Respice Finem

I've spent the last year working on a screenplay.  It's a feature, and carries more complex characters than my previous works.  I should also mention that it's a period piece, which has added its own level of glacial slowness towards gaining momentum... but I'm trying to embrace it.  In previous screenplays, I've been hurried to vomit that first draft out on the page as quickly as possible without stopping to question the material, and at that point I just close my eyes and hope that I only need to do one or two re-writes on it before it's a masterpiece.  (I know, it's naive but I can't fight my subconscious on that).  On this project, I'm taking a different approach and trying to have it all figured out ahead of time before putting pen to paper.

About 10 months ago, I ran into a stuck point— Writer's Block.  It stemmed from what I believe is the actualization of an old writer's tale that you should never verbalize your story until it's completed in private.  I had to do this, as I've been working with a partner on this project and I needed to fill him in on the details of what I'd figured out up to this point just to make sure we were in agreeance with the general direction of the story.  But as I was explaining this story aloud, my confidence in what I thought was a surefire structure waned and it felt like maybe it wasn't as strong as I suspected it would be.  The suspicion was confirmed when I shared the scene-by-scene story with another friend of mine who felt like the need wasn't clear enough.  It deflated me a bit, and I've sat idle on it for close to a year now trying to find my point of passion to regain momentum in writing and research.

This week, I had a little time to go back over some old material and I think I'm starting to diagnose the flaws here.  The character is interesting, the premise is promising, the setting is unique and the obstacles are in place, but the previous critique was right on— his intent isn't super clear.  Aaron Sorkin talks about the recipe for drama is intent and obstacle.  Without both, you don't have a story.  Things just passively happen, or even worse, NOTHING happens.  What I thought was the intent of this character is a little too hazy to carry enough weight.  It's heady and is a delusion of the character.  Furthermore, because I'm drawing from real life events, I had kind of an omniscient view of this character's timeline.  And because I knew this character was towards the end of his life, I was assuming the character could feel that as well... but when I think about it... this guy is a fighter, his ambition is great, and he refuses to consider his mortality until it's grabbed him by the collar.  So with that insight, I've got to pivot on an attitude change.

Another thing that's got me thinking on this narrative again is a little note I found while digging in the backlog of unfinished blog posts here for Living In Cine.  It was a writeup I started several months ago that I had found reading a short story by Tolstoy.  It was on the phrase "Respice Finem" which translates to "Consider the end", or to the character in the short story, it represents a rally cry to live so that your life will be approved after your death.  After considering where I am in the writing process, the phrase changed meaning for me.  I considered the end for my character, and I loved how it worked as a theme in a very tragic sort of way, but was blinded by it as a blanket idea, which now needs to be weighed against a man who wants to live and succeed.

My plan is to comb back through some research materials I had yet get to a year ago, and between that and re-arming myself with Syd Field and Aaron Sorkin philosophy fresh on my mind, I think I'll be ready to saddle back up and get this first draft written.  And if it takes another year, so be it.  I'm not under any sort of deadline with this, I'm not being paid for it.  It's for myself, and it's timeless enough that I don't need to rush.  With this project at least, I'm going to try to embrace the ebbs and flows and allow it to take as long as it needs to.  I see the  pitfall in that thinking... no constrictions, deadlines or accountability may mean the project won't ever happen... but I think I can curb that.  The story itself is my carrot on a stick to see it through.

Screenwriting Growth

Not much in this world gives me more joy than learning and having "breakthroughs" in my understanding of what I'm passionate about.  I like to think.  I write a lot of notes.  Most of them are kept private to me in quick emails, google documents or jots on scraps of paper.  I do this until they've had enough time to gestate into a fully formed idea, and over the years it's just become my working process.

The focus for me lately has been in my further understanding of screenwriting as an artform.  And over the last few weeks a few big breakthrough pieces I've stumbled across have opened up the floodgates in my thinking.  Somehow, every time this happens, it almost always is perfectly in-sync with something I'm needing to solve in a current project I'm working on, and this is no different.

Since the start of the year, I've began plotting out and exploring a screenplay that I've been collaborating on with a fellow colleague.  While in the past, I've typically been able to knock out a first draft in a matter of weeks— this one, I've been taking my time on and really trying to see the whole forest before I venture into the woods.  I carefully wrote the first 20 pages or so, but felt like I was wandering into some bad territory in the story, so I deleted the last 6 or 7 pages and took a step back.

Something that has really helped me keep my head on straight has been the mixture of Syd Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (which I've been kicking myself for not reading earlier), as well as this tool I devised for myself to keep things straight and in order for the events of my story that I've been calling "Screencards".  It's really nothing more than some cards with the major "formulaic" beats of the story, and a little reminder of what each piece should contribute to the structure as a whole.  Think of it as the blue print or "training wheels" to help plug in what you know about your story.  It's the most commonly-identified beats (maybe identified with different names) within a screenplay structure that writers can settle on.

I don't necessarily prescribe to the idea of formulas in the long run, but understanding how well-written screenplays function and the things they have in common with one another is certainly not a bad place to start as far as I'm concerned.

I'm sure once I've been around the block longer in this world of screenwriting, I won't need them, but for now just having a place to pin ideas that says "This part of your story needs to generally do X" helps free me from worry about "what happens next".

So I've been pinning the ideas I knew I wanted to have, and probably once a day, I'll visit the board, shuffle some things around and maybe a new spark will hit me that causes me to form an even clearer picture of what I'm after here.

Once I felt like I had exhausted my current ideas and pinned everything up, I took a break from the process and circled back to that Syd Field book I mentioned.  Aside from his brilliant explorations and observations, a couple major things have really stuck for me.  He says that before you should even think about putting pen to paper (or ehm, E-ink to screen, I guess?) that you should have 5 things figured out, in this order of importance:
1) Your main character
2) Your ending
3) Your beginning
4) Plot Point 1
5) Plot Point II



Well strike one for me, I suppose.  I solved 1, 3, 4, 2 (kind of), THEN 5 in that order.  But it's caused me to question a lot and poke holes in some ideas, and reaffirmed other ones.

Another thing that was fascinating was his description of "sequences".  I've always used the term as a catch-all for a nondescript duration of edits.  For me a sequence could be three shots in succession, or it could be 3 scenes, depending on the context.  But he defines the term as a clustering of scenes serving one objective, i.e. "Our main character attempts to do X".  On the surface, it was rewarding because I had never really heard a screenwriter address the idea of the sequence (which maybe just makes me a newbie in the craft), but I think what really stuck out to me is the attempt at reducing the daunting task of writing an entire 120 pages screenplay.  By clustering scenes together and saying "These 4 scenes are about INSERT OBJECTIVE", each scene is just the WAY that that objective is achieved or revised, and you've suddenly reduced the number of things to think about from 4 to 1.

It sounds silly, and way too intuitive, but reducing the complexity of the job helps open you up to focusing on the more creative material, which I think is what Syd is attempting to achieve here.

The other big lesson I'm learning here is that beyond simplification of the process, patience is the other takeaway I'm hearing from this book.  I've always heard about screenwriters who spend a year or more working on a single screenplay, and my assumption was just that they were too exacting in their first draft.   And while I'm a proponent of opening your mind and letting words flow from your fingertips as subconsciously as possible, I think I've perhaps neglected the other end of the spectrum; the consideration of the grand idea and structure of your story.  It takes time, it really does, to write a genuine original piece without fudging and faking certain aspects that you don't yet understand.

And it's been a compounded experience for me, as I'm a writer often drawn to period films concerning lifestyles and careers that are different from my own experience.  This takes even more research to accurately portray their world.  I think as I'm writing this, the reason I'm drawn to these types of stories is not in the exploration of "what it was like back then", but more from my yearning to bridge how human and similar their experiences were back then to ours today.  Really, I'm going against the grain of the thesis I was so fired up about when I first started this blog; the anti-romanticist.  Life is real, messy, gritty.  It's not easy.  We all deal with problems, and even though something that seems so different and distanced by the span of time from how our lives are in modern society, it really isn't so different.  We're saying the same things as we were 100 years ago about politics, religion, economics, the world.  The context is different, but the content is the same to a large degree.  I just think that's cool.  That's probably the closest thing we can get to an emotional time travel right there: connecting emotionally to past events by drawing comparison to similar instances in our modern day life.  You're being reminded by both the unfathomable expanses of time, as well as the finitely minuscule separation we have from our ancestors.  We're both totally foreign from our ancestors, and at the same time we're mirror copies of their fears, dreams and comprehensions.  It's truly incredible.

Finishing My New Screenplay "Garage Boys"

About two months ago, I began really entertaining this idea I've had brewing in my noggin.  The premise was simple: It's a buddy comedy set in the early 90's about a trio of late-blooming friends who get the wild idea to start a tech company in their mom's garage with the assumption that in doing so, they'll strike it rich. Their friendship is put to the test as they soon face the hard realities of their naive plan.

This has been the most organic writing process I've experienced thus far.  I had an idea.  I gestated on the thoughts for awhile.  I wrote a rough outline of how I saw things playing out in the story, and I sat down and began writing.

Three weeks after beginning the screenplay, I now have a finished first draft and am feeling good about the first broadstroke I've put on paper.  I realize there's a lot of work ahead for the project, in both the screenwriting and the potential of actually funding and producing it but this is the third feature I've written and it feels like it's getting easier over time.  Perhaps it's because this was the first feature I've written where I've had a cast in mind for the key players, and was able to use my familiarity with their natural speaking voices to help guide the writing and focus more on the "want" of the characters and not think so hard on finding a voice for them.

I filed "Garage Boys" with the copyright office last week and sent out the first draft to a batch of friends and colleagues for review.  I have up and down moments in my confidence in the story as I eagerly wait for the first response to come back, but hopefully I'll either have that confidence restored, or will receive a hard dose of reality in identifying the true problems and plot holes within the story.

My plan is to take the screenplay after I've received these first reactions to it, and begin a writing room with the intended cast and take another stab at it with them to help distill the story another level.

As I wait for the responses to roll in, I'm beginning to noodle with my next screenplay that I want to write, which is a fictional political drama set in the very near future.  This one may require quite a bit of research but it could be an interesting cultural tableau of a potential reality.

6 Tips to Re-Build Your Story From the Ground Up

 Originally written on Raindance.org, this is exactly where I'm sitting with my screenplay.  I thought it'd be helpful to share with others as well.

1.   Remember:  The first draft of anything is shit

I’m quoting Ernest Hemingway here. And when asked about rewriting, he answered that he rewrote the ending to “A Farewell to Arms” thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. Unfortunately, oftentimes new writers believe that their first draft is gold and that it will only take a little bit of fixing before it rocks. They naively assume they’ll just need to improve lines of dialogue, transitions, or formatting errors. They hand me their babies thinking it has a cold, but most of the time it turns out it has a bad case a pneumonia and needs more than a spoonful of cough syrup to get it back on its feet. In fact, their script often needs a total RE-STRUCTURING of the plot. There is a great French word, RESTRUCTURATION, which has a better ring to it than “re-structuring” and is sadly missing from the English vocabulary!

2.   Accept that bruises to your ego are part of the process

The problem is, as soon as I prescribe a “RESTRUCTURATION” of their script, many new writers go into panic mode: they just can’t picture themselves re-building the wobbly castle they took so long assembling. Or their ego is so wounded they bury their script six feet under the earth and prepare the noose and chair for a hanging. Which is a shame because most of my literary patients have something in them that is worth saying and saving. Believe me, I have been there many times. When I was honing my craft at UCLA, I freaked out when a screenwriting professor ripped apart a script I had sweated over for two years. It takes eating large portions of humble pie to become a professional writer and get the best out of your story and characters. It’ll never stop wounding our egos, it’s only human nature, and it’s okay. Go to the gym, go for a walk, sulk for a few days, do whatever you need to do to get past your disappointment. But at some point you need to roll up your sleeves and get back to developing your screenplay.

3.   Stop putting pressure on yourself

Too many new writers want to have their script completed by Christmas, or for a looming competition deadline. Giving yourself a deadline for each rewrite is a healthy thing to do (I always give myself deadlines) but the truth is you never know how many drafts you’ll need before a script is rock solid and there is no point in sending a half-baked script to a competition. Just accept that some scripts take more time to develop than others. After all, if took a decade for Darren Aronofsky and his writing team to hone “Black Swan.” Similarly, Christopher Nolan spent ten years developing “Inception” before it was a shooting script. Originally, “Inception” was a mere heist story and it’s only when C. Nolan threw the Marion Cotillard character into the mix that the script truly came together.
The less experienced you are the more time it might take to complete your script. So unless you’re being commissioned to write a script and you have a REAL hard deadline to meet, relax and enjoy the process. And besides, developing your script, aside from it being necessary to get it sold/optioned/placed in a competition, etc., is good practice because the horrid reality is that once it’s good enough to land a producer, actor, agent, financier, etc., then it’ll be regarded as draft 1 from that point on – and then you’ll need to start incorporating other people’s notes, producers, directors, actors, etc., which means your ego and your script are going to be challenged again and again and again. The more you get used to this and accept it as part of the process, the closer you are to becoming a professional writer.

 4.   Re-outline your screenplay

Proceed methodically. Don’t dive in blindly into your script as it’s a sure-fire way to hit a wall and get lost. Instead, step back from your screenplay and re-outline your story. A script is like a house and you can’t build it if the foundations aren’t rock solid.
First write a ONE-PAGER delineating the 3 acts of your script. On the back of the page, write down your protagonist’s outer goal, inner goal/need as well as their transformational arc (and if this terminology is alien to you I urge you to buy a screenwriting book ASAP!). Then, turn your one-pager into a 4-PAGER, with one page for Act 1, two pages for Act 2, one page for Act 3. Workshop your 4 pager, read it to your friends, etc. until it’s rock solid, and then, and only then, turn it into a treatment. TREATMENTS are usually 10-12 pages but can be up to a hundred pages if you detail every beat, scene, etc. In any case it’s a prose version of your story. Before commencing with the screenplay format, some people then write their treatment into a STEP-OUTLINE (also known as a Beat Sheet), meaning a description of the content of each scene. Others feel it impedes their creativity and skip that step, which is absolutely fine.

5.   Don’t be stubborn

Many new writers scream out “No way, I’m not going back to square one!” They are scared their beautiful words and witty dialogue will go down the drain. So they haphazardly toy around with their script, add and remove lines of dialogue and shuffle up their scenes in the hope the script will come together in the end. I’m not saying that strategy never works, but in my experience – I’ve read hundreds of scripts for film and TV over the years – it seldom does work because for most writers and their screenplays it doesn’t solve the problems in the script. You have to take it apart and carefully reconstruct it. And it’s a lot easier to do that with a one page document, and then a four pager document, etc.
I hate it when a writer comes back to me one year after I script doctored their work, admitting they tampered with their script without a roadmap, got lost, and now they need me to help them re-outline their story from the beginning. What a waste of time! I much prefer when writers devote their energy rewriting their outline for a few weeks or months until it’s structurally sound and come back with a solid new draft the next time around. You know why? Because then we can move on to the fun stuff like dialogue, visual transitions, motifs, imagery; things that are a lot easier to fix once the house is properly constructed so to speak. I liken this step in the development process to choosing the color of paint for the walls in your home, the style of carpet, the fabric for the curtains, etc., meaning you wouldn’t and shouldn’t do this until the foundations, walls, roof, number of bedrooms, style of kitchen, etc. have all been designed well and properly constructed – then you can do the finishing touches to your home/script.

6.   Find the tools that work for you

If you struggle with structure, I’d encourage you to use a structural template. The BEAT SHEET provided in Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat” works great (by the way, if you haven’t read his book get is asap!), the Hal Ackerman SCENOGRAM is a fine tool as well, but there are other ones out there that can prove just as helpful. Make charts if you like charts, use 3 x 5 cards, highlighters, whatever works for you. Develop your own tools, but by all means don’t jump in blind to rewrite or restructure your script.
I can’t yell it loud enough, RE-OUTLINING is an effective treatment against wobbly structures. Re-outlining might save you months, if not years of your life as a screenwriter. And no matter how badly side-tracked you were when you wrote the first draft it’s never a waste of time to go through the process of “restructuration.” Even if you bungled your story structure or picked the wrong protagonist (which happens in a lot of scripts I read), things will fall back into place if there is some method to the madness of developing screenplays. The essence of your script, the diamond in the rough will eventually jump out at you and make itself clear. Make no mistake, writing is a difficult, long process. It takes a lot of hard work, frustration and floundering around. And if you don’t believe me, here are a few words by John Irving for you to ponder:
“More than a half, maybe as much as two thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.”
As E.B. White said in “The Elements of Style”, “The best writing is rewriting.”
Or as I like to say, the best writing is re-outlining. Happy “Restructuration!”

My Journey Through Kerouac's On The Road

I'm just coming to the last pages of On The Road as part of the research I'm doing for a screenplay I'm eyeing to write.  I've come to one conclusion: this is some dangerous literature for a glittering, wide-eyed young pup wanting to add scores to their life experiences.

His writings stir up something indescribably 'mad', as he puts it.  It's an itch that even strikes me at 25 and is a lifestyle so far removed from my own that I can only live it vicariously through the text.  That's the power of On The Road.

The same itch that Kerouac had found for his book hit me at age 18 and spawned a similar adventure and even a similar traveling circuit as he took in his first round of travels, but with much more preparedness and cutting out the trip east of Indiana.  My adventure was ended abruptly in a pretty terrible car accident, though.  But it still left me yearning for more afterwards.  Life on the road in America is dirty, but terribly romantic.

In reading On The Road, I can see how this morphed generations; especially considering how constricted and conservative society was at the time.  This became an almost how-to guide for anyone lost in the world and looking for adventure.  It's the cheap way out of problems, and although Kerouac's trek doesn't land him with what he was hoping to discover, it's understood that it's the adventure itself that matters.  It's being down and out and making something of your situation.  It's learning to appreciate the small stuff in the hardest of times.  Some cultures send their children out on their own into the wilderness for months on end to learn self sufficiency.  They leave boys and return as men.  I see this same journey in On The Road.  Although the landscape might be different and Kerouac was certainly not a boy when he began his life on the road, it's about learning yourself and learning the world and returning with wisdom.  It's your basic hero myth.

Kerouac paints a picture of adventure with poetics and romanticism; penning a simplistic and free lifestyle set against a beautiful America.  It's fantastic and wondrous, but only runs so deep.  I'm sure the masses who attempted this trek after finishing the book were sorely disappointed when they found themselves stuck in the middle of Kansas on a back country road, drenched in cold autumn rain with hunger pangs hammering away at their ribs, tremulously dangling their thumb for a ride as butterflies flew out of their empty pockets.  It's a sucks-to-be-there-but-sure-sounds-good-on-paper type of situation.  But I think most good literature is like that.  There's conflict, and you feel for them, but at the same time you feel wrapped up in the warm blanket of poetic pages and know things will be fine in the end.

Kerouac introduces future generations to a whole vocabulary of colorful words and philosophies.  He writes continuously through the book about the 'mad' people they meet and the 'kicks' they get into.  That's the heartbeat of the beat generation, and I think the real value that resonated with that particular generation.  It's appreciating character, and acting on impulse.  I think, at least for the first generations to read this, it spoke to them as a call to break free from conformity and monotony, and live life wildly on impulse.  It's as if the book says 'I know we're all messed up, but that's just fine.  Go out and live messed up together.'

With that said, there's also another matter of fascination: the syntax of the book.  I chose to read the 'Original scrolls' of On The Road rather than the edited version that Viking published in 1957.  The book is one long paragraph and was originally written as one continuous scroll that, to Kerouac, represented 'the road'; the words were simply the characteristics of that road.  I think that alone elevates the book from being classified as pages of poetic journal entries into the realm of artwork and true American literature.

There's been a myriad of different critical reviews-- some called it complete incoherent garbage while others praised it as a masterpiece.  I fall somewhere in between.  At times, yes, it does feel like rambling journal entries that are scattered and difficult to follow, but at the same time I don't think you could write such poetic prose without mapping it out (and that's made clear in the foreword discussing his manuscripts and journals leading up to writing it).  Although it's loose in structure, it's obvious that Kerouac put thought and care into the structure and rhythm of his sentences.  There's no denying that.

I suppose with every generation, sub-cultures form.  From that, martyrs, icons and sign posts arise that help shape and explain those microcosms.  On The Road does that for the Beat culture.  To that first generation that got their hands on it, they lived it in spades.  To me, reflecting on it years later, I can still appreciate it and understand its significance.  And even today, the ideals of that lifestyle and the yearn for simpler times reflected in Kerouac's book are even moreso wistfully sought.