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Overcome FEAR: Get off your ass and WRITE!

Not yours… The studio! That’s right… They FEAR you and your screenplay! Yes, of course they want to find that needle in the stack screenplay that catapults their career into executive head-honcho but it’s their very own fear that often keeps them from recommending your screenplay.

Fear of what?

Fear of losing their job, plain and simple. Think about it… You submit your outstanding screenplay… A low-level producer reads it and likes it a lot (I almost said love but does a producer ever really love anything?) but stops dead in his or her tracks when it comes time to “kick it upstairs.”

Why? They LIKE being a producer. They LIKE telling their friends and family that they are a producer. They LIKE handing out that business card – driving that BMW…

So what the HELL do you do?

GET OFF YOUR ASS AND WRITE!

But write your ass off knowing that you have three seemingly insurmountable (don’t you love that phrase?) obstacles standing in your way…

I only mention the top sheet because it summarizes the coverage… The synopsis is the reader simply retelling your story in between 1 to 3 pages…

Ah… That brings us to the comments section… This is where the rubber meets the road. Can you say, CONCEPT? This goes hand in hand with my post yesterday, “Do YOU have a WINNER?”

These are the things that will be on the comments section of the coverage…

So there you have it. How does YOUR SCREENPLAY fare when asking these questions about it? And, more importantly, are you answering these questions HONESTLY? If not, then it’s time to find somebody who will.

Trust me on that.

Let’s take these questions one by one…

Well is it? What makes it strong? How is your screenplay DIFFERENT from other produced films within the same genre? Is it different? It sure as hell better be…

I recently read a police detective drama. The writing was okay… The characters were okay… The dialogue was okay… Really, nothing made this screenplay STAND OUT and hence, therein lies the problem… It was no different than watching some hum-drum made for TV movie. A guy gets killed in the beginning i.e., the inciting incident… This causes an investigation. The investigation takes the detective through some political maze of police corruption. In the end, the police corruption isn’t even dented but the bad guy who killed the inciting incident guy also gets killed by the investigating detective.

YAWN…

It was no different than hundreds of other movies you’ve ever seen before… No real twists. No real obstacles. No concept that HOOKS you. Just fucking boring.

How could the writer change this around? Fuck, I don’t know… LOL. Hmmm. Let’s see… What if the guy that got killed was the detective’s gay lover? What if the detective was trying to keep the fact that he’s gay a secret but now here he is investigating the murder? What if he has to play with the evidence to keep himself from becoming a suspect? What if he finds out that his murdered gay lover was having sex with certain police officials and then blackmails and extorts money from them?

Okay, so maybe the gay thing has been overdone or we’ve seen it before… Let’s go in some other directions… LOL.

What if the dead guy has a wooden stake through his heart?

What if the dead guy’s head was missing?

What if the dead guy’s upper and lower teeth were missing?

I could go on and on but I hope you get the picture… You’ve got to UP THE ANTE with these stories to make them different and often, simply by asking yourself ONE MAJOR QUESTION about the story (no matter how stupid it is) can launch an outstanding concept for your story.

This makes your job just a little harder… This is when it’s time to really hunker down and learn everything you can about structure and screenwriting. Read screenplays and emulate styles that appeal to you and feel similar to your own writing… Find screenplays that have similar scenes in them to see how it was executed in a produced film. More often than not, this is the kind of stuff that comes from one hit wonders… They come up with an outstanding premise and concept but they simply do not know how to pull it off.

Congratulations! You’re a screenwriter but you just haven’t figured out how to come up with a great concept… This goes back to what I’ve said about screenwriters writing for contests… Not all screenwriters mind you… Just the ones that write about that historical worm farm debutante that takes over the family business after her father dies. I could of course go into ways of making this epic into a high concept story but why bother? At least at this point you know about structure… You know how to create characters and write dialogue. This is a MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT! So now it’s time to start figuring out how to UP THE ANTE of your stories.

Okay, what’s this HOOK thing? Well, that’s when you’ve got this great concept and premise but it’s just still lacking something… You didn’t go the distance… You got a little lazy because you figured the concept was good enough all by itself. Hooks are for both the reader and the audience… This is where upping the ante becomes very important and really (opinions will vary) should be established within the first 10 to 12 pages… Normally, it’s very much as I described above… Take the inciting incident and give it a HOOK that makes us lean forward in our theater seats and pay even MORE attention than we normally do. If not the inciting incident (there is no hard and fast rule), then you’ll need to figure out how to up the ante of your concept…

Let’s go back to the worm farm debutante… Geez… I’m doing it after all.

How could we establish a hook in what could be (trust me, it was) a very boring story? What if the debutante had no other way to save the family business than to steal the worms from all the other worm farms? Or maybe she kills off all the worms… LOL. No, worms are cool. They don’t bother anyone… How about killing off the other worm farm owners? Maybe she hires a geneticist to create a super worm? Maybe her father was experimenting with super worms when he died and she continues on with his experiments but they go awry… In other words, you gotta just get in there and dig your feet in and start brainstorming! Don’t worry how stupid all the questions are… That’s simply you purging yourself of all the garbage to get to the good stuff! I tend to think in ways of thrillers and horrors so I apologize to the squeamish. How about a super worm that tastes like chicken?

Sorry.

In other words… What’s MISSING from your story? Again, we’re still trying to up the ante… If you haven’t watched every film there is within your genre and in addition, read every screenplay within your genre, you haven’t done your homework.

That’s right girls and boys… Think about how readers and audience members are going to draw comparisons and conclusions to your story and hopefully, a film. We can’t help it! I recently watched in an interview about his film, and how everyone tends to draw comparisons and conclusions to other mob genre films like and .

Like I said, we can’t help it, so make sure you find what’s missing… What we really want to see… BUT don’t simply copy what we want to see in your story from some other movie… UP THE ANTE. Figure out a way to make it different and bigger.

Cool… You can knock this out by doing your homework above, right? Same deal… See how they did it and do it BETTER. Sometimes it can take over a month just to figure out how to make one small scene better than the rest of similar scenes in similar movies… Don’t simply give up… GO FOR IT! Figure out how to do it bigger and better.

YOW! Just as important as finding the good stuff and making it better is finding the crappy, cliché stuff and NOT doing it! This is one of the reasons I like to go to the theater and watch movies with other people… I’ve learned how to watch the movie but at the same time, watch and listen to the reactions of those audience members… What I really try to pay attention to is how their reactions DIFFER from mine…

I’m HARD… LOL.

Stuff that doesn’t make me laugh seems to definitely make others laugh so when I finally do laugh, everybody else seems to be fucking ROARING. Pay attention!

If you can’t go to the theater that often, invite a myriad of people over to watch a DVD and then observe those reactions… Not quite as good because people in small groups tend to not be as impressed as they might be in the dark… Keep this in mind!

Bottom line?

Last but not least… Get off your ass and WRITE.

Unk




Wednesday: 13 September 2006|1819|Under Uncategorized

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8 Responses to “Overcome FEAR: Get off your ass and WRITE!”

  1. wcdixon on Wednesday: 13 September 2006|2249

    Okay, my CAPS using man… first off clarifying that you are primarily lecturing? the novices or nobodys (I mean that in the best possible way - meaning they haven’t sold a script yet) in the crowd. I say that to try to explain or understand this excerpt from your post:

    “The investigation takes the detective through some political maze of police corruption. In the end, the police corruption isn’t even dented but the bad guy who killed the inciting incident guy also gets killed by the investigating detective.

    YAWN…

    It was no different than hundreds of other movies you’ve ever seen before… No real twists. No real obstacles. No concept that HOOKS you. Just fucking boring.”

    The line I’m focusing on is the:

    It was no different than hundreds of movies ‘you’ve ever seen before’…

    Yes - that boring predictable plot you described…got made. Hundreds of times…

    Sounds like a contradiction, no? What ’sold’ that screenplay if it had none of the essentials you describe…or prescribe.

    And it can confuse the novice IMHO
    when you go on about making yours different or creating an original hook and upping the ante in order to make your script stand out from the fray and get that glowing coverage, but on the other hand we have all those unoriginal versions of above example?

    My explanation would be it was written/made by someone(s) who’ve already written that first ’standout’ script and are now ‘for hire’ and giving a majority of the B, C, and D level of the Hollywood muck what they want to see made. For the paycheck.
    Nothing wrong with that. A sale is a sale.

    That said, loved the list of insurmountable obstacles because you are right on - your fate will generally be decided by those three items…most often even before it ever reaches the producer/studio exec you’ve targeted, ‘if’ it ever reaches them. And that is the language and criteria of coverage…and its really good to know.

    Feel free to disagree, justg yacking here.

  2. Unknown Screenwriter on Thursday: 14 September 2006|0001

    wc…

    Ah… Let me clarify… I’m talking about plain old crappy stuff that comes on at 3:00 in the morning on a cable channel.

    I’m talking about a movie with a star who apparently did it for the payday.

    Sure, these movies got made but WHY make another one unless it’s got some kind of twist to it? Notice that these are movies that WERE made and not really being made anymore.

    Do you know how many people try to break into the business with a DIE HARD rip off? A SPEED rip off?

    LOTS.

    Correct. Those movies WERE made so why make another one? Better yet, WHY WRITE ANOTHER ONE?

    So while I may have been unclear about that, I hope that I have now become clear.

    And to be honest… I’ve never written a screenplay that was unoriginal. There’s always been some unique aspect… Some “hook.”

    The problem was my execution with those screenplays but the outstanding thing about that is I can always go back and rewrite them using the knowledge I have now… The knowledge I’ve busted my ass to learn and absorb. The CONCEPTS are still outstanding.

    I think we’ve covered this before but yeah… If you’ve written an unoriginal screenplay, it can always be chalked up to really good experience no matter what but hey… Maybe instead of chalking it up to just that… Experience… Why not dust it off and find that high concept angle and hook?

    By the way… It’s okay to lecture… It’s a blog. LOL.

    Unk

  3. taZ on Thursday: 14 September 2006|0648

    Sometimes blogs like yours are better than film-schools.

    Thanks for the time you spend bloging and keep it up.

    And by the way, the LOL-thing you got there… it’s not really made for screenwriters and artists like you. More for my 14 year old sister. Just saying.

    Have a good one!

    /screenwriter taZ

  4. MaryAn Batchellor on Thursday: 14 September 2006|1444

    I’m intrigued by this worm farm thing as a sequel to How to Eat Fried Worms. Maybe I’ll just write the chldren’s book first.

  5. Unknown Screenwriter on Thursday: 14 September 2006|1507

    Taz,

    Can’t help it. I’m addicted to LOL. Writing it and actually doing it.

    MaryAn,

    I have every confidence that you could make that story work…

    Get well!

    Unk

  6. Anonymous on Thursday: 14 September 2006|1746

    Can I name my band “worm farm debutante”? You inspire me to write!

  7. Unknown Screenwriter on Thursday: 14 September 2006|1941

    Anonymous…

    Use it in good health!

    Unk

  8. moviequill on Friday: 15 September 2006|1034

    I agree with Taz, chuck the books (but inhale them first), get the partial refund due you from pulling out of film school, read blogs such as yours and write… and write… hey, write some more

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