I am a "minimalist" writer by nature. I shun over-writing in favor of as crisp and clean a style as I can create to get the narrative job done. Perhaps because my original training was in mathematics, I find elegance and beauty in renderings where "less is more."
When I started writing fiction in the late 1960s, I learned that my writing style served me better in short stories than in novels, which is where my focus was. I wrote three unpublished novels during this period, while publishing stories in such literary magazines as Prism International, The Literary Review, The Colorado Quarterly and others, three stories of which were selected for the "Roll of Honor" in the annual anthology, Best American Short Stories.
When I discovered playwriting (another story in itself), I happily discovered that my weakness in writing, which is describing physical things, was not relevant - the set and costume designers took care of that!
I came to screenwriting in the late 1980s when one of my stage plays was optioned for a movie. I wrote the screen play. In the quick school of hard knocks, I discovered what would become my favorite form to write in, which had all the economy a minimalist would want and did not have certain practical restrictions of the stage. I rediscovered my starting point, the expansive storytelling soul of a novelist, in screenwriting. In a sense, the screenplay was like a minimalist novel with a limited point of view.
Then the other shoe dropped.
The "business of screenwriting" is something I am forced to put up with. I don't like the disrespect the writer gets in Hollywood, I don't like the collaborative wheeling-and-dealing that too often puts too many chefs in the script kitchen, and I don't like the trendy fashions that come and go faster than a young man's orgasm.
But I love the screenplay as a form, even as a literary form. I love the breadth of story one can create with a minimalist rhetoric. I love the incredible economy of screenplay transitions. I even love the challenge to come up with a movie concept that is recognized as an instant winner, even though I've never come up with one. But I keep trying.
In 1994 I put my The Screenwriters and Playwrights Home Page [URL] on the Internet. Shortly thereafter I began teaching screenwriting online, first a college class for Eastern Oregon University, later workshops for Writers on the Net, and still later at Portland State University, where I am the "screenwriter in residence," teaching both undergraduate and graduate students in the craft.
This self-guided course is an expansion of the various syllabi I've created for my classes - especially my class with the same title, Screenwright: the craft of screenwriting.
I have several aims here:
My own screenwriting career has been uneven. Along the way I've had a handful of agents, sold six options, been hired as the writer on three film projects, none of which ever made it to the screen, and been so close to getting a script financed that I could feel the relief of getting creditors off my back - a not untypical story for a screenwriter.
In this book, I draw on my own experience - but on much more as well. I have no particular theory to push, no ax to grind. I draw on many resources for the material I present here, having done considerable scholarly (as well as not-so-scholarly) research.
I believe this is as complete an introduction to screenwriting as you can find. I explicate no less than seven screenplay paradigms, showing how they all come out of three-act structure. But I also address the very different needs of "forest people", whose "jump right in" learning and writing styles have been ignored by the vast majority of screenwriting texts.
I hope that you will come out of this self-guided course thinking of yourself, not as a screenwriter, who writes screenplays, but as a screenwright, who crafts them.
I make no false promises of fame and fortune. Instead I provide as broad a foundation as possible for learning how to write a damn good script.
And this, I believe, is where any writer should begin.
Charles Deemer
August 1, 1997
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