The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 254 - A New Year, A New Outline

Happy New Year! Off, it's been a while since my last post. I guess the end of 2012 saw me veer off schedule with these "weekly" updates. No more - I am trying to get back on track! At the very least, though The Writing Weeks might have fallen off track, I'm happy to report that my writing itself did not.

Where to start? The end of December was actually pretty exciting/interesting. For one, we decided to do another push with the post-Apocalyptic spec. As far as I know, we got a couple reads over the holidays, which ideally I'll have some updates on by the end of next week. One of the people reading is actually a manager, which will be interesting. (If you've been reading, you know I have reps in LA already, but I got the requisite go-ahead to send, so we'll see what happens.) He is someone I was in touch with years ago when I was fresh out of school. My material wasn't ready at that point, especially the script that he read then, and I recognize that now. Naturally, I had high hopes, and he responded generously, but we didn't wind up working together. Looking back on that script, that's no surprise to me at all. I'll be the first to admit that screenplay was not ready for industry attention. Perhaps the second time will be the charm. I certainly like to think I've grown much stronger as a writer in the ensuing years.

The sci-fi collaboration hit a bit of a bump at the end of the year. A (very) similar project was announced at a major studio. Well, perhaps that needs some qualification. A studio picked up the rights to some material that is strikingly similar. I won't speculate as to why it might be eerily akin to ours, as it's not really my place, but it was - to say the least - a shock. My writing partner and the producer who paired us agree that our best plan is just to push forward and produce a polished screenplay before the other project comes to fruition. We have too much invested to stop, and neither my partner nor I want to. I have no way of knowing what the outcome will be, other than to tell you that the immediate result was a fire lit right under my butt.

Sitting above the flames, I cranked out a revised outline for the project in question over the holiday week. The second half of the script remained largely the same, structurally. In fact, much of the script did, but I made a lot of adjustments earlier on, since we decided to skew toward a slightly younger audience and wanted to emphasize the science elements, rather than the action ones. My writing partner and I already had another hour discussion on the new outline, emphasizing the big points we want to hit that weren't called out in the outline, which are mostly emotional. End result: I started revising last night and am aiming for the draft to be done by the end of the month (knock on wood). 

How is your 2013 starting?

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 243 - Started a New Script

Working with a partner has been a very positive experience for me so far. One of the biggest unforeseen bonuses has been that there's someone holding me back from jumping the gun on starting a new script prematurely. When working by my lonesome, it's easy enough to say to myself, "this outline is ready; might as well jump into the page stage now." Having my collaborator, W.A., along with our producer, however, has made me hold off until the outline was about as ready to go as we could make it.

I'll admit, I used to loathe the thought of outlines. Granted, this was in college when I was a much more novice and pretentious writer. I thought that no good story could be old without giving it the freedom to roam where it might. Outline? Psh. That would only stifle my creativity. For the character to come alive and the plot to go where it needed, I had to strip away all confines and let the beast roam free. 

The result was usually trash.

In the years since, I've become heavily dependent on my outlines. I don't like to embark upon a script without one, and I'll generally do at least one full pass at an outline before getting anywhere near Movie Magic. For the sci-fi collaboration in question this week, I've done seven - count them, seven - full outlines. Probably about a hundred pages or more in different drafts. That tally doesn't even include the versions that preceded my involvement in the project. I came into the script, back in February, to a an outline, that was the result o many other years of development. And by saying I have done seven, I mean there have been seven major incarnations of the outline since I became involved. There have, as with any writing project, been multiple other revisions that were more edits than actual changes. Seven just represents the number of new documents I have created due to overwhelming changes to the story and structure.

And you know what? Draft seven isn't perfect.

There are a lot of smaller things we still have to fix, but W.A. ans I both felt that those, many of which are dependent on visuals and minute details, are best addressed in the actual pages. So, with a solid though still not perfect outline, I finally set off onto the page stage. My hope is to get W.A. a draft of act one by the end of the week. It will be rough. It won't be edited. It will need streamlining and revisions. But it will, if all goes according to plan, be structurally sounds, and I will ask him to focus primarily on the tone.

Off we go. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 232 - The 30 Day Screenplay Challenge

Something unusual and unexpected occurred at last week's writers group meeting. No one had any pages to present, so we had decided to meet for dinner and just talk about our current projects and anything else that was on our minds. Toward the end of the meal, Austin (aka Zombie) mentioned that he had decided to do a 30 day screenplay challenge, and he was wondering if any of us wanted in. The goal: write the first draft of a new script in the next 30 days. 


I jumped on board before he was even done pitching it.


For months now, it seems, I've been stymied when it comes to fleshing out new material. After a couple comprehensive yet flawed outlines, I've gone back to the drawing board to work on character backstories and development for the sci-fi collaboration I'm working on. My demon thriller is basically the Swiss cheese of outlines. And let's not even touch the potential page-one (as a comic book) rewrite of the post-Apocalyptic spec I'm looking at. I felt as though I was mired in the world of endlessly blinking cursors and text pages offering little plot advancement to speak of, and I needed a kick in the pants. Austin's drop of the gauntlet was exactly the elixir I thirsted for.


Last week, after the meeting, the four of us who decided to embark on the challenge shot messages back and forth to one another in an attempt to settle on the rules. Beginning today, June 18, we would have until end of the day July 18 to write a full - or as much of a - first draft of a project. Unless we feel the overwhelming need to, we won't meet too regularly about our work. We'll check in once a week to note progress and talk through any story issues any of us is experiencing, but since we're in a time crunch, we're not going to devote our evenings to  lengthy meetings and psychiatry sessions. 


I've decided to push ahead on the demon thriller for my project. I had a pretty thorough outline until I received feedback from my manager on it. I agreed with his note, and I'm excited about the possibilities for change that come from it, but at the moment, I'm going into this month-long experiment with a fairly coherent understanding of act one, and not a whole lot beyond that. My fear is that the fist draft is going to be one of the more poorly written pieces I've turned out in a long time. On the flip side of that is the fact that it will also be the fist new draft I've produced in a long time, so I can't argue with it too much. 


I generally prefer to have the backdrop of a much more solid outline before I begin on pages, but the time crunch doesn't allow for that now. My nights will be spent producing actual pages (fingers crossed), while I'll pretty much have my outline and notes open all day long at the office, and any down time at the day job will go to working out that night's beats and story problems. 


I'm excited to see where this takes me. Mainly, I'm just eager to be writing again. I feel as though the grey matter between my ears has been a bit dammed up as of late, so hopefully this will open the floodgates, and I'll come out of it with both material and a surge of creative juices to pour into the other projects on my desk.


Let the challenge... begin!

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 228 - Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

I think it's nearly impossible to make a good script too simple. Look at some of the most successful loglines and movies. Die Hard always jumps to mind when talking about the beauty of simplicity. A New York cop tries to rescue a group of hostages from terrorists in an office building. That's a pretty straightforward premise. The plot has twists and turns and complications, but the driving goal is direct and simple. 


W.A., my collaborator, and I had a call with our producer at the end of last week to talk about the sci-fi spec outline we submitted earlier this month. The call was an illuminating one, though as often happens, the outline we thought we had primed for the pages stage was revealed to be overly complex and confusing. due to its nature as a sc-fi, there's already an inherent degree of complexity in the premise. But the execution doesn't have to be nearly as multifaceted as we were making it. As the producer put it, "you have three layers of things going on in this world, which hardly seem connected." We thought the elements were working together, but clearly they weren't. 


With that little kick in the pants, W.A. and I met yesterday to discuss things. Going into the meeting, I wasn't sure where either of us stood. I was beginning to think we might be facing a larger re-write, but I had no idea if he felt the same. The meeting proved quite fruitful, with us stripping some large elements completely, reducing others, centralizing the story, and working in a great overarching goal that we had subconsciously already been working our way toward. Over the course of an hour and a half discussion, the script became a lot simpler and more manageable in scope, with fewer rules to explain and locations to justify. What was left, though, after we peeled off layer after layer wasn't weaker - it was stronger and far more engaging due to its concision. Both W.A. and I walked out of the meeting jazzed about what we had come up with and hope that those changes become the bedrock for the pages I soon hope to start drafting. 


The simplest stories and often be the most difficult to write. I remember thinking that my Medieval spec was going to be a breeze. It's a simple revenge thriller, but man oh man was it hard to crack. I still haven't figured it out, and I'm two full drafts into it. The protagonist's drive is still very simple, but that doesn't mean that I can be lax in my writing. The story still has to flow organically and logically, and while the overall arc was and is clear in my head, the plot points aren't. 


As the producer also said when we were talking, the outline stage is the best time to catch these changes and work on streamlining the script. The last thing you want is to wind up having to do a page one rewrite because you didn't take the time to plan before you sat down to write. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 227 - Keep it Fresh

Later today, I have a call with my co-writer, W.A., and the producer who paired us on our sci-fi spec. It's been about three weeks since I last worked on that project - what with getting it out for review and setting up a phone call at a time convenient for all of us - so I've had some extra time on my hands recently. To fill that gap, I've gone back to the outline of my demon thriller.


It's been fun going back to that project, but of the four main notes I'm trying to incorporate, one is being a real nuisance. Without giving anything away really, the script involves demons living in the world we know. (On the surface, not the most original sounding idea, I'll give you that. But there are, I hope, some really unique things I'm doing with the concept and the notion of demons, hell, and the earth converging.) My manager's overall note was that the demon aspect of the story is really pretty fresh and offers some great visuals, while the human portion of it is fairly prosaic, almost to the detriment of the story as a whole. His reaction was that he loved the demon parts to much that he felt mired in the sequences that didn't involve them and suggested I try to elevate the temporal beats to match those of the supernatural ones. 


I understand his point. In my mind, it's not that huge of an issue; maybe I just see the full story more and know that the demon elements won't be as fantastical as perhaps he envisions them. Or, maybe having somewhat more everyday components will enliven and highlight the paranormal that much more. I'm still not 100% convinced of the need to change things out, but at least for exercise's sake, I'm giving it a whirl. (It's probably worth mentioning that the earthly sections take place in the legal world, so if nothing else, removing them from that arena will limit the number of parallels drawn to The Devil's Advocate.) 


In my quest for change, I'm looking at the unusual and unexpected careers found in "normal life." What haven't we seen on film that often? What creates and aesthetic that holds its own against that of demons and hell, while also being thematically linked to that world? Demonology and hell and good versus evil have certain tones, certain arcane elements that ideally will find a counterpart in the earthly setting I've established. It's tough going, as you can probably guess, mainly because the parallels were easiest to make when I kept the human interactions confined to the legal world. Court room showdowns and guilty versus innocent are the defacto temporal judgments we're all familiar with, so it's such an easy connection to make. I worry about losing those if I transition the setting somewhere else, but the challenge of determining how to retain them is one I'm enjoying so far.


Either way, the key to a solid script is freshness. I feel as though I'm about 2/3 of the way there. Hopefully, the remainder falls into place this weekend. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 225 - The Necessary Outline

At long last! Two months after my collaborator, producer/director/actor W.A. and I first met about the sci-fi project we're working on together, we finally sent our revised outline off to the producer that paired us together. (Actually, two months for revising a project isn't that long at all, but whenever I finish a stage of a project and am able to send something off for review, I feel a small wave of triumph.)


Believe it or not, what we sent the producer was the fourth revision of the outline. I received one before the initial phone call W.A. and I had before we began working together. Then, based on an in-person meeting we did the week after that, I provided him with the big points from our chat and then rewrote the outline based on those. He gave me feedback, which I incorporated into a second draft. Drawing ever closer to something we were both really pleased with, we met again, and out of that came the third draft. That one seemed to require less drastic adjustments, so we met via phone. Of course, drafts three and four are very different in a lot of places, but the result was mutually pleasing to us. Now, we wait to see what if any notes the producer has. 


Naturally, the whole point of this process is to enable me to write the first draft of the script easily and effectively, and for that draft to be a very solid foundation for the final draft. Granted, projects change a lot between the outline and script stages, but we've worked out a lot of the questions and kinks in the story, so hopefully even if the story doesn't adhere, the logic of the world will. It's always impossible to anticipate every question a producer or writing partner or reader or agent or... (you get the point) will have about a script, and that's why the outlining process is so vital. As W.A. and I worked on the story, issues would arise. He would suggest a change based on something that wasn't working, and in attempting to fix it, I would realize that some other piece fell out of place. Or I would ask why something was a certain way, and in his response, he would see the solution to another problem we were grappling with.  Though not every bug or flaw might be addressed, our two minds have raised and answered an enormous number of questions at this point, which should make notes and then writing that much easier. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 221 - Strength from Originality

If you're at all like me - and for your sake, I hope you are in as few ways as possible - then you experience a barrage of creativity and ideas and writing followed by listless respites. These can come in months, weeks, or even days. When I'm actively writing a script, I'll write straight through for a month or more, and then experience as long a time off after completing the first draft. Now that I'm working on a collaboration, as well as keeping my demon thriller on the back burner, those draughts are shorter, no more than a few days typically. 


Still, a draught is a draught, and it will be felt. 


Ok, let me partially retract that. I spent a good week working on revising my outline for W.A., my writing partner. He and I met a couple weeks ago and tossed around a lot of good ideas. For the most part, he was (is) very pleased with the progress I'm making and have made so far. For the most part, the notes he had were pretty minimal. Once again, I've gone through and made some large changes to the outline he first presented. And, once again, he has come back with some mainly "cosmetic" suggestions for improvements. I'd be lying if I said that I've had ample time to devote to them this week in preparation for our meeting tomorrow, but I understand fully where he's coming from on all but one of his remaining notes. I'm not too concerned at all about my ability to address the trio, even if I do lack a degree of clarity for one of them. Hey - that's why we're meeting tomorrow. 


In the meantime, I've been planning on getting back to my demon thriller. Time, however, has not been my friend. Though the day job hasn't been overwhelming, commitments after work have seemingly stacked up in the past few weeks. That, and I'm actually exercising again! I know, I know. Lame. Every time I plan on getting down to pumping out some actual pages on the demon thriller, I get waylaid by some other activity. 


In general, I love having two scripts on the table, no matter what state they're in. Actually, the less developed they are, the better sometimes. When I'm stuck on one, I can just go ahead and jump onto the other. Being so versatile in the outlining stage isn't as easy when it comes to actual pages. At that point in my process, I tend to favor extreme concentration on one project, which means the other goes bye-bye for a month or more. With the demon thriller, the wait wound up paying off.


The script involved a fair amount of world creation. To me, that's one of the best part of writing a movie. Sure, it can be fun to write about a cop or a transit worker or a librarian, but how much more fun is it to write about one of those people in a brand new world that you've created? Or even in our world, but in a completely different time? Giving birth to an entirely new setting with new rules and visuals and realities... is anything greater when working on a story? It's hard to think of something. Well, for the demon thriller, my manager made the very astute observation today that I did that for half the script. Half of it is very unique with new rules, new visuals, and a new approach to possibly familiar experiences. The other half graces tv screens every night in a handful of shows. It's basically a Law & Order episode. 


I didn't realize that odd dichotomy until my manager pointed it out, but it makes total sense. The strength of the premise - and, therefore, in the ultimate execution - comes from originality. Part of the script rises up to the challenge. The other half presents a worthy problem that is organic to the nature of the piece, but it does so in an inferior way. The result, according to my manager, is a loss of steam. I see where he's coming from. More than that, if he sees it in the outline alone, I don't want to even fathom what a producer or potential director might have seen in the script. Other, of course, than a pass. Better, obviously, that I fix it before that happens. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 220 - Everything's Connected

I've been mired in outline land for the past few weeks, as you probably know, and this week has been no exception. After a short hiatus following the submission of my outline to my co-writer, W.A., I met with him to get notes. I have to say, getting notes is downright fun sometimes. It can also be aggravating as hell, but there's often no rush like the rush of figuring out story beats. Sitting there, talking things over while drinking coffee or whiskey or a beer, playing creator of worlds and people - what could be better?


I love that part of working on a story. W.A. and I met at his office again and though we were a little pressed for time, we made a lot of progress in the outline. Many of his notes were, to filch the term from him, "cosmetic." "We can't use the pyramids, because this similar movie did." That sort of thing. (And believe you me, those are important things to pay attention to.) Other notes were slightly bigger - "This reveal comes too late; we should probably push it up." 


"Yeah, but..." I'd start to counter. But you can only rebuff an idea for so long. In fact, when going over notes with a writing partner in particular (though the rule applies when speaking with anyone about your script), you should be as open as possible to everything thrown down on the table. After a few moments' deliberation, I would see where he was coming from. "Ok, next?" 


Some suggestions were mutual, though on the spot. We nixed a character then and there, which felt great. I waffled back and forth on the decision later, but a comment he sent via text message a few nights later cemented the decision for me. We realized that certain things couldn't happen as outlined. "These characters are stuck in prison, but I've given them an easy out, which they don't seem to realize until it's necessary. That clearly doesn't work." All told, the notes, changes, and ideas that spun out of our meeting brought to light things that I might not have otherwise noticed on my own, and then they sent me back into edit and outline mode.


The "cosmetic" changes proved not to be quite as simple as I thought they would be. Locations I had chosen appeared more difficult to swap out then I wanted. Conversely, ditching the one character helped fit a lot of other beats and character interactions/motivations into place. Moving the reveal up further heightened a pivotal sequence at the midpoint of the script and allowed me to bring in a missing element that W.A. and I both wanted in the script. Why did all these dominoes fall the way they did? Because everything is connected. 


Few if any changes can be made in a story, especially one in the outline process, which don't affect the rest of the piece. Perhaps altering a character's name can be trivial enough to not cause ripples, but anything more substantial than that will resonate throughout the entire piece. That's the mark of a cohesive story. If making changes throughout the script doesn't have larger effects on the piece as a whole, then it might not be as fluid and structurally sound as you think.

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 219 - Two Outlines In the Bag, or How To Write an Outline

It was a busy week for outlining. I used to deplore outlining. My ego didn't permit me to do them ("I like to surprise myself and see where the story goes"), and multiple drafts that continued to produce failure were never proof enough that I needed to remedy my ways. This month, though, I've been working on two projects - my spec demon thriller and a sci-fi collaboration with a known writer/director/actor we'll call W.A. - and there's no way I could have achieved any progress without outlines.


To add a disclaimer, if it sounds like I only just began outlining consistently for these two projects, that's far from true. I've been outlining for years. I started making it a regular part of my process sometime in college, and no longer do I attempt a script without an outline. It just proves to be too great a waste of time to do so.


At any rate, outlines are an interesting point of discussion between my friends in the League. How long should an outline be? How detailed? Does it need to feature ever single shot, or scene, or just sequences?


The outline (perhaps treatment is a better word, but I tend to use them interchangeably in my screenwriting vernacular) that W.A. presented me on our sci-fi collaboration was just over 21 full pages long, courier new. After I retooled it, which wound up taking a long time by the end, since I was stuck on a couple key beats, I sent him back an 8 page, Times New Roman document, no spaces between paragraphs, each point bulleted. What I emailed him wasn't the most detailed; I didn't state exactly how we first met each character or how certain ones died or whatnot, but their introductory and final beats were all clearly marked. Everything was broken up by beat, primarily, with small transitional scenes wrapped up for the most part in a larger chunk of text. 


I get very finicky about my outlines and how long each section is. I stick to traditional three act structure, breaking the script up into four equal parts (act one, act two part one, act two part two, and act three). If act three comes in a little under, then that's fine. I actually prefer a shorter third act, and mine typically wrap up in 15, rather than 25 pages. This is where I get particular - if act one has a total of 8 bullet points, then I aim for each subsequent section to have that exact number, no more, and no less. Generally, I hit this mark on the head naturally. For the demon thriller, each section had 11 beats; for the sci-fi one, eight. Act three is the exception, with perhaps three fewer beats/bullets than the rest. 


Both projects turned out well, I feel. W.A. and I have a meeting tomorrow to discuss the sci-fi outline, for which he suggested I watch a movie tonight. His comments so far seem mainly cosmetic, addressing a few set pieces that might feel familiar compared to other movies, and similar tweaks. We'll get into the details at our meeting. As for the demon thriller, the Leaguers who have read it have responded pretty well to it so far, with only a few minor suggestions. At this point, it sounds as if I'm good to move forward with actual pages on both. Can you imagine how much harder those pages would have been, had I not taken the time to outline? Just think - what stumped me for a few days in an outline and necessitated changing a few prior beats could have been a week's stalemate with pages in front of me and an immediate rewrite as a result.

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 218 - Well, That's a First

After months of little to no activity, it feels amazing to have a project that I'm excited about and making continual headway on. The demon thriller outline is off to my manager and a few Leaguers for a second opinion, which has allowed me to immerse myself in the sci-fi collaboration I'm working on with a known director/writer/actor (W.A.). This is a completely new experience for me - writing based on someone else's idea - and I have to say it's been pretty rewarding so far.


Initially, I wasn't too sure what to expect. Before I even got the treatment pages, I was psyching myself out. "What if I don't deliver? What if I can't do it or don't like the idea?" All for naught. When a mutual producer paired W.A. and I, she knew what she was doing. I took to the idea quickly, and W.A. took to my suggestions. Sure, there were some things I was unclear on and elements that I didn't think were necessary any more, but to his credit, W.A. was all ears. He gave me free reign to do what I thought best, and for the past week and a bit, that's what I've been doing.


Starting from a pre-existing 22 page document makes the writing a lot easier in the planning stage. I know which characters I have at my disposal, which I won't need, and where any gaps might be. The same for plot points. In fact, the outlining has come pretty naturally. I think W.A. will be pleased by the fact that most of the structure he put in place remains, if only altered or streamlined. I think I've simplified certain things and cut extraneous elements, but the foundation of the story is untouched. I've been zipping through the latter half of act two and act three, and every beat seems both organic and necessary. There's very little fat that I can see.


However, I'm still missing 25% of the outline. Oddly, that quarter is the first half of act two. Rarely - if ever - is this the problematic portion of a screenplay. Act Two should coat along until the midpoint, when pages 60-70 drag you down and make you want to pull your hair out while drinking yourself into an early grave. This go 'round, though, I cruised right on past that. The second half of the script is - if anything - a little overwhelming in terms of how much happens, but it's all necessary, far as I can tell. 


So why is the first half of act two vacant still? I hope that doesn't mean that it's going to be dull. The rest was just so exciting to write, though, and flowed so naturally. Nah... I think I'll be fine. I just got swept up in the resolution, and knowing how tough it can be to write a compelling climax, I don't mind having that part done already. 


I just hope W.A. is as keen on it as I am. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 217 - Let the Collaboration Begin!

Two weeks ago, I received a short email from my manager, Kevin, alerting me to the fact that one of the producers who had been shopping around my post-apocalyptic spec was working on a project with another writer-producer-director, and they were in need of a writer. Particularly, they wanted one based in New York. When this multi-hyphenate collaborator - let's call him W.A., since I can't go into a lot of detail about who or what with this project - asked the producer if she knew of anyone, she immediately thought of me. (And though I can't quite reveal who W.A. is, you'd definitely recognize him, or at least his films, if I gave you his name.)


The following week, I got an email from the producer to set up a time to talk about the script. She sent me a 22 page treatment on the project, as well as other reading material: research conducted on some of the sci-fi themes, images and tidbits on elements involved, and a couple other core articles and documents to help me prep for our chat. Then, Friday of the week before this past one, W.A., the producer, and I got on the phone for 15 minutes and spit-balled about the project. It was a good chat, with W.A. and I clicking pretty much off the bat. Over the weekend, he sent me character bios, story notes, and a few other things to read over. We met last Thursday.


This was my first real story meeting with an industry collaborator. Yes, I've had phone and email exchanges with the producers on my post-Apocalyptic spec before, but this was an in-office meeting with a known talent about a project. Suffice it to say, I was pretty damn excited. I also was pretty damn prepared. I had reread the outline and all other documents, done some research, and made notes for myself of thoughts and questions for W.A. For an hour and a half, we chatted about the project; I threw out some not-so-small ideas for changes and alterations, and we had a good back and forth on the ideas. This weekend, I put those notes down into a new document for him, which we'll use to help us move forward with the story.


To be completely honest, this collaborative endeavor comes at a great time for me. I was feeling a little stalled on my demon thriller (which I finished outlining over the weekend, by the way!). Having a new project - and one much further along in the developmental stages - helped get the ball rolling for me. I worked through the rest of my idea and was able to jump onto this sci-fi collaboration guns a-blazing. My mind is working on the two stories to varying degrees most of the day. Besides that, I'm having other ideas for scripts, which is a welcome change from the drought I'd been in. And, not to mention the excitement of having a collaboration to work on. 


I've tried collaborating with other Leaguers in the past, but those attempts, while not long lived, were always on ideas we both helped create. This experience is my first with material that didn't originate at least in half from me. That is, it's my first foray into what being a commission-earning writer is like. As professional scribes, we'll (likely) want to write on spec when we can, but the sustainable career comes from being able to land rewriting or commission-based gigs. I'm fortunate to have found a collaborator whose idea I responded so well to and who himself is so receptive to my work and ideas. There's no doubt in my mind that this can prove to be a great learning experience. I just have to be sure to deliver the goods. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 216 - A Busy Week

I had one Hell of a busy week recently. for one, the outline on my demon thriller is finally chugging along again. At the suggestion of my manager, I stared reading Blake Snyder's Save the Cat to help re-energize my writing faculties. Though I don't want to, I have to admit that it's been helpful. At least, I think it has been - I've made more progress in the past few days than I had made in a while, and I attribute that to the informal refresher course I'm giving myself. 


Over the course of working on the outline, and act two in particular, I'm starting to see more and more the mistakes or redundancies I typically make in a script. Usually, these involve the same two characters in two different scenes that achieve two parts of the same goal. For example, with the demon thriller, the protag and his friend-turned-antagonist have an argument around the midpoint. I spread that argument across two different scenes, with a buffer scene between them. Looking at it, however, I couldn't for the life of me determine what naturally would go between those scenes, nor did I have a very strong reason for splitting them up. Rather than one good blowout fight, I was working my way toward two weaker confrontations with a stuttering step between them. It didn't make sense. Last night, after some waffling, I decided to combine them into the one intrinsic scene they wanted to be all along. No unnecessary filler needed, no mid-argument cutoffs, no redundant scene a page later. Just one scene with one fight. Much stronger.


Ideally, I'll finish the act two outline today. That's not the only thing I have going on nowadays, though. I have started contributing to Screenwriters Utopia, a site dedicated to screenwriters of all skills, levels, and experience. My first post there came out on Sunday and deals with the many frustrations I have with a show I still somewhat enjoy watching - AMC's The Walking Dead. (Don't even get me started on it; the most recent episode fueled the flames of my fury again. Why can't they just get a script supervisor - OR ANYONE - to check for inconsistencies? It would be so easy and alleviate so many glaring issues with the show.) I hope you like it. 


Finally, I was recently given an opportunity to look into some collaboration work with a known writer/producer/director. I can't or won't say too much about it beyond that, but this would be my first foray into writing a project that I didn't conceive of on my own. And though I've done some minor collaboration work before, that has all been within the League. I'm pretty damn excited for this chance, so I'll let you know what comes of it (within the scope of my ability to discuss it).


I hope your week was just as if not more productive, and that this Leap Year proves not just fecund, but fruitful.

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 215 - Watching Movies and Creeping Ahead Word by Word

Outlining isn't easy, nor is it quick work. If it was either, the ten incomplete projects on my hard drive would at least each have full first drafts, if not industry-ready scripts to show for all my (varied amounts of) effort on them. No, outlines are the meat of a developmental phase of working on a script. It might only take me three weeks to bang out 90 script pages once the outline is done, but that outline (in and of itself perhaps five to ten pages) is a month long endeavor, if not more. Because the outline contains the framework for the entire plot, each act and every potential major beat, it is a monumental undertaking. It is where the story comes together, and where the weaknesses reveal themselves.


It is also where a writer can most frequently become stuck. 


I can't (or don't want to) tell you how many days these past two weeks I've devoted my daily hour of writing to alternating my blank stare between the blinking cursor on my screen and the clock on my wall. Tick, tick, tick, the second hand mocks me, as the screen goes dim to conserve power, and the outline refuses to grow. Sure, I might add something here or there, but it is typically inconsequential. "The characters have their first date." That's all well and good, but it's also something that anyone who knows anything about the script must assume is in there somewhere, and it rebuffs any further description. While it appears good on screen (progress!), it offers about as much as it did in terms of tangible forward movement than it did when it was unwritten.


Yes, outlines can suck. They can be maddening. If I wasn't worried about going bald, I'd say they can induce hair-pulling. But there's a workaround that I've found helps. Watch movies. Not just any movie (though, sometimes merely seeing something succeed in any genre can be inspiration enough to get past the hump). Specifically, though, it can help to check out movies that are either in the same genre or are somehow otherwise related. For the demon spec, I watch both The Devil's Advocate and The Lives of Others. Devil's Advocate might be a pretty obvious connection, but Lives of Others perhaps at first glance seems an odd parallel. Think about it, though - demons, devils, and the protagonist in Lives are all observers, with the key difference being in how they respond to their subjects. Lives of Others is a great study in observation, and observation is one thing there's not going to be a shortage of in my demon thriller. Lives is also a prime example of a well-paced, engaging movie that has no real typical "action" (i.e., guns and explosions and whatnot). 


When I watch these, sometimes I take copious notes on beats and plot and structure. Sometimes, I just watch and try to absorb. I did a little of both with the above two films. Hopefully, the next time I sit down to work on the outline, I will find that I've actually gleaned something useful from those two viewings.

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 214 - Write Out Your Goals for Each Act

Have you ever written out your goals for each act of your screenplay? I hadn't - nor had I really heard of the idea before, that I can recall - until this weekend. I've been outlining my demon thriller spec, and the going was a bit slow to begin with. In order to kick things into gear, I decided it might be worth the exercise to write out my goals for each portion of the script before actually setting beats down.


Boy, did it help. I had a very loose document with some scattered thoughts here and there, and some ideas for what had to happen in Act Three, but little concept of how to get there. (I'm still stuck on Act Two, but hopefully that will sort itself out by the end of this week.) So, I thought, "what the hell, might as well give it a shot." I started small, bulleting goals such as, "introduce the main target," "explain that demons are real," and "introduce his best friend and hint at their history." Some things were a bit more complex, like "showcase the rules of eternally damning people," for example. 


Bit by bit, though, the objectives for those first 25-30 pages started becoming clearer and clearer. Shortly into the goal-laying process, the means by which to attempt to accomplish those objectives started to become apparent. I knew I could open with a particular scene, which would naturally segue into a second, then a third scene, and a fourth would shed light on what happened in them. I would start with a mysterious, cryptic hook, and then piece it together for the audience in a way that tackled four or five Act One goals at once. I wouldn't flat out explain everything (in fact, I wouldn't have to flat out explain anything so directly), but I'd offer enough for attentive viewers to pick up on what was happening, while capturing the interest of less discerning audience members. By the time act one ends, ideally, the basics are in place, and more specific details will be set up to come out later in Act Two. 


I'm not quite sure how many pages, roughly, I've outlined yet, but I have a sneaking suspicion I'm looking at a shorter first act. That's ok, to start. Now, I just have to get cracking on Act Two, and see where this story takes itself. The thing I'm enjoying so far, which has surprised me a bit, is how visual the idea is becoming. Before, my emphasis had been on the dialogue I anticipated I'd get to write. The focus is shifting toward the visuals at the moment, and I have to admit I'm quite enticed by them. I think this is going to be a fun script; hitting that realization marker is always a good step in the right direction.


Finally, I decide to try opening with a title card for the first time. (I attempted once before, but that project required little more than a time and place title card; this script requires a bit of a setup.) I found a particularly apt quote from the Bible, which I think will go a long way toward setting up the situations I'm writing about. Hopefully, a week from now, I will have a full outline to show for it.  

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 171 - Upping the Stakes

This time last week, I'd finished the first draft of the outline for my Medieval sped. Though I was comfortable with it, my manager pointed out a number of weaknesses in it. I spent the next six days re-working on the outline, focusing most of my attention on adding to the complexity of the protagonist and upping the stakes of Acts One and Two.

Again, I'm please with the result. I know to be wary, though, because as happy as I was with the first draft, it proved itself rife with problems. This time around, though, I know there's much more to the story. In fact, it's a completely different entity in many ways, having been transformed from a fairly simple, straightforward tale of revenge to a deeper story about redemption and overcoming obstacles. That sounds pretty trite and faux-grandiose in the way writers like to talk about their material, so to better explain and not come across as having a swelled head about what, at the end of the day, is an action script, I'll explain a bit more. 

My protagonist was essentially a saint in the first draft; he always did the right thing, while those around him participated in corrupt activities. He was the unerring voice and embodiment of righteousness. While that might work for some characters, it didn't for this one. He had no growth over the course of the story. More than that, too, the love interest I gave him was also one-note, and their relationship never really built, because I did not give them any interesting screen time. 

Act Two was similarly boring. the action was straightforward, with one scene leading to the next in a fairly coincidental manner. This is an easy trap for a write to fall into, one that I have been victim to a number of times in the past. The story has to continue moving forward, but in such a way that what comes before directly affects what comes next, and builds upon what preceded it. Now, I'm pleased to say that, instead of one looming threat compelling the protagonist forward, he now faces at least three obstacles at any one point. We (and he) find out about them at various beats throughout the script, and they build in tandem to one another, creating a more-realized world and stakes that continue to escalate.

We have a writers group meeting tomorrow, and I'm eager to see how the other Leaguers respond to the outline. For many of them, this will be their first time looking at the project. Fresh eyes on the outline are just what I need to gauge whether or not I'm on the right track. Hopefully, with a vote of confidence from them, I'll be able to move over into the pages stage of this script and tackle any remaining issues there.

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 168 - How to Write and Use an Outline

At first, when I was still in school for writing, I openly doubted the importance of outlines. To me, they were suffocating documents that hampered my experience writing a script; I preferred having the story unfold for me as I went along, each day a surprise as to what came next. An outline meant that I would just sit down and bang out the details of a scene that I had already figured out, with little surprise of what was to come. The budding, less-wise writer in me thought that took any sort of art out of writing. 

More recently, as I have improved as a writer, I've come to see the great importance that outlining plays in my technique. Some writers refuse to use them; others outline until there's no room left for changes, and burn through writing the actual script. I, on the other hand, think I've come to learn that there's a comfortable middle ground to work in. I'll outline until I have more than just a loose structure of the film. The document I prepare gives an overall sense of what beats fall where and what happens in them, so it's pretty detailed. However, it's also fluid; that means that when I sit down to produce actual screenplay pages, I don't take the outline as gospel. Case in point: when I wrote my firefighter spec a while ago, I realized before I had even finished the first page that an entire component of the story was missing from the outline. Luckily, the structure I had mapped out was successful enough that it afforded obvious places to include these new characters I was adding, and allowed certain beats to be molded to incorporate them. This flexible outline approach is great - it gets me writing with little hesitation about what the next day will bring, but it also allows me time to problem-solve as I go along.

I've spent the past few weeks talking about various stages of the multiple outlines I'm working on, but I realized I have yet to really delve into what that looks like on the page. For a quick snapshot of what those look like - and, mind you, I have submitted both forms to my manager, so this is what people in the industry have seen - there are two main types of outlines I write. Often, I'll do one of each for each project I'm working on. 

The first type of outline is a pretty straight forward, scene by scene breakdown. It will look something like this:

ACT ONE

-Vietnam, 1972. Mark stands at the edge of a battlefield. He and his buddies are tense. They pass a joint, trying to calm down. Hushed small talk.

-BOOM a mortar round lands not far off. The trees erupt with gunfire.

-In the battle, Mark goes down with a shot to the gut.

-Later, in the field hospital, Mark recovers. A nurse stands nearby. He checks her out.

I tend to conceive of these lines as shots, almost, multiple beats within a sequence. The guys hanging around talking might be a page or two. The mortar round might be a half page. The battle will be a few pages, culminating in Mark's injury. The next scene we see opens in the hospital. Depending on the detail I put into each scene, this type of outline might be 6-10 pages. I'll mark a few tentpole scenes for myself with the following: ACT ONE, PAGE TEN (or INCITING INCIDENT), ACT TWO, MIDPOINT, and ACT THREE. More than anything, those demarcations are to help me with my page count targets. Acto Two should begin between 25 and 30, midpoint will land at 50 or 60 (depending on total count), and Act Three at 75-90. 

The other kind of outline is all prose. This approach will convert the beats into a narrative that reads like a short story. Again, this might be 6-8 pages. My goal with this is to see how the story checks out as a narrative. Sometimes, the beats make sense as bullet point, but reading and writing it the other way makes it easy to see where something's missing or redundant. This approach is also the one my manager tends to favor, and converting the outlines has proven helpful for me. I tend to think out my story in narrative terms a lot, and then convert it to the beat format, so half the work is already done by the time I sit down to work it out as a short story.

Anyway, hope that's helpful. What approach to outlining do you take - if you take one at all?

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 162 - Fleshing out the Mystery

My agent, manager, and I settled on my next spec last week. Thankfully, the chosen project is the horror script I talked a bit about last week. It's potentially a very cool project with material that has yet to be explored on film too much (beyond a C-grade horror flick here or there that I don't even know actually exists). I'm glad we landed on this idea, because it's one that I can really flex my muscles on, while trying something new.

At this point, the approach I'm working on for horror/mystery spec is investigative. By that, I meant that my protag will go on a journey to find out what happened to someone in the recent past, and the thrills and chills will come along the way. Over the weekend, I began outlining the script. (Technically, I'd already started, but the earlier strokes were broader, less specific). The thing is, I ran into a wall pretty early on. 

One of the key components in the first act (which will detail the events leading up to the character's disappearance) is a relationship with some people who live in the area. That relationship becomes integral to all that comes later in the script. It also determines a healthy portion of the action in Act One. While I thought that I could work my way around it, particularly because we don't actually see the lost character disappear, I found I was proving myself wrong.

There is a lot that goes unseen in my script, especially by the protagonist. However, as the writer, I cannot proceed without knowing it. Even if I develop enough material for another script, I have to flesh out the mystery. What happened to this person? Where did they go? These questions seem obvious, because they are the very ones that the protagonist is trying to answer throughout the script. However, their answer - to me - must come before any actual pages. There's a saying that the solution to an Act Three problem can be found in Act One, and that's proving extremely true here. The ability to map out a script all rests on the ability to plan through the first act. Right now, I don't have nearly enough to go on. Before I can flesh out the script, I have to understand and map out the mysterious events - even if we never see them in the pages or on the screen.

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 160 - How to Present Your Rep With New Ideas

Continuing with the focus of the past few weeks, I thought I'd turn a bit of attention to what, exactly, it is that I'm submitting to my reps. Before I had my manager and agent, I didn't quite know what it was a writer would share with his/her "team" when sussing out new ideas. Whole scripts? That sometimes seemed unlikely. Outlines? Verbal pitches? A logline?


The answer, I've found, can be all of the above and, often, a combination of them in a certain order. When working with my manager, as I have been the past few weeks on these ideas, we tend to start off with very general, very short bits of ideas. I'll send him a sentence or two, sometimes without much more than a vague setting, theme, or approach. For example, "Kevin, what about Gladiator underwater; a deep sea diver has to rise up against the king of Atlantis when he is taken captive." Essentially, it's a logline, but it doesn't even have to be that yet. (I'm always wary of giving what I consider to be an extreme idea, since someone out there is likely to see it and want it; if in two years, scuba-Gladiator is on the big screen, please give me a shout-out.) 


From there - and consider, we'll do this with a handful of ideas - I'll distill the approved concepts into actual loglines. The goal here is to make them more market ready, clean up the language, decide on protagonists, and make sure they read tightly. Next, we either go to the agent (or producer, etc.) with the loglines or, if we need more, I'll hit the drawing board for a bit and come up with a paragraph or two for each idea. The one or two sentence loglines become 3-5 sentence paragraphs expanding on the concepts, painting the worlds a bit more vividly, and elaborating on the protagonists' goals. 


Next, it's off to the agent or producers. The ideas only go out once. If a logline is returned without interest or fanfare, it does not become a paragraph, at least, not any time soon (for now). If the idea garners interest, the outlining phase begins. In recent years, I've really stopped writing without an outline. I find I don't have the time to spend on a draft that wanders aimlessly. That's just me. Some writers manage quite successfully without outlines, storing entire plots in their heads until they write furiously or just waiting to see where the characters take the script. That no longer works for me. 


Once an outline's approved, that's when I'll start writing. By "approved," I don't necessarily mean that my reps pour over each outline and sign off on each plot point. I have to like it, for one. More though, at this point, I'm writing a product that other people are (theoretically) saying they will stand behind. If it goes way off course of delves into the realm of "unproduceable," they let me know. Mostly, and I don't always show my reps the outline, this step is to guarantee that the larger picture still matches up with what everyone thinks is sellable. 


Granted, you say, I haven't made a sale yet. True, but hopefully these steps will bring that first paycheck about sooner, rather than later. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 117 - Completed A New Outline

A few weeks ago, I learned that I'd be diving back into more re-writes on my post-Apocalyptic spec after working for a couple months on a draft that we had turned into the Production Company we're working with. Of course, I was disappointed that my time and effort went without the reward of a sale - or at least a big move forward - and that was no surprise to my manager, producer, and the exec at the production company. In order to ward off any other undesired pages, we all agreed that I wouldn't write another page until I produced an outline that we were all in agreement on. 

Last Thursday, I sent that outline off to my manager for his approval after working on it with my producer for some time. I am pretty happy with how it turned out, in no small part because I think it's much closer to what the production company executive wanted. Still, I have no idea whether this will be the final outline that they greenlight for me to write a script off of or not. In fact, I would put money on having to make at least some small changes (I would do this for no other reason than that I've learned to be at best cautiously optimistic about everything; were I not, I'd have gone completely mad by now). 

I know that writers sometimes debate the merits of outlining. When I was still in school - and thought that a sale would instantly follow the completion of a script - I tried to convince myself and my professors that I didn't outline, because I didn't need to. It wasn't my "process." I liked to find out where the story went and allow it to take me along for the ride. As I got older, I realized that's a bit crap. Sure, I don't always outline. However, I do not universally brush off the merits of it. Outlining can be a great process and (had I shared the outline with the production company back in December) a time-saving one. at least with this go-around, I know that the structure will be agreed upon before I set out to put one more word down on paper, and then I can just focus on producing pages as quickly as possible.

One of the things that has become increasingly jaw-dropping to me is how different the script has become in the two and a half years of its existence. I'd always heard stories about how drastically a project can change during development (and had joked accordingly that some studio head would one day try to make my post-Apocalyptic thriller a romantic comedy), but this is the first time I've experienced that for myself. Of course, this is the first time I've actually gotten some major interest in a project. Without a doubt, this is at least the fourth major incarnation of the draft (by that, I mean different characters, plot, and story structure). I've been happy - in varying degrees - with each version, and I enjoy this one just as well. Still, it's undeniable that this script would not make the same movie as my first draft (or second, or third). The project has evolved, not always for the best. I just really want to cement the draft that we shop around and try to make some bigger waves with it soon.

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 116 – Used Index Cards to Help Outline

There are a lot of tools, tips, and tricks that writers use every day while crafting their stories. People write extensive character back stories – even if none of that info ever makes it onto the screen or into the script – so that they know who they’re writing about. They draw character arcs, maps, and family trees on their wall to help maintain visual on everyone in their script. They outline extensively. Sometimes, writers will even sketch out certain locations of buildings if their architecture plays a key role, and use this to help describe the scenes on the page.

I’ve done all of the above. Once thing I hadn’t done until last week, however, was use index cards to help outline my story. I knew that there were a few key beats that I had to include, some that I wanted to include, and a number of pieces to the puzzle that were necessary, but I had no idea where they fit in. Staring at a blinking cursor wasn’t getting me very far, as there’s only so much visualizing I can do while looking at eight pages of text. So, I decided to try index cards and put the plot together like a puzzle in need of assembly. I found this to be amazingly helpful.

The first thing I did was to decide how I needed to break up the information on my index cards, to determine the elements that I was working with. (As a committed recycler – particularly of paper – and, some would say, a bit frugal, I decided to use the backs of my old Far Side day calendar pages, rather than buy a pack of new index cards for this experiment.) I decided that I was essentially dealing with three major types of information. First, there were the locations and big action beats. I wrote these in big red letters. This way, I could lay out the major beats by what happens in them (never getting too specific) and be able to rearrange the plot through them. For example, at one point, my character goes to Washington D.C., so that card just reads, “Michael gets to DC.” Another would be, “Michael is chased through the trees.” Simple things that to other people might not mean a ton, but to me, carried a lot more implied information. I think I had about 10 or 12 of these.

I lined up the red beats vertically on my bed, rearranging and leaving blanks between them so that I could get a quick overview of the story structure so far and sense where I was missing something. Immediately to the right of the red cards were the blue ones. Blue was for the reveals that come with each scene. For example, if the beat was “Michael arrives in DC,” then the corresponding blue might be “His ex-wife is no longer living there.” The blue represented bits of information that were organically (and often immediately) apparent once the protagonist arrived there. He arrive in X (red) and sees that Y (blue) is the case.

Finally, to the right of all the blue cards were the ones with black text. These were the ones that were trickiest to work into the script and most important to spread out effectively and intelligently. The black notes were the bits of information that the protagonist puts together along the way, the puzzle pieces that are revealed to him through his actions and interactions with other people. For example, “He arrives at a volcano” (red), “The volcano is about to blow” (blue), “Someone is causing the eruption” (black).

Any information that did not immediately fit into the line up, I placed chronologically by color off to the side. If I knew that the five black notes that I hadn’t fit into the script yet had to be revealed in a certain way, I ordered them vertically accordingly, and was then able to see which red beats they corresponded best with. If there weren’t any scenes that naturally would reveal that information or there were scenes that didn’t organically follow one another, then I knew that I had to add another beat.

The visual of lining all of this information out on my bed and seeing what was missing/irrelevant/not yet incorporated was incredibly helpful. I don’t know why I put off this approach for so long. Just seeing everything like that helped me pinpoint what was working and what wasn’t, and – perhaps most importantly – where I was duplicating scenes because I thought that I hadn’t revealed something that was actually already there. If you’re ever stuck outlining, I would suggest using index cards (or some variation thereof) to help you break through. It certainly worked for me.