3.
Finding Your Writing Method

"How can I be lost if I don't care where I am?"
--Buck Kassel

So you have a movie concept you like - for the sake of argument, let's say it's this:

The First Lady is kidnapped and held for ransom by terrorists.

Now what, coach?

Different Strokes for Different Folks

One of the difficult things about teaching writing, or anything in the arts, is that any teaching methodology implies a certain "right way" of doing things. I'm not referring to common elements that any good screenplay will have; I refer to the way you go about writing. I call this your writing method.

William Faulkner is reported to have said, "Writing can't be taught - but it can be learned," and I am inclined to agree with him.

Even established screenwriters find that they begin different projects differently:

"It's been different every single time," notes Jim Cash, who wrote Top Gun. "You just write. You start with something, though. You start with what you feel to be the heart of the story, one way or another. Sometimes the heart of a story is a character, sometimes it's a situation, sometimes it's a personal story of a character. When I say a situation, I mean it's something so unique that you can make a story out of it. It's just different every time." [REF]

A good teacher, in my view, is not one of the growing number of "screenplay gurus" on the market, who have the best method for writing commercially successful screenplays. Rather, a good teacher is like a guide: someone who has been exposed to a wide variety of approaches to the subject matter and presents the student with alternatives for getting from here to there.

Because the fact of the matter is, we are different in our creative styles. For example, I have writer friends who do an extraordinary amount of "left-brained" analysis before they ever begin to write. They do things like:

Don't worry if you don't know what these refer to - you will! And if they make sense to you, you will incorporate them into your screenwriting process.

But the point I'm making is this: I know other writers, myself included, who do not do any of these things. This is not to say we don't plan before we write because we do (though other writers like to jump into a story right away: Harold Pinter has said he likes to put two characters in a room together and see if anything interesting happens).

Planning, in other words, can mean different things to different people.

Tree People v. Forest People

To make a broad generalization, it seems to me there are two kinds of writers, each very different in his/her approach to writing: the tree people and the forest people.

Tree people like to start with the small picture. Forest people like to start with the big picture.

Tree people like to plan the details before they begin the job. Forest people prefer to jump to work sooner, trusting in the dynamic process of creation to make decisions about detail along the way.

A forest person can be very turned off by a teacher taking a tree person's approach and vice-versa. For example, I have a friend who teaches playwriting and requires students to fill out notebooks filled with character biographies. I would rebel against doing this! In my view, this would dissipate the very energy I use for writing, and by the time I finished such an "extraneous" exercise I likely would have lost interest in the project.

If you find out what your natural method of writing is, you will be able to take advantage of certain features in this course that will make less sense to writers of the opposite style.

So let's look at tree people and forest people more closely.

Tree People: Everything in its Place

The vast majority of screenwriting methodologies and systems on the market today are aimed at tree people. Indeed, the usual development process of moving a film story from concept to script involves the kind of step-by-step careful planning that is at the heart of the way tree people do things.

If you're a tree person, then, you will be right at home in screenwriting because most of what is written about the craft is aimed at you. You'll be urged to do the things you like to do anyway:

As a tree person, you're going to be faced with a dizzying assortment of "paradigms" urging you to structure your story this way or that way, and you'll want to become familiar with most of them in order to see which approaches resonate with you. Much more about this later.

You also might want to invest in a large box of index cards. Index cards lend themselves especially well to making a step outline, an approach to story development that is both left-brained and very functional. Colored markers can be used to trace things like plot points on the index cards. Again, we'll have more to say about this later.

But not all tree people work with index cards. Planning before writing is the key to a tree person's method, however this is done. Ron Bass, who wrote Black Widow and Rain Man, does it this way (quoted in American Screenwriters):

"I don't work from index cards. I write screenplays - and novels as well - from a story outline. I don't like to write any scene until I think I know where everything is going, because everything I do is informed by that. Of course, the outline may change radically as I go. But just to kick off and say, here's an interesting first scene, now where do I go from there? Some people are very successful at that, but it's not my style." [REF]

As a tree person, you're going to be faced with more theories about screenwriting than you can digest. I'll be your guide, pointing out the highlights as we go along.

Forest People: Creation is Discovery

Forest people can get very lonely in Hollywood. Today the left-brained approach to screenwriting that appeals so much to tree people has become a thriving cottage industry. Buzz words are everywhere: paradigm, plot point, character arc, and most of all - structure, structure, structure!

But not everyone rides this bandwagon, including some successful screenwriters. DiAnne Olson Wosep interviewed Chris McQuarrie, the writer of The Usual Suspects, and came up with some confessions from a forest person:

"Tell your story. Rules lead to formula, Formula leads nowhere. One of the first meetings I took after Suspects was sold, a development exec. said to me:

"'You are so bold. You broke the big rule. You used flashbacks and THEY WORKED!!!'

"I never went to school to learn I couldn't do that. There are no bad conventions. There is only bad writing and the attempt to salvage it with conventions.

"Again with Jaws. How many acts in that? How many arcs? How many stories.

"Form is nonsense. Only the story matters. Trust it to tell itself as you see it. After the first 20 pages, a story should be moving YOU along." [URL]

Another "forest person" screenwriter is Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote Ghost:

"I'm never intentional. I'm totally intuitive. I don't understand structure, at least in the academic sense. If you asked me today what a denouement is, I cannot tell you. I don't know my first act break from my second act break. Now, granted, I have to go back and identify them with the help of producers and directors, but I don't write that way. I just write from the gut, let it come out, and it tends to shape itself." [REF]

Joe Eszterhas, who established himself in the 1980s and 1990s as the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood's history, replied to the question of whether or not he worked within a three-act structure this way:

"No, I just start writing. And sometimes I don't know where it's going to go. That's when it gets really exciting to me, when I don't know here it's going to go, because it's not locked in, it's not set." [REF]

Another screenwriter, I.A.L. Diamond (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The Apartment), says, "I'm afraid that if I get it worked out too well, then I'm going to find the writing boring. I'd rather just have a few signposts and leave a lot of wide-open spaces, so things can happen when I'm writing. I don't like to have it down too cold or too well figured out before I start, because I think some of the excitement and enthusiasm goes out of it." [REF].

Still another forest person is author Truman Capote, who has written a number of memorable television dramas:

"I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously -- that I'm seeing it in one flash. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, the joyful little push that keeps a writer going. At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to YOU, then you can't forget it ... it will haunt you till it's written." (Paris Review, summer 1988).

In a similar vein, Marshall Brickman has written about the "forest" writing experience of working on Annie Hall with Woody Allen.

"The first script...was much more episodic, tangential, and novelistic....It didn't work for us. We started to become interested in the love story between Woody and the Keaton character, which was all over the place. We cut and pasted to make the love story more important, and the structure emerged. The material was telling us what to do." [REF]

The notion that the story moves the writer along and not vice-versa is pure forest person sentiment. I also hope it is something that most writers get to experience because there is nothing quite like the magic of feeling like a medium as your characters rush forward with your story, begging you to keep up with them.

This is not to say that your characters always lead you where you want to be, which is the place that makes for the most engaging story. Nonetheless, this is a part of the process that most writers probably experience at one time or another - and forest people thrive on it and go with the flow, while tree people tend to get nervous when this happens, remembering that their step outline has defined a very different progression of actions.

Forest people aren't afraid of what they don't know. They trust that they will discover what they need to know for the story along the way. They are not afraid to delay the engagement of the analytical part of the brain until later in the process of creation, during rewriting.

Take, for example the matter of character biographies. A strict tree person wants to know everything possible about his/her major characters:

And tree people want to know these things before they start writing. For these reasons, tree people often write biographies of their characters or fill out forms for this purpose, such as those that are contained in the story development software called Collaborator (more about writing software later).

I am a borderline forest person, and so I don't write character biographies. This "failure" can result in amusing incidents.

Once, in rehearsal with my best known play, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, an actor asked me about Rex, the character he was playing: "what was Rex's favorite subject in high school?", the actor wanted to know.

Well, I couldn't answer that exactly, even though I was sure Rex didn't like his classes in mathematics or physics or chemistry, and in fact took as few of them as he could get away with. Maybe shop or P.E., I thought.

"What do you think?," I asked the actor back.

He thought a while and said, "This is probably way off base but - I think he doesn't like any class for the subject matter but for the teacher. I think he had a history teacher he really liked."

I looked like the most surprised playwright in America and said, "You're absolutely right! That's incredible."

The actor beamed with new confidence, empowered by this sudden insight he had into Rex. We were both happy.

Now I don't think filling out a form on Rex's character before I wrote the play would have helped me one iota in that little encounter, nor improved the wonderful performance given by the actor, which is, after all, the bottom line. The actors, more than the script, communicate to the audience, which is why I call my playwriting classes "the art of writing for actors."

Forest people think tree people get lost in the detail and miss the fun of discovery along the way. Forest people put off using their left brain for as long as possible. They'd rather start analyzing things after they have a script, not before.

What is Your Natural Writing Method?

Having read this far, you probably know what kind of person you are or at least which writing method you lean toward. The advantage of knowing this is that through the rest of this course you will have special links to follow, while writers of the opposite persuasion go elsewhere to cover the same material from a different point of view.

This is not to say you shouldn't try both paths - but I have made an effort to "speak your language" and I recommend that you follow your "natural writing method" links before you start exploring elsewhere.

If you're still not certain whether you are a tree person or a forest person, I've created a very unscientific test that may persuade you that you tend toward one direction rather than the other.

Take the Writing Method Preference Test.

Writing with a Partner

If you are a tree person, you also might want to consider writing with a partner. (I can't imagine how forest people would do this.) I have twice collaborated on a screenplay, behaving like a tree person, and the experience was more positive than I thought it would be going in.

The advantage of having a partner is that a dialogue/debate begins immediately about the script's concept and development. I remember writing a step outline on a chalkboard with a partner - what a high energy experience that was!

Sometimes, in left-brained activity, two heads really are better than one, and screenwriting - especially in the early stages of story development - lends itself to the give and take that having a writing partner will bring.

On the other hand, I found that actually writing the script was another matter. My partner(s) and I had such different writing styles that this important part of the process was less successful. Perhaps two scripts should be developed at once, in which both partners participate in story development but only one writes, or drafts, the script.

Update on thoughts about collaboration.

At any rate, screenwriting lends itself to collaboration more than any other writing form. You might want to consider this option.

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MODULE 3: SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

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