It is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of any creative process: setting aside all of the distractions that life presents and just doing it. In the realm of writing, and screenwriting in particular, there are a thousand reasons why that masterpiece of a manuscript never quite leaves the hard drive of the maker's computer. There is always some tweak that needs to be made, some additional scene that needs to be added before it will be complete enough to spit it out onto paper and pass it on to the hands of someone who might actually have the ability to bring this story to the screen.
Screenwriting in particular, perhaps more than any other type of writing, demands the highest level of craft, skill and concentration. Just as a novelist or playwright, the screenwriter has to be able to come up with a compelling idea, breathe life into characters and develop them in a way that engages readers, and tell a story that captivates. Of course this is only the beginning. They also have to be able to visualize what this would look like on the screen, write those directions into the script following a specific format, while still writing something that someone would actually want to read. Anyone who has ever flipped through a screenplay or two would acknowledge, that is perhaps the most daunting aspect of the process, and one of the main reasons why so many screenplays end up in the recycling bin before the reader ever gets to the final pages.
Syd Field lays these difficulties out in his book on screenwriting, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. Field offers important guidance not just on the technical aspects of how one goes about putting a screenplay together, but also the more pragmatic concerns of those struggling with the problem of finding the time to devote to writing. The excerpt I chose to look at begins with a full chapter on this subject, of how one goes about sitting down to write, and the invitable obstacles that will keep a writer from his work. Spouses, children, the need to work and make a living are just a few distractions many of us have. Then there are the mental blocks. He lists those brick walls, and the pitfalls to avoid, pitfalls he has no doubt fallen into himself. There's the problem of thinking of all sorts of new ideas and questioning whether the current idea is worth working on, or if it should be abandoned in favor of these fresher ones. At times, there is the sudden urge to clean and organize our space, an urge never before experienced in the five years prior as the mess of papers piled up, but now seems so important. There are always things that seem more pressing that allow us to put off writing until tomorrow. Of course, tomorrow never comes. Sometimes we do get started, and then hit a wall after 15 or 30 pages. Sometimes we breeze through and hit a wall when we reach the last 15 or 30 pages. As Field describes these scenarios that for many will sound all too familiar, he doesn't judge, but rather acknoweldes that these are real and natural problems that occur for every writer. But if we are to have success, we have to fight through it.
Field drives home the point that we should all sit up and pay attention to if we want to write screenplays and be taken seriously. It's a simple idea, but one that seems to elude so many who set out to write a screenplay. A writer's job is to write the screenplay. That is, a writer must do all the things mentioned above about developing character and story. The writer's job is not to figure out how to film the story, and therefore, there should be no need to see the word camera in the screenplay, unless of course it's a story about a photographer. The job of figuring out where to place a camera and how to shoot a scene belongs to the director and cinematographer of the film, not the writer. Now, many writers also direct their own scripts. Take Woody Allen, Spike Lee or Wes Anderson for example. They can afford to be specific about camera angles in their own screenplay because ultimately they are the ones responsible for getting it to the screen. For us mere mortals however, the focus should be on the writing.
And so the next natural question that Field poses is, if we are concerned with visualizing what we should see on screen, but we can't use the word camera, how do we accomplish that feat? The answer is quite simple. Figure out your subject, and write about that. If you're tempted to say "the camera tracks with John as we walks down the street to his car", instead consider who the subject of the shot is. John is the subject, so your focus should not on what the camera does, but on what John does. All you need to say is "John walks down the street to his car", and let the director figure out if he wants to shoot it with a tracking shot, a wide shot, a sequence of several different angles, or whatever other combination he chooses. That is not your problem. Your only concern is to make sure the director knows the action that must be conveyed to move the story along.
There is one last point that I think is important for every writer to remember, and that is to let go of the notion that any idea is so precious that it cannot be cut without the script absolutely falling apart. If there is a line or scene that you are enamored with, that you feel is written with such brilliance that you sit back and behold it, reading it over again and again, chances are, it may need to go. There's a saying that I love to reference, once uttered by William Faulkner, that I think illustrates this point about as well as anything: "in writing, you must kill all your darlings". I love it because it is such a straightforward way to remind us that as artists, nothing can be precious. I also happen to have a poster that that you may see hanging in my office later this semester if I ever get around to framing it. It lists ten rules to live by as an artist, and it was created by local sculpter Wendell Castle. The one that sticks out for me is "if you are in love with an idea, you are no judge of its merits". Both of these quotes get at the same idea. The point is, sometimes we must make painful choices in service to story, rather than making the story service our egos, and force the audience to be the one to experience pain.
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