The Writing Week (vol. 3) part 111 - Plan on Lots of Re-writes

I don't think that anyone could have convinced me of the amount of re-writing work I'd have to do once I began writing my post-Apocalyptic spec. Even I can't believe it sometimes.

For over two years now, I've been working on this same script (off and on). At first, though I was writing it with the hopes of selling it and breaking into the film industry with it, I was also writing it just for the hell of it. I had never tried an end of the world script before, so it was sort of an experiment for me. Sure, I'd had to create new worlds and settings before, but I'd never tried transforming the familiar (major U.S. cities and landmarks) into something different and unknown. All of my previous scripts had taken place in fictional cities with fictional laws, all of which I created. This, though, basing something in reality, was also new to me. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it beyond the Armageddon scenario that I'd come up with (couldn't it maybe be enough to just explore this new reality and work a story into that setting?), but I knew I wanted to use it.

Over the past year and eight months, though, the script has really evolved. I'd say it "changed," but I don't think that implies either a positive or negative difference, whereas "evolved" does. At least to a degree.

The script is better now. I think I can securely say that. There are certainly fewer plot holes, and everything on the page makes a lot more sense and is unquestionably earned now. In the earlier drafts, I was clearly having fun with my characters and world, but sometimes to the detriment of the story. Things click into place much more clearly now. That said, I've also been doing consistent rewrites since June, and it's hard to avoid feeling like I've moved away from that original, ill-formed idea of what I wanted the script to be. Yes, it's about something now. Yes, the plot is tighter. Yes, we care more about everyone we meet. That doesn't mean that it's exactly what I originally set out to write.

Disclaimer: I don't want to sound like the above is a complaint. It's certainly not. Rather, it's an observation on how far the script has come. It's also an honest confession. I was thinking about notes I'd gotten on it the other day, sitting on my bed, trying to figure out how to address a big question that had come up in the pages, when something hit me. My original intent with this project was so far behind me, so far "missed" that I didn't remember it. At first, the script was more sci-fi, creepy people doing creepy things. Now, it's much more firmly grounded in reality. (After seeing both THE ROAD and BOOK OF ELI recently, I think it was wise to move away from the more eccentric behavior.) It was just an odd thought - that this was incredibly different from what I first planned on doing.

Now, after all of that is said and done, there's one final thing to consider. The other day, my mother asked me which draft I was most pleased with. Isn't this the crux of the matter? I answered honestly when I told her that, if I could sell any incarnation of it, it would be the current one. It's the strongest. And, though it's different from what I first set out to write, because of the years of unexpected re-writes, it's also better.

I hope you find that re-writes do the same thing for your script - just be sure you don't get so far from the original idea that it stops feeling like yours. Throughout all of this, I still feel like the script it mine. Different. But still mine.

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 110 - Lock Yourself Away to Write

Onyx and I were supposed to spend the weekend in Ohio helping out on Zombie's film set. Unfortunately, in order to get there, we were going to have to stop in Arlington, VA to borrow a car from my parents and then drive up through Maryland and Pennsylvania. That whole region was the epicenter of a major blizzard beginning exactly on the Friday we were to hit the road, so we had to cancel.

With my plans all screwed up, I had an important decision to make. Should I go ahead and have a four day weekend, or did it make more sense to save up my vacation days and go into the office? I had so successfully shifted my mind into "no work on Friday" mode, that by the end of the day Thursday, I knew I would likely not be productive for the final day of the work week. I was confident that I could be of some use on Monday, but Friday was likely to be a loss. On top of that, my producer got back to me on Wednesday with notes on the latest draft of my script, and my mind was all abuzz with new ideas. Thus, I decided to take Friday off and dedicate the weekend to my script.

Normally, I write for about an hour a day and consider that a success. However, I'm not one to enjoy "wasting" a long weekend, no matter how tired or lazy I might be feeling. So, on Friday, I holed up in my room and worked for about 3 hours, cracking the major issues that my producer had found with the script. Saturday saw another two hours of work, as did Sunday. I know that 7 hours in a weekend might not seem like a ton, but it did me a lot of good.

The top of the week found me pretty aggravated, to be honest. I received an email from my producer with her new thoughts on the script, and it indicated a lot more work to be done. I went to sleep that night pretty frustrated, frankly, and ready to be done with this phase of the script. After my call with my producer on Wednesday, however, I was happy to do more work on it. I saw where she was coming from with her feedback and, more importantly, how to go about solving it. Most crucially, though, I knew that she was right - the things she had brought up were important issues, but would not compromise the structure or scenes of the latest draft. I suppose it's a good thing (and I hope I'm not wrong in my evaluation of the script here) that the changes we needed to make could be done almost exclusively through dialogue. A few adjustments or tweaked lines here, and we would be able to convey the important info that was missing. 

Now all I have to do is implement those notes, get her the revised draft, and hope like mad that we can pass it on to the production company soon. Whatever the result, it was great to give myself one day (Friday) in which I dedicated myself to very little other than working on ironing out the problems in the script. If you have the opportunity to do so and are facing challenges in your story, I highly recommend locking yourself away to write. 

Novel Ideas: Your Novel's Revision Stage

Last time we chatted, I'd finished my first draft of SILENT CITY and was riding the wave of joy that comes with such an accomplishment. I was prepping for The League to look over the draft and taking a moment to bask in the glow that comes with finishing a project.

But then reality set in.

The book isn't done. Far from it. I realized a little while after writing the last post that finishing the first draft of a novel is only a part of the ongoing process of writing one. Next comes arguably the most challenging and perhaps longest step: Revisions.

My initial plan was simple: Submit the draft to The League, make the required changes and start querying agents. But nothing in life is that easy. The League was already well-stocked with stuff in the queue and, unlike my colleagues who mostly deal in 100-125 page screenplays, a 220-page novel is a more daunting task, and not something I can expect my fellow Leaguers to read through and properly digest in a few days. So, SILENT CITY will be analyzed at our next meeting, ideally sometime toward the end of this month. In the meantime, I was left with a shiny new draft and no one to read it.

This is where good friends become a great benefit. I sent a few polite emails to people I knew, both in and out of publishing but mainly people I knew were readers and most importantly, people who I trusted to be honest with me and cut the bullshit. Some of these people include novelists, editors, newspaper writers and copy editors, etc. Mainly, I wanted an honest opinion from a wide swath of people -- some well-versed in the crime fiction genre, others just coming to it as a new reader would, in addition to the comments I knew I was going to get from The League.

So far, I've built a pretty solid list. I've handed the first draft to a colleague of mine who has a ton of experience reading manuscripts in general and crime novels specifically. So, I'm waiting on his comments before I send the draft to a wider list, mainly because I expect his notes to be the most detailed and effective. I'm pretty sure that the second draft of SILENT CITY will be significantly different from the first, so I don't want to bog the rest of my list down with reading it twice. Also, I'm well aware this is the kind of favor you can't really call people on more than once every few years, so I have to make sure each "read" I'm getting doesn't just get done, but also gets done at the right time. For example, I have another close friend back home who's an ace copy editor and also a very smart reader, period. But having her read my first draft, especially when I know I'll be getting copious notes from someone else, doesn't work if what I'm looking for from her is more of a general "This didn't work for me/This was good" analysis, coupled with a very detailed copy edit. Maybe I'm being a tad OCD about it, but it makes sense to me on paper.

Now, while all this planning and list-building sounds good, it doesn't equate to much writing. So, I decided to start outlining the next novel while I waited for people to get back to me and between revisions (which have yet to begin). This was a fun exercise because it allowed me to work on something new while still keeping a hand in SILENT CITY. I've got a very basic breakdown of Pete's next adventure, which involves a change of scenery, a new villain and some other surprises I'm hesitant to get into just yet. I've read a few books as research and I'm excited to work on something new but also familiar, as it's a continuation of SILENT CITY.

More as it happens...

2010 Academy Award and Razzie Nominations Announced

Today, film lovers around the world finally got to find out what the 10 Best Picture Nominees for the 82nd annual Academy Awards are. Some of us are groaning, some are griping, and some are pleasantly surprised. I'm more curious than anything - how can up be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Animated Feature? 

Of course, the end of January doesn't just signal time to recognize the year's best cinematic accomplishments - it's also a great opportunity to look back at (or avoid) some of the most epic film failures of the past 12 months. And for that, we have the Razzies. 

If you haven't see the nominations yet - for both the year's best and worst - here is a sampling.

Best Picture

"Avatar"
"The Hurt Locker"
"Precious: Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire"
"Up in the Air"
"Inglourious Basterds"
"Up"
"The Blind Side"
"District 9"
"An Education"
"A Serious Man"

Best Original Screenplay

"The Hurt Locker"
"Inglourious Basterds"
"The Messenger"
"A Serious Man"
"Up"

Best Adapted Screenplay

"District 9"
"An Education"
"In the Loop"
"Precious"
"Up in the Air"

Best Director

Quentin Tarantino, "Inglourious Basterds"
Kathryn Bigelow, "The Hurt Locker"
James Cameron, "Avatar"
Lee Daniels, "Precious: Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire"
Jason Reitman, "Up in the Air"

Best Animated Feature

"Up"
"Coraline"
"Fantastic Mr. Fox"
"The Princess and the Frog"
"The Secret of Kells"

Best Foreign-Language Film

"Ajami"
"El Secreto de Sus Ojos"
"The Milk of Sorrow"
"Un Prophète"
"The White Ribbon"

And on the other side of the fence:

Worst Picture of 2009

“All About Steve”

“G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”

“Land of The Lost”

“Old Dogs”

“Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen”

Worst Screenplay of 2009"All About Steve"

"G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra"

"Land of The Lost"

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

"Twilight Saga: New Moon"

To see all Oscar nominated films, click here. 

For all Razzie candidates, click here.

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 109 - Should you Follow the Trend?

Should writers follow the current Hollywood trends? Do they make the trends? Should they even worry about them? These are questions that I never really thought about recently, at least not so far as they dictated my writing. Recently though, I can't help but seriously consider what's being released and what has recently sold when trying to determine which idea I should work on next. 

While it's worth noting that all aspiring writers ought to have multiple ideas in the queue - this isn't so much to gauge your seriousness as a writer, as it is your future success as more than a one-trick pony – this post assumes you have a few ideas. (It’s fine if you don’t yet – focus on finishing your first script before getting too far ahead of yourself.) So now let’s say you’re trying to decide which script to write next. Let’s also assume that all your ideas are of equal urgency to you. Whether you’re repped up or not, you might wonder how much Hollywood’s current trends should affect you decision.

Of course, my voice is just one out of many (and one that is not too well known in the industry – yet). Still, I can tell you that both my current and previous manager have been very hesitant about giving me the green light to work on specs that are similar to something(s) that has just sold. Any studio that doesn’t yet have a vampire movie (hypothetical – I’m sure they all have 6) will most likely not want to risk their neck-biter flick on an unknown writer. That means, they’re going with the big guns, and you and I do not fit the bill. So, I doubt I’d write a vampire script right now if I had other ideas rattling around there. (I know this sounds like a bit of hypocrisy. After all, I’m trying to sell a post-Apocalyptic spec on the heels of not only The Road, but also Book of Eli and 2012, to name but a few.)

Granted, there’s the flip side to trends. Now might be the PERFECT time for you to write a rom-com about a woman who goes to Europe and meets the perfect man. When in Rome and Leap Year both look terrible, and studios might just be looking for “the movie those should have been.” Likewise with my post-apocalyptic spec, Eli and The Road both got middling reviews, so I know that part of the train of thought is that people still want to see a more successful version of that world. On the other hand, a couple flops can kill a genre.

We seem to be back at square one – should you follow the trend? Maybe. I can tell you now that I’ve met with incredible resistance to trying to establish a franchise. If you’re hoping to write your own superhero movie, because superheroes are all the rage, you should know that hardly anyone will want to risk $150 million on your self-created superheroes (believe me, I’ve tried). And unless you have something incredibly unique to say about zombies, now might not be the best time. We’ve seen every form of zombie there is recently – except ballerina zombies, which I just copyrighted – so studios are likely to edge away from that soon.

Maybe a better question is: should you determine the trend? If you can’t quite determine it, can you at least get ahead of it? Maybe you remember watching some sasquatch movie when you were a kid, and a generation later, there’s been no sasquatch movie. Well, it might be perfect time to unleash your sasquatch thriller on movie-goers.

Ultimately, what the answer comes down to is money. Studios don’t want to spend money, but they have to in order to make it. And they love making it. That means that right now, they’re looking for the “sure” things. Unfortunately, that means sequels and franchises. It does also mean trends, but only to a certain extent. Slasher films are usually a low risk venture because of the unknown talent and low budgets that can carry them. A new writer attempting a low risk venture like that can really distinguish him or herself by writing a knockout script. A new writer attempting a $100 million futuristic caper is facing much more of an uphill battle. If you can write a smart, relatively inexpensive, yet unique script that fits into the current trend, then go with it. Know that by the time your script is ready for production, the trend might be over, and your project could stagnate. For the most part, though, I think that what you and I have to do is write what we feel we can write most effectively right now, avoid the trends that just died, and just make sure that we’re breathing new air into whichever genre we tackle.

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 108 - Get an Outside Perspective

For the past seven months and change, I've been working with an independent producer and manager (and since October, a production company, as well) on my post-Apocalyptic spec. However, for the first year and a half that I've been developing this project, the League's feedback has been invaluable. I've consulted various Leaguers about different elements of the script on and off since June, but for the most part, they haven't been actively involved in fleshing out ideas with me for a while now. Last week, though, in order to bring them up to speed on things and (more importantly for me, at least) get the opinions of people who haven't had their head deeply in this material for two years, I brought the script back to the League.


Before I go any further, let me just reiterate something that is at the heart of the League; in our opinion, writers groups are an invaluable asset for aspiring writers. The importance of having people whose opinions you value and trust to be consistently honest and critical cannot be stressed enough. It is really only with the help of the League that I was able to get my script to a point where it attracted managers and producers. Because the feedback has been so valuable thus far, I knew that the first place I had to turn when wanting an outside perspective on the newest draft was my fellow Leaguers. 

Ask any writer and they will (probably) tell you - the more time you spend in the world of a script, the harder it can be to make sure that the readers and audience have all of the information that they need to follow the story. At this point, I've been working on this particlar script on and off for over two years, and while I've kept a close eye on it with help from my manager and producers, I know that we might be missing something valuable that, at this point, is elemental knowledge to us. 

The League met on Friday after work (a good end to the week/beginning of the weekend), and it was one of the more helpful meetings I've had in a while. My fellow Leaguers opened my eyes to a couple important aspects of the script. Not to give too much away, but over the course of the script, the protagonist's views on a couple groups operating within his world shift. The League made me realize that, while I'd done a solid job illuminating one group, I had failed to really offer much about the other, thinking that the first shift would cover both. Additionally, they helped me realize that my midpoint of Act Two scene, while functional, is not yet playing the crucial role that it can and is positioned to really achieve a lot for both the story and the main character. 

There were other things that the League helped me realize about the script, and now I feel like I'm either on the edge of a breakthrough epiphany, or will have to go back and re-work a lot of the script that will reveal itself to be flawed. Either way, my friends here at League HQ have proved themselves an incredibly important tool in my writer's toolbox and have served as the outside perspective I so badly needed to push through the final stages of this round of rewrites.

Creative Screenwriting Gets It Right

I've been a Creative Screenwriting magazine subscriber for just about a year now, though I've been an on and off reader for longer than that. While CS can be a pretty valuable resource for writers, I've also found it to be frequently disappointing. The first issue of 2010, though, I have to say, got it right. Creative Screenwriting finally went editorial (at least just this once).

A magazine like Creative Screenwriting, I have to assume, walks a fine line between what it can and can't do while trying to reach a niche market. I say this because, while there are some great segments in the bi-monthly periodical, there are also some parts that are clearly hesitant to be critical.

Let's start with what the magazine does right. the Agent's Hot Sheet is a great piece that polls agents and managers once every two months on a certain subject. Topics can be anything from tent-pole films to the state of the spec market. The advisory panel of go-to managers/agents contribute their thoughts and opinions for the benefit of readers, acknowledging that most of the readers are unproduced writers. Some of the info might be pretty basic, but there are often great little tidbits in there for even more accomplished writers.

The writer profiles that kick off each issue are also usually pretty worthwhile reads. These articles spotlight newly successful writers and detail a bit of their rise to becoming writers with a sale under their belts. Granted, when the headlines try to spin the profile as that of an overnight success, you have to be a little skeptical; often, the "overnight" writer spent ten years as a reader, assistant, and producer first. Still, these are worth reading and are always - at the very least - a good reminder that hard work can pay off.

There are other featured segments on craft and interviews with established writers are that usually worth a read. But throw all of the above together, and I'd say that leaves only about 33% of a typical Creative Screenwriting issues accounted for. The vast majority of the articles are interviews with writers of films currently or soon to be in theaters. These are interesting - often more so if you've seen the film(s) in question - but really not as useful as they could - read: should - be.

So here's where I put on my disgruntled subscriber cap and vent. Here at the League, we periodically review films. We're pretty up front about whether we think something's worked or not, and to the best of our abilities, we try to analyze a picture through the writing behind it. Creative Screenwriting, however, spotlights writers and their films, yet hardly ever offers any analysis of the script in question. For example, the article on SURROGATES, which you might remember we did not like, touted the accomplishment of getting the film made and detailed the writers' process and some of their experiences with the project. Fine. Dandy. But that's the same thing that the piece on BOOK OF ELI did. It's the same thing that the segment on DAYBREAKERS did. It's the same thing that the segment on THE MESSENGER did.

After a certain point, reading about a writer's process and their excitement about seeing their film made ceases to be helpful if it has no discussion of the quality of the film and script. Every writer interviewed will likely be thrilled that they sold something and got it onto the big screen. What readers need is an analysis of why something worked and why it didn't. Had I never seen Surrogates, I would think it was just as strong a film as every other one profiled in the magazine.

I'm aware that a periodical like Creative Screenwriting has to be careful not to alienate the writers it interviews, especially since it will most likely try to interview those people about their next project. No one wants to be interviewed by a magazine that slammed their last script. However, this cautionary approach results in a very finite amount of usefulness to readers. Unproduced writers - and I know this from personal experience - are looking for guidance in the form of lessons learned about what makes a script strong and what omissions can greatly weaken a script. With little to no analysis like this, the magazine becomes little more than a written commercial for the next two months' releases.

Ok, you might be wondering, what did I like about this issue? (If you're wondering why I still subscribe... stop. I do. That's all on that.) This issue, Creative Screenwriting kicked off the year with essays on different genres, how the films of the past decade influenced them, and why certain films stuck out as stellar examples of their genre. In short, this issue was not afraid to be more critical. Not every film referenced was praised. The columnists this issue weren't afraid to refer to scripts that failed to work, and they were equally unafraid to praise the hell out of ones that did. First time readers were introduced to an unfortunately uncommon level of analysis that actually did something to guide new and aspiring writers toward examples of strong and unsuccessful scripts. More than any other issue I've read, this one was a valuable and consistent learning tool. Perhaps the editors in charge will determine a way to get more bang for the readers' buck in the future, while still refraining from alienating or overly criticizing the screenwriters that they rely on for interviews.