< The Dream v. the Reality

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Screenwriting: the Dream v. the Reality

An Introduction

"We write because we can't help ourselves; writing keeps us from killing ourselves and others."
--Richard Krevolin, Screenwriting from the Soul

Every year tens of thousands of screenplays are registered with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the procedure that is the industry standard for protecting one's work.

Every year over 3,000 scripts are entered in competition for several Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowships, one of the top prizes for new writers.

The Great American Screenplay

We are in an era when young writers are not trying to write the Great American Novel but the Great American Screenplay. And not only "younger" writers are chasing this dream - many a second career is sought by those who are trying to write the screenplay that will open the doors to Hollywood.

Screenwriting is probably the most competitive form of writing there is in today's marketplace. One hundred thousand scripts or more get written each year, but at best only a few hundred movies are made.

This is why it's been said that selling a screenplay is about as likely as winning the lottery (interesting statistic). But there's an essential difference.

A great deal more than luck is involved in selling a screenplay. To be sure, a little good fortune - like being in the right place at the right time with the right script - never hurt anyone. But when you write a screenplay, you are engaged in an act of imagination and craft over which you have total control.

It is only in marketing a screenplay, not in writing it, that Lady Luck may come into play. But what you write, what you bring into the marketplace, is completely up to you - and it is here that one writer can gain significant advantages over another in this highly competitive arena.

Earning Good Fortune

The fact of the matter is that successful screenplays have certain things in common - and these things can be learned.

This is not to say that success is automatic once you learn the craft of screenwriting. But without learning the craft, you are at a significant disadvantage.

A common cry among producers today concerns how many poorly crafted screenplays there are in the marketplace. By mastering the craft of screenwriting, you join an elite group of writers - and hugely increase your chances of commercial success.

Learning the Craft

This self-guided course has twelve modules that will lead you through the essentials of the craft of screenwriting. In truth, there are many ways to go about learning this craft. Among them are:

This course is not in competition with any of the methods above. Rather, it is supportive of them, a foundation from which you can expand your studies in new directions.

At the same time, everything is here that you need to know to get started. Learning craft is about learning a process. Among the skills you will learn here are how to:

The Five Essentials of Screenwriting

Let me expand on this early overview. There are five essential areas in which you will be honing your screenwriting craft:

  1. Character: You are going to tell stories about people. Even if you blow up a lot of buildings and take hostages along the way, your story must have characters that we, the audience, will remember. Look at the "characters" in your own life: "Joe is such a character!," "Mary is such a character!" Movies are larger than life, and so it's even more important to create characters who are memorable.
  2. Structure: It has been said that "screenwriting is about structure, structure and structure." Surely no narrative form is more economic and therefore more demanding of every word written on the page. Much of your time here will be in learning structure, or what I and others call "the 3-act paradigm."
  3. Economy: Two kinds of economy are important in screenwriting, structural economy to insure the efficiency of scene design in this tightest of all narrative forms, and rhetorical economy to make the script a quick, easy read. Remember, a screenplay is not written primarily to be read. In fact, the publication of screenplays is a fairly recent development addressing the boom in screenwriting students. Screenplays are blueprints for a movie, and the screenwriter is really more like an architect than "a writer" in the sense that a novelist or a poet is a writer.
  4. Format: The screenplay is written in a special format. This format is much easier to learn than you may think. Learning format requires no knowledge of camera angles or the technical aspects of film (this was not always so). Just learn the rules and follow them.
  5. Concept: Last but by no means least - in fact, first in most cases - your story concept is the first thing that producers and agents are going to respond to. Development executives have said on record that when they buy a script from a new screenwriter, ninety percent of the time they are not buying the writing but the story concept. As you learn craft, you should write the stories that you have to tell. But later, as you venture into the marketplace, you will be taking a different tact regarding concept and will try to conceive of stories that are highly marketable, which is a skill all in itself that has nothing to do with writing. And yet this skill - the ability to create marketable story ideas - will probably determine your screenwriting future more than any other.

Reality 101

There is something else you must know about screenwriting before you begin to take it seriously: screenwriting is collaborative by nature. Think about that. Collaborative by nature. This is enough to drive some writers away from the form.

Look at it this way: screenwriting is the only narrative form of writing in which "success" is measured by putting a product "into development" in order to change it. (Reminds me of a joke.) When you write a poem or short story or novel, you send it out and hopefully it gets published. There may be revisions before this happens but typically these are not major. (Screenwriting also is the only form of writing in which "writing for art's sake" makes no sense: see Writing: Art v. Commerce).

Not so in screenwriting. You send out a script and a producer buys an option on it. Before he takes it out to find a deal, however, he puts his own stamp on the script, which means the screenwriter rewrites according to the taste and dictates of someone else. A star reads the script and likes it, getting attached to the project. Now there are rewrites made to satisfy the star. A director comes on board, and now the director is boss and changes are made under his watchful and necessarily approving eye. All along the process, the screenwriter is rewriting in order to satisfy other people. S/He is -- unlike the playwright or novelist or poet -- powerless even though s/he initially creates the story. (Reminds me of a joke.)

Richard Price (The Color of Money) puts in bluntly in American Screenwriters:

"I'm just saying how things are. But creatively it's a bunch of shit because you put everything you have into the first draft. The rest is chipping away at what you did to make it look like everything else that's ever been done, so they can feel comfortable enough to put their millions of dollars behind it. So after you finish your first draft, you say goodbye, you kiss it, you wrap it in its bundle, and you just watch it get changed. And if you want to get it done and you want your name on it, you have to do the hacking. But you never care about it as much after the first draft." [REF]

Price usually writes after selling an idea, so his first draft is the last one he gets to do alone. As a beginning writer, you are going to be writing many drafts before you even enter the marketplace. But once you do get interest in your script, the story no longer is yours alone, and this is the situation on which Price is commenting (speaking, of course, as a novelist used to more control over his material).

The collaborative nature of screenwriting was the basis of an article in the Sunday NY Times (4/1/01) called "Writing for a Business Where No One Reads," written by David Thomson, a book author who sometimes writes for the screen. He emphasizes the differences between screenwriting and "real writing":

"Yet screenwriting isn't actually writing -- that needs to be said and allowed to sink in. Writing cannot exist without reading, and in the movies, the only things that are read are contracts, credits and subtitles."

"'Real' writers," he points out, "never trade away the privileges of copyright, of owning their work." But screenwriters did just this, in something that resembles a Faustian pact, a pact with the devil:

"But they have made a bargain for success. Ultimately, the American picture depends on being a hit. The Writer's Guild...has to face that fact. Screenwriters can't write for the sake of words and reading. They are clever typists in a business that likes to regard all its necessary workers as properties. So nearly every screenwriter dies crushed -- with a well-fed, well-maintained corpse surrounding a large soggy heart still yearning for novels, plays, poetry and respect."

Harsh words, perhaps, but words that tell an important truth. The essential point for the beginner to understand is that a screenplay is not a literary document. It is a blueprint for a movie, an invitation into a collaboration in which the screenwriter, who is the originator of the process, ends up being one of its least powerful members. This is the present reality.

Producers get writers to change scripts in many ways. Screenwriter Steve Rivele (Ali, Nixon) put it this way (New York Times Magazine, 11/03/02):

"There are basically four ways producers get you to change something. The first is that they just won't turn it in to the studio. Of course, they never say it like that. They'll say, 'We just want it to be as good as possible when we turn it in.' But they mean that they won't turn it in without the changes, and because you get paid for delivering a final draft, you won't be paid until you make the changes. The second is they fire you. The third is they overwhelm you with such breathtakingly stupid suggestions that you begin to doubt your own judgment. You think, God, is it possible I'm the one not getting this? ... Finally, when they find out that you've fallen in love with the story, they can endlessly manipulate you. They know you think it's important that this actually get seen by the public. Then you're dead."

More about Reality 101.

About the screenwriter v. the director.

Keeping the Dream Alive

You have a dream of becoming a screenwriter - or you would not have purchased this course. My goal is to give you the tools you need in order to play in the only arena in which dreams can come true.

You can master the craft of screenwriting. This is something that is learnable. And only when you have mastered it will your creativity and imagination have a language with which to tell your own unique film stories in powerful and moving ways.

For even though successful movies have much in common, they also express the individuality of the unique artist. You have film stories to tell that no one else can tell for you. My purpose here is to help you tell them in the most dramatic and successful way possible.

(See Cyber Film School column, "Is Screenwriting Right For You?")

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MODULE 1: SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

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