The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 72 – The Sum of Its Parts

I’ll admit right now – I’m not very good at writing female characters. They always wind up being either completely one-dimensional or erratic and, more often, flat out crazy (obvious insight to my dating history, I’m sure). So, knowing full well that my female characters always need more attention – and hence, pretty much every romantic relationship I write does, too – I decided to go about my rewrites in a different way this week.

My comic book style spec is full of big action, big battles, big danger. But at the heart of it, it’s a story about redemption, as told through a budding romance. (OK, maybe not quite as sappy as that makes it sound, but there is a romance that evolves throughout it.) I knew that the ten major beats that comprise the relationship weren’t quite working before, but for some reason, I always tried to fix them within the context of the scenes that come immediately after or before them. I wasn’t able to fix anything, since I was too involved in what was next to make the scene work in and of itself. So, this week, I pulled the ten scenes out and read them back to back, with nothing other than awareness about how they fit into the greater scheme of things), to make sure that they worked as a storyline.

I can’t tell you how helpful I found this approach. OK, scenes one through five work, but then what’s said in six appears again in eight. And why is she mad in eight when they were fine in seven? By reading this select group of scenes together, I was able to figure out what story I was trying to tell (purely between these two characters) and how its evolution was either working or failing. When I reinserted them into the script, they formed a much more coherent subplot, and therefore, worked within the greater context much more effectively.

I actually found the approach so useful that I tried it with two other storylines. (I don’t want to make it sound like the script is fragmented – everything works together, but the romance is happening as the antagonist is doing his thing as X, Y, and Z. In order to make sure that the parts added up to a solid whole, I broke the script down and analyzed the parts.) By the end of the weekend, I had cut out an inconsistent (and unnecessarily drawn out) ticking clock, raised the stakes, streamlined the action and dialogue, and clarified characters’ motives. All because I broke the script down into its individual parts. Maybe you, dear reader, do this al the time. I hadn’t before. Now I wonder how much time I’ve lost in rambling rewrites that didn’t quite address or even find the problems in the script.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 71 – Delaying the Inevitable

What’s your favorite part of writing a screenplay? Developing characters? Outlining? Dialogue? Personally, I love writing fast paced first acts and killer third acts. The problem is, I don’t tend to enjoy everything in between, i.e. act two. Luckily, I just realized one of the biggest problems that I tend to have with it.

With my Roman-army spec, the League kept telling me, “We get to page 35 and then nothing happens until act three. They just keep talking about what they’re gonna do, but no one does anything.” Of course, I denied that. “It’s all about character in there. Any they do move the story forward. See all these scenes? This is what that scene does. This one does this other thing.” And so on and so forth. Well, I realized I have been wrong. My problem with writing Act Two is in delaying the inevitable.

I’m rereading a comic book style action spec I wrote about two years ago. It was relatively smooth sailing for about 50 pages. Then I hit the midpoint of the script, which felt more like a brick wall. At 100 pages, the script is already pretty trim. The problem is, a lot of the second half of the script is fluff. I build toward a climactic sequence that eventually does come. But before that, I have at least 20 ages in which a lot happens, yet hardly anything happens. The characters all spend a lot of time talking about the big battle scene that we know is coming, talking about who they can trust and who they can’t, talking about how they feel going into the battle. Talking. Talking. Talking. However, they do very little doing.

I find that it’s a difficult balance in keeping the story moving forward while not overwriting everything that the film is working toward. Too often I duplicate a scene to ensure that the reader (and, hopefully, viewer) knows exactly what everyone is feeling going into the climax. To that effect, I have many unnecessary scenes that push the big reveals and action back, but do nothing to further the story. These scenes just sit there, take up space, and, if I was really off my game, reiterate what I’ve already said. They delay unnecessarily. For page count? Because I’m not confident I’ve clarified what I’ve needed to? I’m not sure. All I know is that they have to go. And seeing them in this old script will help me be on the alert in them in all future scripts I write.

Stop delaying. Get to the good stuff already.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 58 - Writing An Epic?

Normally, I am a huge supporter of the 100-105 page script. Especially for an action spec, 105 is an ideal length. Anything done in that amount of pages (or fewer) that has a strong plot and characters is nearly untouchable, if you ask me. Nowadays, the industry seems to be looking for shorter and shorter scripts, too. In a time when money is on everyone's mind, productions slates are being cut by close to 20% sometimes, and everyone is looking on how/where to save in a budget, the 105 page trumps the 120 almost any day of the week. (OK, before you run off trying to find Variety articles on this, I'll clarify that it's my own opinion. But at least humor me and think about it.)

The past two things I've done, my comic book spec and the post-Apocalyptic one, rang in at 100 and 105 pages, respectively. Despite the shorter page counts, I still follow the conventional, 120-page, three act structure pretty closely. I don't know why, really, but I'm hard pressed to write a first act that doesn't end right around 30. The midpoint of two is negotiable, coming in somewhere between 55 and 60. Act three is where I tend to shave most of the time off, often bringing it in under 20 pages. I know it might seem a bit rudimentary to talk so much about page numbers and act structure, especially since the sequencing method has recently taken the writing industry by storm (from what I read). Nonetheless, act structure and adherence to page count "guidelines" is a big part of how I write, so it'd be foolish not to include it here. It is a safe way for me to write, a method that I understand and feel I can work pretty comfortably in.

However, something happened this week. My Roman army spec (which I'm more excited to be writing than I have ever been when writing from an outline) is coming out a bit longer than I had anticipated. At first, I was worried that my first act was going to be too short, and that my targeted 105 page count would be a stretch, at best. That's not looking like the case. I'm coming up on that beautiful, yet terrifying midpoint right now - terrifying because I find that pages 60-70 are THE WORST PAGES EVER to have to write - and I'm still not quite ready to deliver that big, midpoint jolt yet. I'm dealing with a lot in this script, so I'm not worried, but it begs the question: am I writing an epic?

Epics are interesting to me. I haven't studied them nearly enough as I should have, perhaps because I never planned on writing one. Even epic action movies (Dark Knight, Batman Begins, and pretty much anything else that came in over 2hours and 15 minutes in my opinion) are a category unto themselves. Movies like Gladiator, Braveheart, and even Last Samurai (that one was for you, Onyx) fly by because they're done so well. And they fit a certain structure. But what exactly is it? Are acts one and three still only half an hour, while act two fills up the bulk of the screen time? Or is everything proportionate to the higher page count? Guess I'll have to do a lot of script-reading and movie-watching to find out. In the meantime, does anyone think they know?

The Writing Week part 44 – Ensemble Casts

A while back, I wrote about beginning a project that involves voiceover – new, unexplored territory on my writing map. That idea, for which I wrote a 12 page character background, was the first new idea I’d had in a while. I was beginning to worry that I had somehow dried myself up, perhaps since I was spending so much time working on rewrites at that point. Now, I have three additional ideas, two of which I’m particularly excited about, and all I have to do is narrow it down.

In five days, I’ll be getting on a plane bound for South Africa for the second time in my life. (If any of you have any desire to travel to Africa, I strongly suggest getting your name on South African Air’s email list, as they have great deals pretty frequently.) While I don’t foresee doing a lot of writing while I’m abroad, mainly because I’ll be too busy traipsing around with lions and rhinos and giraffes to sit down and bang out a first act of anything, I’m definitely looking forward to the freedom of mobility and the sun on my to help me figure out what it is I want to work on next (outdoors + exercise can often = creative decision making time).

One of the projects I’m working on, the one I’m most strongly leaning toward, revolves around an ensemble cast. The idea is for a war movie – with a twist unique to Cake Man – and Onyx and I have spent much time recently trying to work out the optimal number of main and supporting characters. If you take a movie like BRAVEHEART, there are a few obvious leading roles, followed by a handful of secondary and tertiary characters, who, because of the number of them or the lack of lines for most of them, are more “that guy” than anything else (as in, “remember when ‘that guy’ died?” or “hey, it’s ‘that guy; I like him”). How many of “those guys” can you have before you dilute your script completely?

While the example I gave is a war movie (because that’s what I’m writing), sports movies are another great example of character juggling. If you watch any football movie, you’re going to recognize at least 8 characters pretty easily, maybe even 12. You’ll know the names to probably 4 of them (give or take). But you’ll really only follow one or two of them closely. It’s the same in a war movie. You might not like it when your favorite guy catches that fatal bullet, even though you only knew him as “the guy with the stutter.” The trick, as I’ll have to figure it out, is to know when to stop adding characters and how to allot the necessary time to those you do have, while not drowning the protagonist in a sea of gratuitous tertiary characters. The juggling, or management, of multiple characters can be difficult. I did it (somewhat successfully, I think) in my comic-book spec, but my new idea requires more acute concentration on unique characters with sufficient screen time.

Has anyone out there *coughONYXcough* worked with multiple characters in an ensemble situation (i.e. sport or war movie) before? Any experiences you’d like to share?

The Writing Week part 42 - To Copyright or Register?

This week was another link in the recent chain of re-write and marketing/networking weeks. I tested the waters of the NYC Screenwriters meeting on Saturday, and was able to hand out some of our brand new business cards there. It's a pretty great workshop for anyone looking to get into screenwriting and learn some of the basics, as well as get to meet other people who are looking to crack that first script or finish one of the seven they have open. Any writers out there, especially first time screenwriters could do well to pop in to the next meeting (November 1st, I believe.)

One of the things brought up at the meeting was the debate between WGA Script Registration and obtaining a U.S. Copyright on your material. In the past, I've been told that the WGA or WGAE registration is enough to safeguard a writer, at least as much as should be legally necessary. However, I've recently heard arguments indicating the opposite - that a WGA/E registration might not stand up in court, and could fail to protect against even some of the more blatant idea thefts. (We all know that ideas floating around the industry are a dime a dozen, and my "unique" idea might be far from that. Hmm... that sounds like a familiar thought.) But is that true? Should a writer do BOTH the U.S. Copyright and a WGA/E script registration?

I recently brushed up my comic book style spec, in preparation for NYU's Screenplay Bank - an annual listing of loglines that get sent out to about 200 industry contacts the university has compiled. I'm happy to report I already has a request for my script based off the logline, though, so as not to jinx myself (knock on wood), I won't go into any details beyond that. I know that having a script read by someone actively seeking new projects is a big step, and at this point, one step at a time is all I plan to take. But I digress - the comic book spec is full of characters I want to own. I created them. I've developed them for many years. Like Athena did to Zeus, they've leaped form my head, and I want to own them.

Clearly, a WGA registration is not enough to ensure full rights to a character. So what does a writer do? Is it possible in this day and age to actually own the full rights to characters you've created, especially if they're not originally presented in a comic book? As I understand it, a U.S. Copyright will provide more character protection than a script registration does, but is it enough? I love screenwriting and plan to pursue it as long as I can. Sometimes, though, these and other legal considerations are obvious reminders of how much of a business what we're embarking upon is. The love of writing is one thing (and hopefully the most important thing), but the business side is very much a presence, too.

The Writing Week part 41 -- CONTINUOUS!

In re-reading my comic book/action spec, I started finding little things that annoyed me within my writing, small things that, one their own and irregular, would pose no real problem. Taken together and done frequently, though, they could be quite problematic. Thus, I think it’s time to add two more villains to the League’s Rogues Gallery - Exclamation Point (!) and CONTINUOUS (with his sidekick, MOMENTS LATER).

Exclamation Point, CONTINUOUS, and MOMENTS LATER aren’t enormous problems, but they can provide quite formidable when they join forces in a script. (As point of reference, think of them not as the end-of-the-game boss in a 2-D screen-crawler fighter game circa 1995, but as an end-of-level boss. Once you learn their mannerisms and can time their attacks, you can take them down no problem.)

My worries with exclamation points resurfaced at an NYC Screenwriters Meetup last week. In preparation for the meeting, we had to read a script written by one of the Meetup members, and at the meeting, we all gave feedback. I won’t go into the script here, other than to say that it contained exclamation points! A lot of them! Almost every other line of dialogue had them! YAY!

They got pretty distracting. So, in re-reading my comic book spec this week (and my post-Apocalyptic one last night), I was on the lookout for those dreaded little buggers. I’ll admit, I had more of them in the dialogue than I would have thought. Of course, I tried to rationalize that, these being action scripts, they could allow for a lot of exclamation points. Even I didn’t buy that all the time. I wound up cutting most of them, but it brings up an interesting point. Have you heard of any rules for when to use exclamation points? When do you use them?

Next, I had to tackle CONTINUOUS and the ever meddling MOMENTS LATER. These guys (or gals) can be a real problem. I can’t remember where, but I recently heard someone say that a writer should hardly ever try to use continuous as all action is inherently so, and putting that in the slugg line is redundant. I tend to agree, but the habit I picked up in school of having to include some time after the location for each slugg line is a hard one to break. moments later can serve a purpose, but can almost always be cut just as easily as continuous, I believe. I found I was using those phrases when cutting between multiple scenes all obviously taking place at the same time. My first reaction was to swap them out for SIMULTANEOUS, an egregious error I soon remedied.

The conclusion I came to was that using CONTINUOUS and MOMENTS LATER, just like the dreaded Exclamation Point (!) can be unnecessary and, when done too often, make a script look amateurish. Don’t rely on keywords or punctuation to strike a chord or let the reader know what’s happening. Effective dialogue and concise, descriptive action should do this on its own.

The Writing Week part 40 - Why Did I do That?

This week, like so many recently, has been about re-writes, primarily. I actually spent the week working between three projects, which reminded me just how much I enjoy having multiple things to jump between. Working on multiple projects simultaneously offers so many important freedoms to a writer, particularly the freedom to explore multiple ideas and themes at once, as well as work with multiple characters and genres; it also allows the freedom to experience writer's block on one or even two projects. I'm often at my most productive when, if I freeze on an outline, I can jump to a separate script, and work through my writer's block on the first project that way. It really can be quite liberating.

So, this week's scoreboard featured: the post-Apocalyptic spec's final re-writes for the time being, the character background for the protagonist in my voice over experimental spec, and re-reading and editing my comic book style spec. Three projects all very much alive in my head now, all at different stages, all drawing attention last week.

I can't quite remember which night it was - I believe it was Saturday - I sat down and opened my comic book spec for the first time in nearly a year. The following are the actual first two sentences after the FADE IN: (NAME OF) CITY.

A middle-sized city on the rocky North-Eastern coast of the United States. The city is actually situated on an island, about a mile from the mainland.

I was horrified when I read this. It's not the worst writing in the world, but it is nowhere near the first thing I'd want a producer or agent's intern to read after digging the script out of the pile on his or her desk. So, with a few tweaks, that line became:

A mid-size city on an island off the rocky North-Eastern coast of the United States.

Fewer words. Big change. It just feels much more readable, more streamlined, less unnecessary. In short, I think it reads more professionally. (It might still need work, but it's oh so much better.) This is just one example of cutting back. The ScriptXRay article we linked to a while ago mentioned micro-descriptions. The original phrasing I used isn't exactly the same, but it does the same damage in a different way. It uses more words than necessary and stalls the reader from progressing. (As a whole, though, the 57/101 pages I've re-read so far have been overwhelmingly encouraging. I took my sweet time with this script, and for the most part, it shows.)

Isn't reading old scripts fun?