August 8, 2010

Writing a Good Script


I am by no means a writer. Or at the least, not a professional one. Yes, I love to write, I love to doodle on scrap pieces of paper and I love to jot down random lines or sentences that pop into my head.However, being a writer- be it fiction or non-fiction- is something that's genuinely hard to do. Especially if you want to be a good one.

There's so much that goes into writing. Having a beginning, middle and end. Establishing your lead, their characters and their clear goal. Creating realistic obstacles and then deciding whether or not they accomplish their goal. This is all textbook stuff.

What makes writing so difficult is being able to have your audience, at the end of it all, connect to your script. Did it resonate? Did it make them think? Did your script mean anything? Of course, there are more than enough scripts out there that don't mean anything at all and are merely the fluffy tissue paper inside a gift bag. But this is about good scripts, or even more so, great scripts.



As I said before I am not a writer but as I go to a film school I am required by curriculum to dish out my own number of scripts. Ack.

I am very grateful though. I have the fortune to have a teacher that has pushed me with my art in ways others have never been able to. He is the Yoda to my Skywalker, you can say.

So the thing about writing a script is that there must be a reason for you to write one to begin with. Sounds so simple, I know. In fact, it's much deeper. If you're writing a script for the sake of one day capturing a stroke of luck in which your script is made into a muli-million dollar big budget movie that ends up paying all your school loans AND paying for your high life style? Don't be surprised if all your scripts come out flat.

There has to be a reason. Ultimately we write because we have something to say. We have something we want the world to know or understand. It could be something we care about such as a political situation in a country. It can be about belief, such as why anger should never be contained. It could even be, and often is, about ourselves and what we want the world to understand about us.

Something my teacher says is "You have to be willing to be vulnerable if you want to be an artist" and also "When you create art you have to dig and dig deep until it hurts. When it finally does, you have to dig even deeper." I won't go into the actual lecture of how one writes something while being able to dig deep within themselves. I'm still learning.

The point is, we have to search within ourselves to find out what it is that we want to say, what our voice and vision of the world we live in, the life we lead is. The hard part doesn't stop there though.
Once we find and are able to create that which is so personal and meaningful to us, we have to learn to detach ourselves. Just because we are able to unearth what's deep within us doesn't mean that we've unearthed perfection. What we've done is found the diamond in the rough, but now we must polish and shine.

We have to realize that people will read it, they'll critique it and they might mock it. We have to be willing to go through that. Most importantly we have to be able to not let it get to us or take it personally. Your work is not perfect, accept it and embrace it. Criticism shouldn't be viewed in such a dark light.
If someone doesn't get it, ask why? Perhaps what makes sense in your head just doesn't translate the same on paper. If your character seems illogical or confusing, then perhaps you need to truly understand him or explain him better.

It's such a process to write something so connected to us and dug up from deep within us only to have to learn to detach and let it go. But every screenwriter eventually has to turn over their script to the Director/Producer. They might get it, they might not or they might find something even you didn't know lied beneath.

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