CS Daily Archive > Son of a Pitch > 04/29/04

Four Thoughts for the Road

By David Michael Wharton

It's a long and winding road from Fade In to first sale. Here are four things to keep in mind and keep you sane along the way.

First off, thanks to everyone who's written in with kind words about last week's big cancer column. Your thoughts are much appreciated. That said, my deadline looms, so let's get right into it.

Thanks to my two-month cancer detour, I'm a bit behind in interviews. But have no fear: even now, I'm combing my vast collection of high-level contacts to bring you, yes you, more insider anecdotes and didactic tactics from the Hollywood pros you love to envy.

But in the meantime, we turn once again to the mad skillz of Mr. Michael Cooney (Identity) and Mr. Ed Solomon (Men in Black), with frequent and somewhat relevant interruptions by yours truly. I know I've used these gents before, but this is mighty good stuff, and momma taught me not to be wasteful.

Here are a few suggestions to ease your troubled muse on the road to El Dorado…

1. Find a sanctuary.
You can write anywhere. Plains. Trains. Automobiles. Even places not mentioned in John Hughes movies. Show me a Starbucks, and I'll show you somebody writing on a laptop in the corner. Or at least hoping the cute girl with the eyebrow ring behind the counter thinks he's writing.

However it is that you write, you're probably spoiled to it. Maybe it's not Starbucks. Maybe you've got to be in your office, with the temperature a steady 72 degrees and your speakers blasting Wagner. Maybe you've got to be on a park bench with a legal pad, just across from the crazy old guy who's yelling at the pigeons for refusing the handful of Styrofoam packing peanuts he's trying to feed them. Maybe you need to be naked in your root cellar with your laptop and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Whatever works.

Michael Cooney told me, "When I had my little studio apartment, I created a little corner. I didn't look out the window, and I took everything off the walls, so that became my world. It wasn't the television or the stack of bills or the groceries to unpack. You give yourself a chance to immerse yourself in the story. Create a little environment that you can retreat to."

The creative part of your brain wants to work with you, but it needs two things to work best: routine and lack of distraction. Find someplace to rope off as your writing space. Clear out a corner of your rattrap loft apartment (how very writerly of you) and park yourself there (just make sure it doesn't face the TV). If you've got to go to resort to writing in Starbucks or Barnes and Noble, go for it, clichés be damned!

2. Know when to start.
Let me tell you about my problem. I love backstory. There's nothing I enjoy more than to dig into a story and really explore the world of my characters.

Which is fine, except when I spend six months devising elaborate life stories for every speaking role. I'm the guy that still has literally hundreds of pages of unused material from a novel I planned to write all through high school. I wrote exactly three chapters of that novel before I completely burned out on it. But by God I can still tell you the protagonist's sister's favorite food!

And I still struggle with the same thing on my screenplay. I'd like to claim it's just the rampaging novelist in me, the bound-and-gagged prose tendencies that don't want to go quietly into that good night. But I have to admit that at least part of it is fear, plain and simple. It's the age-old quandary: if I get started, I might finish, and if I finish, I'm either going to have to do something with it or else toss it in the bottom drawer and resign myself to a life of nine-to-five mundanity. Yeah, I finally got myself started, but not before I went through about thirty false starts.

Sound familiar? The bad news is, the only way to learn how to know when it's time to stop getting ready and start getting busy is practice. But it does get easier.

"There's a great joy in preparation before you start," said Ed Solomon, "and a great joy in actually starting. You've got to romance an idea, to court it, before you get in bed with it and have a relationship with it. That courting can sometimes be a long process -- months, years -- and sometimes it's a really quick process. And then, eventually, sadly, you break up with it and move on. Writing is like a whole string of serial relationships, which are not always monogamous. How do you know when to jump in, to commit? Well, there's just a certain moment when you know it. Often, early on, I'd feel hesitancy to jump in, or I'd jump in too soon. Now I tend to circle around something and become familiar with everything in the environment. Then I tend to burrow into the land and really live in it for a while, until things feel like they're ready to grow. As soon as that feeling is there, I start. But it's hard to know what that feeling is early on."

And are you going to argue with a man named Solomon? Just don't let him near any disputed babies.

3. Make it readable.
Raise your hand and repeat after me.

I am a writer. It is my job to tell the story. It is not my job to direct the movie. That's why they have people called "directors."

A lot of us get so caught up in learning the format that we forget that, although a screenplay is a blueprint to a movie, it's still supposed to be an entertaining blueprint. We become obsesses with camera angles and whatnot, and forget to just tell the damn story.

"One of the things I learned over those first five years, where I just churned out screenplays without selling anything," explained Cooney, "is that your screenplay is going to be read a thousand times before a single foot of film goes through the camera, so the damn thing had better be readable. It better be Grisham, it better be a page-turner. People say you've got 30 pages to grab them. Maybe so, but you've got three or four pages to show them that what you're doing is different. In those first few opening pages, it is vital that the reader gets your voice, and gets that the next few hours of reading are going to be worth it."

Maybe you're like me, with a background in prose, and you have to adapt those skills to fit into the screenwriting mold, or maybe screenwriting is your first and only writing love. Either way, the key is to not let structure overwhelm your voice, your style, and your wit.

4. Know when to stop.
In the immortal words of Kenny Rogers, "Somebody pull Spit #4, the chicken is burning." No, wait, that's not the quote I wanted. Try this: "You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them. Know when to walk away, and know when to run." Ahh, Kenny… you bring affordable chicken and wisdom to us all.

Know when to walk away, when to stop. If you've seen Wonder Boys, then you'll remember Grady Tripp's 1,000-page manuscript. He couldn't quit writing. Now, I'm going to choose to believe that none of you are so bad off as to have entered four digits with your screenplay, but that doesn't mean that screenwriters aren't vulnerable to a variant of this malady. Anybody out there rewritten your opening scene so many times that you started losing the feel of the rest of the story? You're not alone.

"I'd keep reworking each separate thing until the life was all gone from it," said Solomon. "Great painters seem to know when to stop; I still have trouble with it."

There's no clear-cut system to tell you when it's time to stop rewriting, but a good rule of thumb that all the writers I've talked to seem to agree on is that there's a lot to be said for just keeping your momentum and powering all the way through your first draft. Even if you're on page 30 and you realize that the dialogue in scene two is the worst material you've ever written, just keep going till the end. Then you can worry about revising, rewriting, and polishing until it sparkles.

Ed Solomon devised a clever system for dealing with this, one that I'm trying for myself, and it seems to work really well. "I used to make files that were no more than twenty pages, so I would work and revise until I got to the end of the twenty pages. Then I'd close the file and not go back until I'd finished the last one. Close the file and start a new one. Then, if I had ideas for File One while I was in, say, File Three, I would just make my notes in that file."

Four thoughts for the road. Hopefully they'll make your journey a little less stressful.

Now, go write.

We talk about what makes for a good idea. Unless I come up with a better idea.

David Michael Wharton is a regular contributor to Creative Screenwriting magazine. When not watching DVDs or otherwise procrastinating when he should be working on his screenplay, he has been known to write for the likes of UGO Screenwriter's Voice and Comic Book Resources. You can email him, especially if you're deposed African royalty looking to secretly transfer millions of dollars into an American bank account.


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