truly wonderful.

The good news is, once you have it on the page, you can make any scene better. But you can’t do anything while it’s only in your head.

There’s only one way to learn– by doing– writing the scene, figuring out what’s working, and what’s not working, and then learning the skills you need to make the stuff that doesn’t work fabulous.

So let all that preparation you’ve done slide to the back of your brain, engage your writing mind, and see where your characters take you. Write the scenes that seem the most fun, or the ones that scare you the most.

Focus on quantity, not quality, and the quality will come.

If you’d like to learn more, I invite you to check out one of my upcoming classes.

HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT SCREENWRITING?

Have a question about screenwriting? Email me here and your question could be featured in a future newsletter.

It may be hard to tell from some of the stuff you see coming out of Hollywood, but believe it or not, no one sets out to be a mediocre writer.

No writer dreams of writing that crappy screenplay with the unintelligible plot. No writer fantasizes about creating paper thin characters, canned dialogue, or predictable plot points.

As writers, we share a common desire: we want to write great scripts, fascinating characters, brilliant dialogue, and breathtaking stories that catch people and won’t let them go. We want to say something that matters to us, have our voices heard, and create the kind of movies we grew up loving.

All writers want to be great writers.

Unfortunately, for many writers this need to create something great is actually the biggest obstacle to their writing.

That’s because, as much as we’d all like to, no can can control the quality of their writing.

Occasionally, magic does happen. You wake up one day inspired. You know the story you want to tell, and somehow it just pours out of you, almost like someone else was creating the story and all you have to do is type out the words.

But more often, that magic is elusive. You wake up inspired with a brilliant premise, but feel like you don’t know how to execute it. Or you discover a character that intrigues you, but haven’t the slightest clue what his or her story will be, or how you’re going to find it.

When the words you’re actually writing don’t seem to match the dream of greatness you’re holding in your mind, it’s hard to see yourself as a writer.

You start to feel stuck, lost, or just plain blocked. You may even start to wonder if you really have what it takes to be a writer…

Nonsense.

The desire for greatness is the most dangerous desire for writers.

When you hold it too closely, you not only take all the joy out of writing, but also make it increasingly unlikely that you will ever achieve the greatness you’re seeking.

It’s not that writers shouldn’t strive for great writing. It’s that writing is a process, and to actually create something great, you must first give yourself the freedom to play.

Picasso said that he spent for years trying to paint like Raphael, and the rest of his life trying to paint like a child.

The same is true for writers. Creating something great often means letting go of your goals for your writing (and the judgment that goes with it), and simply allowing yourself to play like a child.

That’s the goal of my new “Write! Write! Write!” Screenwriting Workshops.

Each workshop begins with a special in-class writing exercise, designed to set your judgment aside, unlock your creativity, and make writing fun again.

These playful scenes then become the basis for inspiring lectures, designed to not only teach you the craft of screenwriting, but also help the build the skills you need to take your most creative scenes, and transform them into the kind of screenplay you’ve always dreamed of writing.

Take your first step today.

From Jacob Krueger’s Screenwriting Newsletter July 2009

I was recently giving a lecture on using hypnosis to combat writer’s block, and was asked a profound question by one of the students.

She explained that her block had nothing to do with fear of writing, procrastination, the desire to get every scene “right” or any of the other common causes of writer’s block that students were describing.

Her problem that she simply didn’t know what happened next in her story. She was just plain stuck. And she felt like until she figured it out, she couldn’t write another word.

How many writers have felt EXACTLY like that?

More than you think.

It’s easy to convince ourselves that if we don’t know what is going to happen, that there’s no way to move forward in our writing.

But the truth is exactly the opposite. And if you want proof, all you have to do is think about your life.

How often do any of us have any idea what is actually going to happen?

When you wake up in the morning, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you that day. Sure, you may have a general idea of what you THINK is going to happen, what USUALLY happens, or what you’d LIKE to happen.

But the truth is, you have no idea what’s going to happen in your life.

There’s an old adage– if you want to make God laugh, make plans.

The same wisdom that is true for life is also true for character.

You don’t need to know what’s going to happen to get out of bed in the morning. You simply get up, because you have to. You live your life. You meet that new person. You fall in love. You get the big promotion or the new job.

You deal with pain from unexpected places. Death, sickness, loss. Unexpected phone calls. Friends and family in trouble.

Wonderful things and terrible things happen all the time, and we rarely see them coming.

And yet we keep on living.

So does your character.

So when you think you’ve run out of story, understand that you are fooling yourself. Life doesn’t work like that. And neither does story.

Get your character out of bed. Just like you get out of bed every morning.

Think about what he or she wants. What your character’s hopes, dreams and expectations are for the day.

And then ask yourself, what’s the BEST or WORST thing that can happen.

Write that scene, allow your character to deal with it, and you won’t have to find your structure. Your structure will find you.

From Jacob Krueger’s Screenwriting Newsletter

The following is an expanded version of an exercise I created for my screenwriting students.

It is designed to replace the negative feelings often associated with writing with positive feelings of excitement and success.

As a result, you’ll not only find yourself writing more consistently. You’ll also discover that you feel better about your writing, and the role of writing in your life.

STEP 1
Set an achievable goal for your writing this week. Something you absolutely KNOW you can EASILY accomplish. 2 pages a day. 10 minutes a day. A page a week. Whatever you know you can make work within your busy lifestyle.

NOTE: For this exercise to work, your goal must be quantifiable. In other words, there must be an objective way of determining whether or not you achieved it.

For example “write every day” is not necessarily a quantifiable goal, because it’s not clear how much writing makes this successful. Write for 7 minutes every day or writing one page a day is, because when you complete your 7 minutes or one page, you know you have achieved your goal.

Similarly “write a good scene” is not a quantifiable goal because you would have to subjectively judge whether the scene was good or not, and opinions might vary. “Write three versions of the scene I am currently struggling with” is a quantifiable goal, because regardless of subjective opinion, you can know for certain when you have achieved it.

STEP 2
Now, take whatever goal you set for yourself and CUT IT IN HALF, to make it even more easily achievable. Write it down and post it in your writing space. This is your goal for this week.

STEP 3
Break out your calendar. Schedule the time that you will use to accomplish the goal. Get specific. What time will you start? What time will you end? Will you write every day or on specific days. Where will you go to do this writing? How will you set up your day and your schedule to make sure you are not interrupted. Write it down, and make it non-negotiable. Treat the appointment just like you would treat an important appointment with your boss or a client at work.

STEP 4
Now follow your schedule throughout the week. Remember, when you achieve that goal, you are DONE. You can choose to continue if you wish. But you can also choose to close down your laptop, and feel that sense of accomplishment of a full writing day (even if your goal was only a few minutes or a quarter page of writing).

Accomplishing and CELEBRATING achievable goals is one of the most powerful things you can do to integrate writing into your life. So do something nice for yourself after each successful writing day, just like you’d hope a boss or a co-worker would do after a big meeting. Compliment yourself. Treat yourself to something. Remember, the reward should be equally great whether you simply meet your goal or end up exceeding it.

If there is a day when you do not meet your goal, accept it and MOVE ON. Don’t increase your goal for the next day. Don’t punish yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. Just remind yourself that you will do better on your next writing day, and concentrate on meeting the goal you originally set out for yourself on the day you scheduled to do so.

STEP 5
At the end of the week, evaluate- did you achieve your goals? Use the criteria below to set your goals for the next week, and repeat steps 3-5.

IF YOU FELL SHORT OF YOUR GOAL

RELAX! This is not the end of the world. It just means you set your initial goal too high.

Whatever you do, DON’T punish yourself. It will not make you a better writer to beat yourself up. All it will do is take the joy out of writing, and make your resistance even stronger.

Instead, take note of what you DID accomplish and congratulate yourself for that. If you expected to write 7 pages, and only wrote 3, celebrate the three pages you have written. If you expected to write for an hour one day, and only wrote for ten minutes, take a moment to appreciate the ten minutes of writing you accomplished.

Then, adjust your goals for next week to reflect what you now KNOW you are capable of doing. Whatever you successfully wrote this week becomes the goal for next week.

For example, if you’d set a goal of seven pages, and only wrote three, your goal for next week would be three pages.

If you planned to write for an hour, and only wrote for ten minutes, your goal for next week would be ten minutes.

Remember, the point of this exercise is not to have BIG goals, it’s to have ACHIEVABLE goals, so that writing can start to feel like a joyful, successful, and integrated part of your life.

IF YOU ACHIEVED YOUR GOAL

Great job! You are already establishing a rhythm for yourself, and it will soon pay big dividends in your writing.

Set the SAME goal for next week, repeat steps 3-5, and keep that rhythm going.

IF YOU EXCEEDED YOUR GOAL

Congratulations! Often, by setting small goals that we know we can accomplish, we set the stage for even bigger success.

To get the most out of your writing, you can now increase your goals for next week, to reflect what you actually are capable of accomplishing.

Set the amount of writing you accomplished THIS week as the goal for NEXT week, and repeat steps 3-5.

In this way, your goals can grow as your ability grows, and writing can become organically integrated into your life.

Remember, if there ever comes a time you fall short, you must adjust the goal for the following week back to the level that you actually accomplished.

Repeat this process for a full month, and notice what changes for you. Send me an email, or post a comment to this blog, and tell me all about it.

Jake

DRAG ME TO HELL
Screenplay By Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi

I just saw “Drag Me To Hell” tonight. Talk about a great example of how a well structured movie uses theme to craft a character’s journey. Spoiler alert: If you haven’t watched this movie yet, this might be a good time to dash out and see it. Then come on back and read all about it.

The theme of “Drag Me To Hell” is pretty simple: selfish desire leads to the soul’s destruction. The film begins with a woman who is genuinely good. And step by step, the structure of the film quite literally drags her to hell– not just through the terrible curse that she must contend with, but by causing her to make such immoral choices in her attempts to escape it that by the time it’s all over, she just about deserves her fate.

When we first meet Christine Brown, she is pure heaven. She’s sweet. She’s kind. She loves animals, and she cares about others. The first time we see her, she’s delivering good news to a nice young couple– she’s made it work for them to get the mortgage they need. Everyone is so happy.

And it’s just the beginning of the movie. So we know we’re in trouble.

Unfortunately for Christine, there’s something that she wants very badly– a promotion to be assistant manager at the bank. And her chauvinistic boss doesn’t think she’s tough enough to deserve it.

Uh oh.

Characters develop when we test their convictions, so the Raimis come up with a scene to do just that. “Oh, you’re really so good? Let’s see what happens when you have to choose between repossessing the home of a helpless old gypsy woman, and losing your only shot at that job you want so badly.”

What choice do you think she makes?

Selfish desire.

So, even when the old woman prostrates herself before Christine, begging for mercy, Christine still doesn’t budge. She wants that promotion. So bad she can taste it. And she’s willing to do something she knows is wrong to get it.

Next thing you know, she’s cursed. A demon is coming for her soul, and she’s got three days to stop it.

In her attempt to escape, Christine will violate almost every ethical code she once held. She will repeatedly deny responsibility for her actions (even during the seance in which they attempt to cast out the demon), lie about her decision to repossess the old woman’s home, and instead lay the blame on her boss.

She will slaughter her cute little kitten in an attempt to appease the demon’s lust for her soul (so much for volunteering at animal shelters).

She will even come close to murder (or worse), as she attempts to pass the curse on to some other victim instead (by re-gifting the button which marks her as the demon’s target).

Why? Because ultimately she wants to escape the curse more than she wants to uphold her values. Just like she wanted to get the promotion (and escape the “curse” of her unfair work environment) more than she wanted to show mercy to the old woman.

Of course, in a fair world, Christine wouldn’t have to sin. That’s what is so great about the structure of this screenplay. Her dominant trait is her KINDNESS. It’s only the unfairness of the world– the unfair job, the unfair curse– the sheer horror of it all, that forces Christine to choose between her desire and her morality. That’s how the writers test who she is, and force her to change.

Unfortunately, Christine repeatedly fails the test, slowly but surely letting go of what is good about her, and dragging herself to hell in the process.

And even when she decides not to re-gift the button to an innocent stranger, Christine does not fully recapture her morality. She doesn’t sit at the grave of the old woman, admit her wrongdoing and beg forgiveness of her spirit. Instead, she tries to condemn the soul of the woman she wronged, by re-gifting the button to her dead corpse. In the process, she also desecrates the old woman’s grave and commits the same sin her palm reader first assumed she might have committed– speaking ill of the dead in a cemetery).

Having come to this false victory by re-gifting the envelope she believes to contain the button to the old woman’s corpse, Christine thinks she has solved her problem. But she hasn’t. And not because of the mix up with the envelopes. Because she still cares more about herself than she does about those around her.

Selfish Desire.

So even though Christine (after she thinks she’s gotten EVERYTHING she desires) ultimately confides to her boyfriend that she was the one who chose to repossess the woman’s house, and that this was the wrong thing to do. When her selfish desire is tested one last time, she makes the same mistake all over again.

There is her boyfriend, standing with the button in his hand, and presumably damned to hell because of it. Does Christine try to snatch the button from him? Does she risk her life to save his?

No, she tries to escape, once again. Tumbles into the train tracks. And is carried off to hell.

Selfish desire.

It’s not the curse that damns Christine, it’s her decisions.

And it’s not the button that determines her boyfriend’s salvation. It’s the choices he makes.

Time and again, his desires are tested as well. And time and again, he does what is right, even when it means not getting what he wants. He makes the selfless choice for the love of Christine– agreeing to the palm reading, refusing the demands of his parents, giving her 10,000 dollars to see a spiritual advisor he doesn’t even believe in. He does all of this without even believing that Christine is haunted, and without thought of gain for himself. He does it because he loves her.

His morality remains intact, because his love is stronger than his selfish desire.

Hers does not, because her selfish desire is stronger than her love.

And the structure of the screenplay works because it tests them both, establishing their dominant traits, and then forcing both characters to grapple with the theme, by making active choices that drive the story and ultimately bring about their own salvation or their own destruction.

To learn more about theme and the way it relates to screenplay structure, check out one of my screenwriting workshops.

From Jacob Krueger’s Screenwriting Newsletter
June 1, 2009

The other day, a student asked me a thought provoking question. It’s a problem faced by so many writers that I decided to include it and my answer in this month’s newsletter.

What do you do when you’re so fed up with your writing, you’re ready to scrap your whole project?

Whoa! Pull those pages out of the trash can– at least until you try these simple tricks to re-energize your writing and get your project rocking again.

QUESTION:

I’m at a fork in the road. I over thought my script and my writing has frozen.

I have a new idea that I’ve thought about writing for a couple of years now. I’m not sure if I should scrap the old story and start this new one or not?

ANSWER:

The question you’re struggling with is one of the most profound ones to answer as you make your transition from amateur to professional writing.

ALL writers have tons of scripts sitting in their files that are not completed. Sometimes you hit a wall. Sometimes you lose steam. Sometimes it just takes a month or even a year of working on something else to find your way back in.

There is nothing wrong with setting a script aside, UNLESS it starts to become a habit. What happens to some writers is that every time they hit a roadblock, they start something new. While this is great for keeping up the flow– and just fine for writers who are doing it as a hobby, for people with professional aspirations, it can actually become a form of writers block.

Professional writers need to finish scripts. So here’s a little trick that I use to fool my brain into finishing scripts.

Work on two scripts at a time.

This way, you can honor your writing brain’s need for a break every once in awhile– while still knowing that you are progressing toward your goals.

What you’ll soon notice is that when things get hard on one script, the other script becomes incredibly appealing. It doesn’t even feel like work anymore. So you set your current script down, and start up on the other one again.

Before long, things get hard on the second script, and suddenly the problems with the first one don’t seem so overwhelming in comparison. So you switch back, and once again keep that momentum going, accepting and respecting your process on each screenplay, and integrating it with the demands of the industry.

As a nice side benefit, you’ll find that the scripts start to inform one another– as you build on things you learned writing one script to improve things in the other.

In addition, you may also want to set aside a day to just play (as you’ve been doing with the exercises), without worrying about either script. Playing around like this keeps your writing brain limber, and often leads to huge breakthroughs in your projects. Think of it as a valuable part of your routine (like stretching before you exercise).

Keep the main focus on those two scripts (and no more than two!) and before you know it, you’ll have two finished drafts.

A final word– remember that it’s not important for either of these drafts to be GOOD. What’s important is for them to be DONE. Once you have a full draft on paper, you can always go back later and revise– and even use the two script trick again in the editing process. Until your script is on paper, there is nothing you can do to improve it. But once it’s out there, the possibilities are endless.

Got a Question About Screenwriting?

Email me here, and your question could be featured in a future issue of my newsletter.

For about as long as there have been screenwriting books, young writers have been taught that movies have a three act structure. Each act is viewed as 30 to 60 page chunk of the plot and when they’re all assembled together, they provide a beginning, middle, and an end for your story.

Countless script doctors, critics, teachers, and producers have used this structure to break down great movies, and analyze how they are put together.

But while this may be a great way of looking at a finished script from a critical perspective, it’s not particularly useful to screenwriters. When you’re beginning a new project, it’s not exactly groundbreaking news that your story is going to need a beginning, middle and an end. The real challenge is figuring out how to structure your story in a way that captures the essence of your character’s journey.

Trying to use three act structure to create the story of your movie is like trying to sprint through a marathon. You may start off strong, but by the time you hit the middle of the story, you’ll most likely be running out of steam. The plot starts to feel external, manufactured, predictable or diffuse. The ideas just aren’t coming anymore. Or you find yourself spinning off in all kinds of directions that take you away from your main character and the story you were telling.

This is a common malady. It’s called “getting lost in the second act.” And it’s killed more good screenplays than any Hollywood bigshot.

That’s why I came up with Seven Act Structure.

Seven Act Structure is not for producers. It’s not for critics, or professors, or development executives.

Seven Act Structure is for writers.

To understand Seven Act Structure, you need to start by understanding the idea of an act.

An act is not just about plot.

That’s because great movies are about much more than plot. They’re about interesting characters going on profound journeys that change them forever.

Think about any movie you’ve loved and you’ll know this is true. The details of the plot get fuzzy with time, but those powerful moments stay with you forever.

So rather than thinking of an act as something you “fill” with plot, I’d like to encourage you to think of it as a way of tracking the journey your character is undertaking, and the way that journey is forever changing your character.

Each act is just a step in your character’s change.

People don’t change easily, and your character shouldn’t either. Take a moment to think about what it would take to make you completely change your own life, how many fears you’d have to overcome, and how many challenges you’d have to face, and you’ll have a taste of the kind of resistance your character is fighting. Structure evolves as a way of pushing your character toward a profound change– whether he or she wants it or not.

So as you develop your structure, you can think of each act as one small step in the radical change your character is undergoing.

When you begin to think of an act in this way, one thing will jump out at you pretty quickly.

Trying to use three act structure to create a film means you are trying to take a character through the most profound journey in his or her life in only THREE STEPS.

That’s 30-60 pages per step.

And that’s a lot of pages!

No wonder writers tend to get lost in the second act!

Seven Act Structure is a new way of looking at structure from a character’s perspective, allowing you to break down the character’s change into manageable chunks, and to give yourself a structure you can actually use.

Because of the unique “engine” built into the structure, it’s impossible to run out of steam. It keeps your focus where it should be, on your main character.

And best of all, it lines up perfectly with a studio’s “three act” expectations, so the Hollywood big shots will never know the difference.

If you’d like to learn more about Seven Act Structure, I invite you to check out one of my upcoming classes.

From: Jacob Krueger’s Screenwriting Newsletter
May 2009

Young writers often get obsessed with writing for the audience. Even in the earliest drafts, their focus is on sneaking in tons of exposition about their characters, layering themes or symbolic motifs, or carefully outlining the mechanics for a surprise ending they think will be the key to selling their script.

It’s no wonder that this happens. After all, these are the things that film scholars rave about and film studies classes teach– complex psychological portraits and deep thematic importance, screenplay structures, beat sheets and outlines.

So why do movies written this way so often come out flat? Why does it seem like nothing is happening, when the writer has put so much effort into building the psychological life of the character? Why do all the themes and motifs just feel like smoke and mirrors? Why is no one reacting to the surprise ending you’ve worked so hard to craft?

It’s not because these things aren’t important. They are. It’s because you’re focusing on them TOO EARLY.

At the beginning of the process there’s only one thing that’s important: the profound journey your character is undertaking and the irrevocable changes in your character’s life that go along with it.

Thematic ideas are not something you impose on your script. They’re something you discover as you get to know your character. Story structure is not something you plot out before you’ve written a single word, it’s something that reveals itself to you as your character’s journey unfolds.

Until you figure out your character’s journey, exposition will only slow your movie down, no matter how profound, exciting, or psychologically fascinating your character’s past may be.

“But what about my outline?” you may be thinking. “I already know my character’s journey!”

No way. Not likely.

If you think you already know your character’s journey before you even sit down to write your character, it’s probably not a very profound journey. How could it be? You don’t even know who your character is yet! In fact, if you can predict your character’s journey before you even start writing, the chances are the audience can too.

What could be more boring? Not only for the audience, but for you as a writer.

Your outline may make you feel safe, but great writing is not about painting by numbers. It’s about stepping into your character, and taking a profound journey with her.

Kill your outline.

Get to know your character.

Decide out what she wants more than anything, and enjoy coming up with the most exciting, challenging, and inventive ways you can to make it hard for her to get it. Ask yourself, what’s the best or the worst thing that could happen at this moment? And see how your character reacts when it does.

Forget about exposition or setting up things for the audience. You’ll have plenty of time for that later. For now, just let your character be herself, say what she would say in the situation, and do what she would do.

Forget about how it all fits together or what it all means. Instead just follow your character as she strives to get what she wants against impossible odds. Notice her specific behaviors. How she talks and acts differently than anyone else in the world. How she responds to things in unexpected ways. Notice how your dialogue suddenly feels more real and your characters actions more motivated and specific.

Notice how your character’s journey reveals itself to you.

Notice how a big surprise you never saw coming seems to bubble up from nowhere, and actually surprises you.

Of course, this is only the first step. There will come a time when you do need to focus on your audience. When you need to set things up and pay things off, layer in theme, and hone your structure.

But not right now. Right now is the time to keep your focus on what’s really important.

Trust your character.

Kill your outline.

Ready to learn a new approach to screenwriting? Classes start June 8th!

I recently had a student ask me a profound question. After chugging along excitedly for a month on a first draft of a new screenplay, he had found himself paralyzed by a terrifying question:

“What if it isn’t GOOD?”

I think we can all imagine his horror– the kind of horror only a writer can feel, after pouring everything you’ve got into something that may not turn out to be what you dreamed it would be.

The horror of not knowing. And possibly, not wanting to know…

This is what I like to call the “Emily Dickinson Syndrome”– the urge to hide your writing away where you can never find out what’s good or bad about it.

It’s the same urge that keeps writers from finishing some of their best projects, for fear of not living up to their own expectations.

It’s that same little voice in your head that comes up with the excuse just when you’re ready to sit down to write, sign up for a writing class, or get your script out to an agent or producer.

It’s the fear of being judged as NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

Let me say this loud and clear:

In order to write well. You have to be willing to write badly. And you’ve got to be willing to show your work, not always knowing how people are going to respond.

Writing is a lot like mining. It’s hard work. You can’t always see where you’re going. You’ve got to sort through a lot of stuff. And most of it’s not gold.

But if you don’t bring it up to the surface where others can see it, you’ll never know what you have.

Becoming a great writer is not about having some kind of secret blessing that other people are missing. It’s about generating as many pages as you can, and getting really good at noticing the flashes of brilliance within them.

As you become more skilled at excavation, you’ll learn how to follow these unpolished nuggets and shimmering dust until you find the big vein of gold you’re really looking for. That’s the moment when your script suddenly seems to be writing itself.

You’ve just got to be willing to do a lot of digging to get there.

And every once in awhile, you’ve got to take a step back from the process, come up for air, and check out what you’ve got.

The question is, where will you surface?

To really know if your writing is working, you’ve got to show it to people who know what they’re talking about.

To the untrained eye, gold doesn’t look a lot like gold. In fact, it looks a lot more like rock. But when it’s polished, shined, hammered, and shaped, its value is unmistakable.

Don’t get your initial feedback from just anybody. Get it from someone who’s at least as good an excavator as your are. Take a class. Find a professional. Or you may end up throwing out your best scenes, simply because they’re not yet polished enough for a layman’s eyes.

Ready to take the next step?

Classes Start June 8th. Sign up today. http://www.jacobkrueger.com

The following are six of the most destructive words writers can say to themselves:

“Maybe I Don’t Really Want This…”

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably uttered these words more times than you’d like to admit.

A day spent procrastinating. “Maybe I don’t really want this…”

A missed deadline. “Maybe I don’t really want this…”

That tortured feeling of sitting in front of your keyboard, wondering if you actually have anything to say. “Maybe I don’t really want this…”

Let’s put this myth to rest right now.

OF COURSE YOU WANT THIS!

No one spends that much time and energy beating themselves up about something they don’t truly care about.

Think about the things you use for procrastination: dishes, vacuuming, laundry, errands, email, television, the internet and a thousand other things you don’t really care about but spend so much time doing.

If a day went by and you never logged onto the internet, you probably wouldn’t spend the next week furiously bashing yourself over your lack of real dedication to Facebook.

If a day went by and you never switched on the cable box, you wouldn’t spend hours morosely pondering your ability to make the sacrifices necessary to be a reality show viewer.

Of course you want this!

If writing was really just a hobby for you, you wouldn’t be agonizing over your missed writing days, abandoned deadlines, and whatever it is you feel your writing is lacking. You’d simply find another hobby.

Usually when a writer is thinking about giving up, it stems from plain old fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of trying and failing. Fear that your greatest dreams and fiercest desires won’t come true. Sadly it’s often the things we want most desperately that we’re most afraid to admit to ourselves.

So, next time you find yourself asking that dreaded question, beating yourself up over your lack of dedication, lack of skill, lack of discipline or lack of inspiration, accept what it really means.

It means you’re a writer.

It’s not an easy life, but it’s a good one, and it’s yours.

Admit it now. And set it to rest.

You want this. You want this badly. And you are going to pursue it.

There are days you are going to fall short. Days you will miss your deadlines. And days you will feel lost and uninspired. Questioning “Maybe I don’t really want this…” is not going to protect you from those days.

It’s only going to make you feel worse, by undermining the dedication that could get you back on track.

And who are you fooling anyway?

So next time you hear that familiar question bubbling up in your head, just go ahead and laugh it off. Nobody said this was going to be easy. And not even the best writers are perfect every day. Take a moment to remind yourself about just how badly you want this, and then find something you can do right now to bring yourself closer to achieving it.

Take a step toward your real goal, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly those doubts begin to lose their power.

The best way to start is with something small. Grab your notepad right now and spend a few minutes jotting down notes or ideas. Make a date with a writer friend to sit down and write together. Or better yet, sign up for a Screenwriting Workshop.

Accept that you want this. And then accept this:

Most writers don’t have trouble writing. They have trouble starting.

How will you start today?

In my Monday class tonight a question came up about the difference between Message and Theme.

It turns out a perfect example can be seen in the “The Watchmen”.

Theme is about the character’s journey. It reflects the want the character is pursuing, the value in that character that is being tested, and the way the character changes.

Message is about the writer. It’s what the writer wants you to believe. And in execution it tends to be preachy and unengaging, because it’s all about PLOT and INFORMATION, rather than about a character on a journey.

For example, “The Watchmen” seems to have a very clear message that human beings are so consumed by hatred, that the only way to keep them from destroying each other is by giving them something even bigger to hate.

Clearly, this is a fascinating idea. and could even become a theme of a film. Yet in this film, the execution is barely watchable.

Why?

Partially it’s because the writers are completely overwhelmed by the exposition, trying so hard to fit in all the “information” they think their audience needs, that for half the movie they’re not telling any story at all.

But part of this is just the symptom of a bigger problem:

The film has a message that we discover loud and clear at the end, but no clearly articulated theme governing the storytelling to bring us to the point where we could accept the message.

Though some of the PLOT and the characters WORDS reflect this message, the way the characters are changing and the values they represent are mostly tangential to it.

In other words, the film is all MESSAGE and no THEME.

Unlike message, theme reflects the journeys of the characters in the story, tying them together, making them feel related, and bringing both the characters and audience to a point of catharsis, where the fundamental ideas they represent are challenged, and ultimately either transformed, destroyed, or strengthened.

Also, unlike message, theme explores the OPPOSITE side of the coin as well. Characters are allowed to fight both in support of and against the ideas of the theme throughout their entire journey, and may either transcend it or succumb to it in a way that leaves them expanded and transformed.

In this film, each character goes on an unrelated journey, and is only allowed to wrestle with the “message” at the very end, when the master plan is revealed. The result is a disjointed narrative that has nothing holding it together.

For our purposes, we’re going to assume that the THEME of “The Watchmen” (if it had one) would be the same as its message:

“The Only Way To Save Humanity From It’s Self Destructive Hatred Is To Give it Something Greater To Hate”

A well structured movie would test this question by building its plot in a way that tests this theme at every turn. Its plot would force its characters to pursue alternative measures for saving humanity, tightening the noose as they met with failure or their successes were undone by humanity’s nature, until FINALLY they had no choice but either accept the truth as expressed in the theme, or to transcend it by saving humanity in spite of that realization. It would also force the characters to deal with their own hatred or capacity for hatred, and to confront the dark sides of themselves.

The Watchmen’s characters never come close.

Spoiler alert: It would be hard to spoil a movie this unfocused, but if you haven’t seen it and plan to, you might want to stop reading.

MANHATTAN starts out passionately engaged in saving humanity, but withdrawn from his girlfriend. He then gets his feelings hurt when his girlfriend leaves him. Decides human life doesn’t matter at all. Then changes his mind and decides he does care about human life after all when he finds out his girlfriend’s father was the man who raped her mother (Why this leads him to care about humanity, I’m not sure). Returns to earth too late to save humanity (in fact, he’s been framed for a nuclear war), but in time to confront the bad guy. However, he discovers that world peace has sprung miraculously from the bad guy’s actions, as now the world has unified in its hatred of Manhattan and don’t want to destroy each other anymore. So he decides that the only thing that matters is the preservation of this myth (so much so that he decides to kill his friend to keep the secret of his innocence safe).

THEME: Caring more about saving the world than about your love life will make your girlfriend leave you. And then you won’t care about the world at all again, unless you find out she had a hard life, in which case you’ll start caring again, only to discover that the only real way to save the world is to trick them all into hating you, even if you have to kill your friend and allow millions of others to die in order to do so.

Because the THEME controlling Manhattan’s journey is both unfocused and not closely tied to the theme of the movie, his character bounces all over the place, and for no apparent reason. A bunch of unrelated plot stuff happens, and then Manhattan gets the message, delivered to him not through his own experience building up to this moment of catharsis but through the words of another character, and exposition via TV screen.

His personal journey with his girlfriend does not force him to confront this idea in any way (his own capacity for hate/his love for a human woman possibly capable of such hatred herself/etc). He neither exhausts the possibilities for saving humanity, nor tries and fails to accomplish them. The elements are there, but the theme fails to focus them. Therefore rather than feeling earned, the message feels superimposed.

The other characters are on even more tangential journeys.

The BAT is pursuing an (at first) unrequited love with Manhattan’s girlfriend and the question of whether or not to start fighting crime again. There’s some brief allusion to the idea that he may have stopped fighting crime because people turned their hate on him. But neither his decision to fight crime again nor his winning of the girl is really related to this theme of coming to terms with inescapable human hatred, falling victim to it or transcending it. He starts fighting crime again because it’s fun. And she falls for him because (as best I can tell) he’s emotionally available, and Manhattan isn’t. I don’t think I need to tell you that “emotional availability leads to happiness” is a LOUSY theme for an action movie, and not related in any way to the message that this movie pretends to be exploring.

The closest the Bat comes to wrestling with the theme of the movie is to get really sad at the end because he doesn’t want to accept human nature. Conceivably this could be a wonderful related theme for his character to wrestle with. But because the focus of his journey is on having fun again, and being emotionally available for the girl, his understanding of human nature is not really tested in an active way (he objects to COMEDIAN’S immoral ways but never does anything about them). His journey in no way prepares him to seriously confront the bad guy’s cynical idea of humanity, and therefore does little to draw the theme of this story into focus.

MANHATTAN’S GIRLFRIEND (sorry don’t remember her name), is on a journey of coming to grips with the fact that her mother was in love with a totally immoral guy who raped her, and that he is in fact her father. Again, fascinating stuff. But how it relates to any of the main action of the movie is beyond me. She’s also letting go of her emotionally unavailable boyfriend and trading him in for an emotionally available model. And, like the BAT she’s learning to have fun again.

THEME: Finding a guy who’s available will lead you to happiness and reconnecting with who you really are.

Again, a nice theme for a romantic comedy, but totally unrelated.

RORSCHACH: At least he hates people and is forced to confront his hatred and the brutality and awful nature of humanity. Bringing him to the point where he is the only person who believes enough in humanity to tell them to truth is a brilliant idea, and well integrated with theme. The problem is, nothing happens in the plot to bring him to this point. His whole journey is preparing him to agree with the bad guy– the humanity he sees is beyond redemption– without a glimpse of hope or goodness. A theme based story would have forced him to change, by coming to terms with what’s good about the world, and in this way become the voice hope, even in his destruction. Instead, his character behaves in ways that defy understanding. The writer hopes to create a powerful moment by having Manhattan destroy his friend. But the action has no value, because the journeys of these characters have not made it inevitable.

THE COMEDIAN: Dead by the end of the first scene, The Comedian is barely an active character in the movie because his story happens in the past, and therefore primarily functions as exposition. There are two exceptions, the moments when his story thematically intersects with that of the Bat and Manhattan, forcing them both to confront the dark side of their nature. These moments could have become the structure of a theme based story, but in this execution, nothing ever comes of them. Which is a shame because he’s the only character whose journey is truly related to the theme: a super hero who wants to save the world, but can’t seem to overcome the dark sides of himself.

The sad thing is that THE WATCHMEN already contains many of the elements that could have been woven into a strong movie, focused by a complex theme that draws us toward an inevitable conclusion. Even looking over the harsh criticism I have written above, you can probably see elements that could have been woven together to explore the theme of the movie and draw it into focus.

Take a minute and think about how these stories could have been refocused. What would YOUR structure look like for this film? And what would your theme be?

Jake