Collaboration: It’s Not All about Me

Here’s a real screenwriting bloggety-blog for those of you still committed to seeing your work played out by the great actors of our time on the big screen….

Writers have to be somewhat egotistical to pull off anything. We have to believe that our story has some importance, some meaning, in order to slog through the work it takes to produce it as a script, a poem or a story of any sort. Honestly, the merit of writing a tale that is meaningful to others is our craving. Defending our point of view becomes a major part of the work of writing, of each story, and yet it is only when we become as confident of our point of view, as a ballerina is confident of her pirouette, that the writing begins to shine on its own and attract an audience.

In screenwriting, and perhaps playwriting, the moment we are confident of our point of view, we begin to understand that our writing is part of a collaboration of points of view. Wait. What? Yes, I am saying that just when you think you’re done, the real work of a screenwriter begins. We’ve developed our writing skills necessarily, up to this point, to work independently, but that’s not all. There is more. Upon reaching a success plateau, say having your script optioned, or getting ready to make a short video with a group of like-minded souls, you are now volunteering to let others into your work circle and actually welcome their additional points of view, and if you're lucky you've been paid to let go of the reigns.  They’ve chosen your script because it struck them as “true” at some level, but now they have opinions about it as well. You go from being confident that your screenplay is perfect as it is, to being asked to consider the necessity of change (locations, for instance) or improvements (i.e.; stronger villains).  Screenwriters do sometimes whine about being left out of the process, once their work is in the development process.  Everyone wants to make a mark on the writer’s former territory, and it can be heart-wrenching to the unprepared.

Most of the working world works in collaboration with others, but writers often believe that they have sole ownership of their efforts. Most likely, they became writers because they have a tolerance for working alone that many do not share. I know that was true for me, but I also know from experience that screenwriting is different. Whether you start alone and then join a team of producers, actors and crew, or you start with a writing partner or even a team, when you type the words, “the end” on your script, a new level of work begins.

You may see this as an argument to be loosey-goosey with your point of view, to be a panderer to anyone who will give you money for your work, but let me be clear: NO! No that is not what I’m arguing for in the least. If anything, I will argue that you must carefully build up a confidence in your point of view before you will be ready to open up to other people’s perspectives with any grace at all. Additionally, only when you have begun writing your own take on a story will it have the cohesiveness it must have to attract others to want to collaborate and bring it to the screen. Why? Because a director or producer or agent will sense the weakness of a premise without a point of view, and will know that a writer submitting such mumbo-jumbo is not ready for the rough and tumble world of collaboration.

Collaboration is THE process of filmmaking. Imagine an architect with the hubris to believe that the grand temple he has designed will be built with his own hands. Um, it has to be a very little building, or maybe the ONLY building he will build in a lifetime then. If you are a writer who wants sole ownership, then consider that screenwriting may not be where you want to focus your storytelling gifts. If you can imagine how the dynamic of teamwork will enhance your work, then you are in the right place.

There are tried and true methods for building strong teams, and, unless you also want to become a director, you don’t really have to pay attention to all of them. In fact, a production team is most often an organic expansion of talented people who more or less share a point of view. Famous writer/directors like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese have worked with a tight knit group of talent for decades. That said; there are things you can work on as a writer to ready yourself for the collaborative process:

• Story confidence building. Being confident of your story, knowing it inside and out is the first step towards being ready to work collaboratively. You must be ready to answer any question and defend any story point throughout your script. This is not about bullshitting. This is about knowing your material inside and out.
• Prepare yourself to compromise. I have a screenwriting friend, who had set a scene in a grocery store, but the production company couldn’t get a grocery store to agree to be the location, and so she had to rewrite the scene for a hardware store. These kinds of things have happened everyday in filmmaking since the golden age. Flexibility is a great asset any screenwriter can bring to the table.
• Don’t take it personally. When you’ve worked on a script for a year or sometimes more, remembering that it isn’t just yours is difficult to say the least. Is it possible that you’ll be working with insensitive, egotistical people in Hollywood? Are you kidding? Make like a duck in a rainstorm and let it roll off your back, as my wise grandmother would say.
• Keep your eye on the prize of a whole career of writing screenplays rather than investing all of your creative self-belief in one project. At the beginning of your career, accept you are on a learning curve. As your films find an audience, you’ll know more and more how to handle “the development process.”
• Use your skills! You’re a writer! Keep notes of why those changes were made and when. Write out reasons for defending your preferences before exploding on the scene with demands and defenses, shooting from the hip of emotion. Use your skills to work out the best choices, and when you can’t find a meeting place realize that sometimes compromises are not win-win, but you can live and write another day if you can work with others and do your best.
• Combine survival and celebration. Enjoy each step of the experience of seeing your idea come to life with others help. Enjoy the additions that enhance your idea and the scramble to get it all done. Enjoy the changes you disagree with for what they are: a learning experience.

I will say that the learning experience is sometimes hard and not apparently enjoyable for many writers. I have seen some writers spin themselves into addictions and worse because they were asked to give up something they didn’t want to give up. Unfortunately, I have not seen these writers’ work back up on the silver screen since. That’s the truth. Collaboration is not about one person, and making movies is all about collaboration.

Empower yourself

The truth is that working in Hollywood is hard! There are endless meetings, and long hours, and lots of reading, not to mention the driving. Endless drama marks the day and it isn't all entertaining. So what are those who have found their fate lies behind a desk in Hollywood to do with the submission of some 50K ideas in any given year? How in the world does the cream rise to the top? How can they bring to order the mass chaos that lands in their in-box every single day?

Agents, the gatekeepers of Hollywood, run the first line of defense against the onslaught. They say, "No, thanks," a lot. Why? Writers want to understand why this elite group of arbiters hasn’t chosen them. I'll tell you the bottom line reason: it is because the writers make it easy to say, "No, thanks." How can that be? They've written the script of their lives, how can this make it easy for an agent to say...? How? I could take the easy way out, lie to you, and say it is all just numbers. They reach their limit. However, that isn't really the how. The how of "it's easy," is that the script is not the only thing that you need to bring to an agent to make it with them or anyone else in Hollywood. The amazing truth is that the script is barely a business card in magnitude as an introduction to Hollywood. It may be the biggest effort of a writer's life, but its impact on the future of a screenwriter is initially negligible. What? Yes, there is a "what" that the writer should be bringing to an agent, producer, manager or anyone else who has the power to say, "Yes!" to them besides a single script. The most important thing you bring to a person in power in Hollywood was never just a story in script format.

It took me years to understand this folks, and the "what" is directly related to "point of view" that I've brought up before on this blog, but it isn't just your point of view. No. There's even more besides a story and a point of view. To get there you really have to invest in your own point of view and I want you to understand why it is so important to have that point of view. Many schools will tell you that you must find a "niche" while at the same time being broad in your strokes and enlisting the lowest common denominator to support your work. This is mumbo-jumbo, folks. It means NOTHING. What you have to do is find your point of view and develop it so that it is indelible, so that it is Teflon. Your point of view is what the people who eventually come to see your screenplay made into film want to know about. Your point of view challenges a film goer, television viewer. Your point of view makes the story that has been told a million and a half times unique in its detail and expression. Because your point of view will find the "what" that you must bring to the table in Hollywood, and that "what" is AUDIENCE.

Why it is so hard to find someone to read and represent our scripts is that we make it easy for agents and producers to say, “No, thanks.”  How we writers make it easy for agents and producers to say, “No, thanks,” is by expecting our stories to be the only thing they are looking for in a client. What is lacking is a clear audience for our point of view. Where do we get that audience? The “where” is known as “credits” in Hollywood, but it is really “credentials” as well.  Our credentials prove that we have followers already and that there is a foundation of work to build upon.

Palm hits forehead. We’re supposed to come to Hollywood with an audience already loyal to our work? Yes. It doesn’t have to be a huge audience (though that is certainly helpful), but we have to show that we have been committed to using our talents out in the world for a good period of time. Whether we just left film graduate school with a school award and a film under our belt, or we have made a hobby of entering our spec scripts into screenplay contests and finally winning one or two of them, these accomplishments show that we are committed to sharing our point of view with an audience.  Right now, there are amazing opportunities to build audience with tools that have never been available before. There are websites dedicated to opening up awareness of your work. There are video sites where you can upload your short films. There are workshops and classes you can take. You can blog about film…grin. In short, there is no excuse left to wait until you are “discovered.” Empower yourself today and tomorrow Hollywood might just come knocking on your door.

Introduction To Screenwriting Class

Next week I teach Introduction To Screenwriting. It used to be that I kept it simply to the subject of learning how to write a screenplay, but frankly, I believe that is an unfair scenario to launch any writer into with the starry-eyed gaze of hope.  If you want to be a writer, you have to start somewhere. This much is true. However, of all writing venues screenwriting is perhaps the most unforgiving.

I’ve talked about the odds here: 55,000 story ideas, 400 chosen. Pretty sad. Then take it even further. There are 400 film schools in the world just about. Therefore, if just one student who has practiced this craft for 3-4 years makes it, that cuts out all the hobby screenwriters who are just learning the craft. Screenwriting is a professional choice, and not a good hobby. It takes a year to develop a good feature-length screenplay for the most professional writers, working about 10 hours a week. They generally work on several projects at once. There are methods. There is a structure to learn. There are those scenes that need truer vision, and dialogue that must be trim and support the action.

Learning how to write a screenplay could very well be helpful for writing any other kind of story because at its best it is dynamic, structured, active and tidy. A novel, poetry, and even proposals for business would be helped by understanding screenwriting. There is no doubt to me about that. Screenwriting is specific in its demands, and yet the best screenplays are unique and revealing. The heart of a great screenplay is a point of view that stays truthful. This is what makes a screenplay transcend the “formulaic” trap screenplays can fall into, and sometimes this means honing a story down to the simplest of themes.

The way a ballerina makes dance look easy, a screenwriter makes writing look easy. It doesn’t mean that there haven’t been years of practice behind the work. The rule of thumb is that most screenwriters don’t get this on their first, second or even third try. It can take up to ten speculative screenplays before a writer finds the screenwriting groove. When you taste it, you’ll realize that all the crap you were writing before was just crap. I don’t know any other way of putting it kindly. The iconic literary agent I once worked for put it this way to me, “Don’t worry about it, Amanda, the cream always rises to the top.”

So, if you’re going to take my class, realize that Hollywood is fat because it only takes cream. If you’re going for that dream, it will take hard work, and lots and lots of planning, and practice runs. That’s just the way it is and will continue to be for the near future. However, that said, I do believe that we are entering a new era. At the beginning of new eras there are opportunities available for upstarts, improvisers and smart asses, like there never is once it becomes established.

In this Introductory Class, we’re going to touch on those new possibilities because I believe it is important to teach what, from my point of view, is becoming an obvious opening in the entertainment industry. I’ll introduce the different pathways that are meeting at this crossroads…there’s no longer one straight highway to the promised gig. If you pay attention to what is happening in Social Media and practice a little bit of extrapolation, you’re going to begin perceiving opportunities that never existed before. I’ll give you some clues as to where to start.

I hope to see you next week!

Truth in the Age of Growing Transparency

In an age of growing transparency, truth is not fixed to fact. While  facts play an important role in reaching the truth, and in the case of mathematics certainly have stood the test of time, in all other arts and sciences facts are in the realm of proofs, and can change with an evolution of knowledge. I believe facts are showing their fragility, and their reliance on power structures that are falling away is making them shakier. Perspective, or point of view, then takes precedence over facts in conveying what is true. 


This makes the job of writing a movie based on facts challenging, especially contemporary stories, because point of view can be fluid. As social taboos, political polarization and analysis explode like colored balloons, we have to understand that the audience is not going to be interested in "fantasy" because reality is so much more interesting. I don't mean "fantasy" in terms of genre. I mean "fantasy" in terms with how characters resolve their moments of change and confrontation. The solutions of yesterday's stories aren’t reliable unless they contain that nugget of timeless truth, the kind of truth that Aristotle spoke of in Poetics, the truth that is greater than history. 

How do we find that nugget of timeless truth?

Yesterday's story of a gay person excluded becomes today's story of a gay couple raising teenaged children. Yesterday's story of an evil witch becomes today's story of a misunderstood magical woman. Yesterday's story of monsters out of control becomes today's story of humanity out of control needing to be secretly controlled by monsters. Does that mean that there are no stories about alienation, evil, or unvarnished fear? No! It means that we have to figure out what tomorrow's story is about and how it addresses these basic human experiences. Moreover, this is not a case of screenwriters being ahead of the curve of knowledge. The only writers interested in this, write science-fiction; again a genre.  This means we are required to be ahead of the curve of comprehension of change. We must see the bend in the road ahead before we’re actually taking that turn. A screenwriter must look for the thread of truth that survives the collapse of taboos, and the throws of transformation.

As I sit down to write my story, I consider the truths that I see today. There are changes taking place on a global scale because of the greater degree of interconnectivity you and I enjoy. My own self-awareness in this environment grows rapidly. Schism freezes me in place one moment and dissolves the next, leaving me feeling often bewildered by the pace of change. My investment in self-evident truths either pays off, or turns out to be misplaced. Yes, I will have to dig a little deeper to test my theories. It is possible that the solution I originally thought up for my hero is based upon yesterday’s news and I may have to redouble my efforts to understand my subject matter. I trust this will take me closer to the real meaning I seek as a writer.

It comes down to a willingness to analyze and discern where I’m being too opaque, too squarely solid with an easy way out for my story’s characters. By opaque, I mean to suggest a surface rather than a layered depth of meaning. Because scripts are limited by time, and thus by page number, it is always tempting to get to the point quickly, but does that serve the deeper meaning?  What I hope for is something like sinking down through that opacity, and from the inside out making the emotional, mental and moral movements of my character transparent. Then, I have to know the heart of my character. Then, I have to trust that the truth within my stories will be told through perspectives gained by my character, and tying down details is all about supporting that point of view.