SCRIPT ADVISORY SERVICE - 'Who Prepares Wins'

REWRITES - BLESSING OR CURSE?

2009-07-02T15:35:00.002+01:00

I started my TV career on a long-running police drama series. During a tour of the studios, one of the show's police advisers was asked if there had been a cop show he had really admired. Quick as a flash, he said: 'The Sweeney. Those two guys could have walked straight out of any inner London police station in the mid-1970s.'

I was dead chuffed. 'The Sweeney' is one of my all-time personal favourites (and it was made by Euston Films, one of my very first employers). If you ever get chance to catch an episode, do - although you might be advised to avoid the one with Morecambe and Wise in it. The hard-living officers of the Flying Squad did not always get their man in 'The Sweeney'. It's thought of as unreconstructed male chauvinist fantasy, now, but in fact 'The Sweeney' was often deeper, more thoughtful, more complex and more emotional than you might imagine.

There's a book about Euston Films - I borrowed it from my local library once. Much of it is taken up with 'The Sweeney'.

Did you know that writers took an average of ten days to write an episode of 'The Sweeney'? Or that one wrote a whole episode once in just three days?

Did you know that a second draft of a script was a rarity - and a third draft suggested that something really had gone wrong?

The scripts were commissioned. They came in. The guys went out onto the streets of West London and shot it.

Simple. Effective. Brilliant.

Some of the best TV ever.

Impossible now, though. Producers these days demand as many rewrites as they think they can get away with, and then some.

Have we lost our ability to write scripts? Or do producers not trust writers anymore?

Too many rewrites ruin perfectly good scripts. At best, we end up with homogenised pap masquerading as drama - no rough edges, no flashes of brilliance, just a gruel of cliches and predictable outcomes. At worst, the script collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Game over.

I doubt that talented scriptwriters have disappeared. I also doubt TV's ability to spot, nurture and get the best out of that talent.

You see, producers have let the rewrite thing go to their heads. And the sort of writer who can put up with that constant, unnecessary and counter-productive meddling and interference is not likely to be of the highest calibre. There's a big difference between a Writer and a Hack.

In my experience, three drafts of a script is enough. One to explore the territory, one to reshape the original and one to polish it all off. If you haven't got it right by then, there's a fair-to-middling chance you never will.

Sometimes, it should be acknowledged, a rewrite makes massive improvements to a script. And sometimes, a rewrite takes the edge of the script altogether, or sends the script off in a stupid direction, or tears the heart right out of it. It takes care, subtlety and know-how to set up a good rewrite; it only takes a power-crazed, incompetent producer to make a total mess of it.

The simple fact is - any producer who demands more than five drafts of a script simply hasn't got a clue what he, she or it is doing.

And if you find yourself working with a producer like that, good luck to you. Because there are plenty of them out there.

And, sadly, plenty of so-called writers willing to play that crazy game. And every one of them - every hack who happily writes a load of absolute bilge because their producer told them to - is putting a genuine writer out of work.

'The Sweeney' is a classic. Always was, always will be.

But that's partly because the producers had the common sense, good taste and manners to let the writers get on with their jobs.

Wouldn't happen like that today.

REJECTION

2009-06-30T12:48:00.002+01:00

Apart from death and taxes, one thing is certain in the life of the writer: bad crits.

We all get them.

In some ways, whenever the odd bad review comes my way, I take it as a salutary experience. Having spent much of the past so-many-years reading and reporting on other people's scripts, it's kind of healthy to be reminded of how hurtful and harmful a savage crit can be.

Many reviewers seem to be unacquainted with the 'praise sandwich' principle, which argues that the best way to make a negative remark is to place it between two positives.

Knowing the pit of despair into which it is possible to sink after somebody, somewhere, has given a negative response to your work, I really do try my hardest not to be too cruel in my own script reports. One can be fair without being harsh.

Recently, a piece of my own work was 'assessed' by the moderator of a writers' website. I needn't bother recounting the substance of the crit, because there wasn't any. My effort had been rejected out of hand - which was a minor problem, simply because it seemed to me that the moderator had completely missed the point, treating my chapters as sample material for a novel when in fact it's a work of non-fiction.

Missing the point ... isn't that what we always accuse those who criticise our work of doing?

Ay, there's the rub. Because the fact is, reviewers and reporters are perfectly capable of missing the point.

As recipients of these reports, we writers have to tread a fine line. Sometimes, the reviewers are right: we haven't done as good a job as we thought we had. Other times, the reviewers are plain wrong, or have simply done a dreadful job themselves.

It seems to me that a writer's life is taken up with soliciting reviews and reports now more than ever. One agent I worked with commissioned dozens of them, each from a different reviewer. This, I believe, was a mistake - too many cooks, and all that.

But what are we to do about reviews which are not just unhelpful, they actually undermine our self-confidence?

First of all, every review or script report you receive should be read dispassionately, and scoured for useful tips. Try to get a sense of the overall thrust of the review, and do look out for the positive remarks (it's so easy to be swamped by the negatives).

Then remind yourself that this is only one person's opinion. It doesn't matter if that person is a first-class agent, a renowned editor or a shit-hot publisher. It's just one person's response.

Don't ignore it. Ask yourself, how can I improve what I've written?

But always remember that to err is human. Back in 1998, I wrote a speculative screenplay entitled 'TRISTAN AND ISOLDE'. There was a flurry of excitement at my then agency. Then nothing. The response kept coming back - no one's looking for this sort of thing, nobody wants it. So when, just a few years later, a film entitled 'TRISTAN AND ISOLDE' was released, I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had been right. Someone (Ridley Scott) had indeed been looking for that sort of thing. The doomsayers of the London media village had been wrong. Didn't help my bank balance, but hey - the experts had been talking out of their arses!

So, whatever you do, retain a balance. One bad review does not mean the end of your life's work.

Don't snap, don't answer back. Take whatever's useful from the crit and move on.

After all, there's probably a circle in hell reserved exclusively for those know-it-alls who give out thoughtless crits. It'll be pretty crowded there. I just hope I end up somewhere else altogether.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE BBC?

2009-05-10T13:39:00.002+01:00

What TV really needs is more female directors

Amy Jenkins (Comment, last week) is right to bemoan the fact that women are a minority on the cast lists of our television dramas but I think she's wagging her finger in the wrong direction.
I have worked in television drama for 20 years and seen many of my female peers rise to positions of power and influence to the point where they are the majority of decision-makers. However, if representation of women on screen is slower to improve, it is for complex, cultural reasons that have as much to do with the make-up of society as with deep story structure. But there has been progress. These days we don't have to "balance" a strong female lead with an entire cast of supporting men, as in Prime Suspect. Let's keep challenging all drama to cast women in depth and let's try to increase the number of female directors coming into the profession. That number really does seem to have been at a standstill for the last 20 years.

Kate Harwood, Controller of series and serials, BBC Drama Production

This letter appeared in the Observer newspaper back in March. I read it, and I was aghast. It's been bugging me ever since.

Let's analyse what Kate Harwood is saying here. First of all, she acknowledges that British television, and the BBC in particular, has become largely a female preserve. I can vouch for this, having noticed, roundabout the middle of the 1990s, that male producers were becoming ever more rare.

Secondly, she admits that, even though 'the majority of decision-makers' in BBC Drama are now female, there is still a dearth of strong female characters in the BBC's drama output.

How come? Oh, well, because of 'complex, cultural reasons'. Nothing to do with the ineptitude of BBC producers. No, it's for reasons which are outside the BBC's control.

The reality, of course, is that it's not difficult to create strong female characters. Any halfway decent writer can do it. So what's the problem?

Is it really the case, as Kate Harwood suggests, that the 'make-up' of society prevents the BBC from developing good roles for female actors?

Or is it that editorial incompetence and second-guessing, constant interference, ideological bias and sheer bloody uselessness are what stand between the (mostly female) TV producers and a reasonable representation of women on screen?

Lastly, Harwood puts in a call for more female directors. The balance at the BBC has tipped, over the past fifteen years or so, increasingly in favour of female producers and female scriptwriters. Somehow or other, this has failed to result in better parts for women in BBC drama. So let's get some more female directors in. That'll make all the difference.

Actually, a director is a director is a director. Gender is immaterial. There are two kinds of director: one came up through theatre, and therefore understands actors; the other came up through cinematography, and therefore understands cameras. Beyond that, there really are only two kinds of director - good ones and bad ones. What's gender got to do with it?

Nothing at all, but in sustaining the myth that women are a suppressed minority (even though they form 'the majority of decision-makers' in BBC Drama), Harwood is both excusing herself and her fellow executives for their own failures, and seeking to extend the gender imbalance. It is difficult to see how an increase in the number of female directors will improve the quality of roles for women, if a preponderance of female producers and writers haven't managed to do so. And why are there so few female directors out there? Is it because they're discriminated against? No - how could it be, when most of the producers who hire directors are in fact female?

And where would Kate Harwood's argument go next? Let's suppose that she fast-tracks a host of female directors into the industry, and they somehow still can't come up with decent female roles. What will she blame then? Too many men watching TV?

The problem of strong female characters in TV drama has nothing to do with social conditioning. 'Coronation Street', for example, had some of the strongest female characters going, and that was years ago. No, the problem is that TV executives can't keep their bloody mitts off other people's scripts. Female characters in BBC drama have to be flawless. They must be plucky, honest, hard-working, long-suffering individuals who are invariably right, while the male characters around them are almost always weak, craven, corrupt and wrong. To create a female character with realistic human flaws would be seen as a betrayal of all those women - like the majority of decision-makers at the BBC - who like to imagine that they're struggling in a male dominated world.

The female characters in TV drama today are not, then, created to be real, or realistic, depictions, but rather to carry the burden of the wish-fulfilment and political ideologies of the TV executives. In the arse-about-face world of BBC Drama, women characters cannot be strong because they must be role-models, idealised versions of the female executives themselves.

The BBC Drama Department has made it impossible for strong female characters to be created, because they have to keep interfering in the scripts to ensure that their ideological image of women is constantly being reflected.

But far be it from Kate Harwood and her colleagues to notice their own rank inability to create convincing female characters. No, the fault isn't theirs: it's a cultural one, apparently. By which, presumably, Harwood means that there simply aren't that many strong women out there in the real world for characters to be based on. So the best that TV drama can do is to keep cloning their idealised, hard-done-by, shining examples of female virtue in the hope that enough real women out there will get the message.

The truth, of course, is that executives at the BBC are trapped in a vicious circle of their own incompetence and their out-dated ideological convictions.

The argument has moved on from the seventies and eighties. But not, apparently, at the BBC, where writers would be perfectly able to create strong, interesting, convincing roles for both men and women, if only the bloody executives would let them get on with their jobs.

NON-SUBMERSIBLE ELEMENTS

2009-05-02T15:27:00.003+01:00

Genius or nutter? It's hard to say, really, but Stanley Kubrick knew how to make a movie.

He was naturally obsessive, which is probably no bad thing when it comes to making movies. Even us writers ought to be obsessive about our scripts.

One of Kubrick's obsessions was with Non-Submersible Elements.

Now, I'm sure you've all heard of these things. No? Weird.

Actually, Kubrick's 'Non-Submersible Elements' is just a fancy phrase for a fairly straightforward thing.

No movie should be without its non-submersible elements. These are those stand-out moments which make the movie memorable.

A non-submersible element can be a sequence or a scene, it can be a moment, a line, a shot, an image. Whatever. It is one of those things which makes that particular movie unique.

And Kubrick seemed to be of the opinion that every movie should have roughly eight of these NSE's.

Now, how often, when we're devising, developing, writing and rewriting our screenplays, do we stop to consider the non-submersible elements? How often to we pause and ask ourselves, 'Which are the eight-or-so moments in my script that will really stand out?'

We should do. Because it's those moments which matter. They are designed to stick in the mind. Non-submersible elements are what set your script, your movie, apart from all the others.

And they're something we ought to be bearing in mind right from the very start of the screenwriting process.

What's a script (or a movie) without non-submersible elements? The chances are it's a fairly mundane piece of storytelling. You may well find that a particularly memorable line, exchange, moment or sequence happens naturally in your script. Whether you manage eight or so of those moments naturally, without thinking about them, is another matter.

But knowing that a script, or a movie, should have those stand-out moments is essential if you are going to make those moments shine.

As you work on your screenplay, you should have a good idea about which moments, which elements, in your script are the non-submersible ones - and you should treat them with great care. They are the high points, the classic moments, which make your script unique. They need to be nurtured, polished, carefully set up and brilliantly executed.

Think about some of your favourite movies. What images, which moments, instantly spring to mind? Chances are, they're the non-submersible elements.

So - does your script have non-submersible elements? Does it have anything up to eight moments which stand out and shine? Is each one different, unique? Have you given each one of them its full impact and value?

What's a screenplay without classic moments? It's probably a waste of time.

Remember your non-submersible elements, and send a little prayer of thanks up to Mr Kubrick for giving them such a useful if, at first glance, baffling name.

A PLAN

2009-04-25T11:54:00.002+01:00

I've been meaning to do this for a while. Now that the gig I was supposed to be at tonight has been cancelled, I've started giving it some proper thought. And I'd be grateful for your help.

There are plenty of books out there - not to mention courses - which purport to lead the reader through the ins and outs of screenwriting. I've read quite a few of them. Some have interesting stuff in them, the odd nugget here and there, often surrounded by wads of less than useful information. Some are - to my mind, at least - absolutely bloody useless.

One of the problems is that the expert author feels the need to parade their phenomenal knowledge of the subject at great length. Even on screenwriting courses, I've been shocked at the sense of sinking in a sea of 'How To's and 'What Not to Do's and ever deeper layers of complication.

Screenwriting is hard work, but it should also be fun. There's a lot to learn, yes, but if the balance between creative and prescriptive is all wrong, aren't we in danger of crushing the imaginative spirit and the individual voice of the writer?

I've been mulling over this for a long time, and wondering whether it wouldn't be possible to produce a guide to the art and craft of screenwriting which emphasised creativity, which takes the reader on an enjoyable journey round the pitfalls of scripts, presents practical know-how and makes the whole process reasonably clear.

And there's another dimension. This has something to do with the ways our lives are defined by stories. We're surrounded by them; they tell us what to think, what to believe. We live our lives according to the stories we've been told, and the stories we've told ourselves.

So, theoretically at least, we can devise better stories to tell ourselves (and others), and by doing so we can alter our attitudes to the world around us.

Isn't that what practically every self-help manual and self-improvement course sets out to do? To get you to change your inner story, to tell yourself a different story?

The journey of the script is the writer's journey. The writer undertakes the adventure, and lives through the long dark night of the soul which lies at the heart of the story. The writer returns with the secret of the script, the experience of the story, and, like the hero, acquires a new understanding.

I'm thinking that the time has come for me to start putting together some worksheets, along the lines of a step-by-step process, which look at the journey of the script from start to finish. I'd like to keep it as simple, as straightforward, and as stimulating as possible. I'd like to present it as a month-long plan.

The result, if it comes out all right, will be available as a PDF document.

I could do with any input you have to offer, though.

What are the areas of screenwriting, or the issues involved, which interest or concern or confuse you the most?

What could my guide do differently that would really help?

What would you most like to know by the end of it?

And would you be interested in seeing these worksheets as they come rolling off the press?

Let me know what you think.

COMMON ERRORS

2009-04-20T13:21:00.002+01:00

I'll let you in on a little secret. Sometimes, a part of me rebels against my own strictures.

It's a kind of teenage rebellion. Screenwriting, I tell myself, is a creative art. How can there be rules? How can I stipulate that this, that or the other must happen? Surely there are exceptions! Surely, a gifted writer can break all the rules and fashion an absolutely brilliant screenplay! Not all screenplays have to look the same.

And then I read yet another screenplay in which a basic 'rule' has been overlooked. And I realise that, these so-called 'rules' actually do mean something.

Let's take the antagonist, for example. Other names include Villain, Rival, Enemy, Nemesis, Shadow, Bad Guy ... but ultimately, they're all the same. The hero of a script tends to be the protagonist ('First Contestant' or 'First Actor' in the original Greek meaning of the word), and whoever he or she is up against is the antagonist.

It's rather surprising to find that, in script after script, it's hard to pin down an actual bad guy.

I reckon that would-be screenwriters often have a great idea. They then imagine themselves as the lead characters in the story and start spinning a yarn around that lead character - and a few other characters for ballast - making their way through that great idea.

But they haven't thought it through. They're creating a kind of daydream on paper. They've imagined themselves into the role of the lead actor of hero in the story, but they've forgotten to provide that hero with a shadow, a nemesis, a rival.

I don't think that this is a peculiarly British thing. But it does betray a lack of planning and preparation. No bad guy equals no drama. The essence of drama is ... no, not conflict ... it's struggle (or, rather, it's what happens to a character as they engage in that struggle). It is possible for the hero to struggle entirely against non-human factors, or against something within themselves, but a story tends to come alive when the struggle is personified. The hero wants something, they have the gall to go ahead and try to achieve it, but there's someone who's determined to beat them, to oppose them, to steal their triumph or to finish them off.

Now, I've given this post the title 'Common Errors', of which there are plenty. You come across them all the time: scenes which wander randomly from one precise location to another without a scene break; a lack of thought given to structure (script structure or story structure); a tendency to rely on dialogue to do all the work; too many characters who aren't introduced properly, so that the reader can't really tell who's who ...

But one of the most frequent errors I come across is the lack of a clear antagonist.

Now, as my last posting mentioned, there can be a great deal of fluidity about the four principal characters (HERO, VILLAIN, SIDEKICK and LOVE INTEREST). Any of these can turn out to be the antagonist (yes, even the hero can be revealed as the bad guy). Some great stories play games with our expectations in this respect.

Hitchcock's 'Psycho', for example. It's some way into the film before we discover that the bad guy isn't the man at the start with the stetson and the money, or the cop with the mirror sunglasses, but that nice young man at the motel.

Last night, I watched Ken Loach's 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley'. The antagonist, to begin with, is the British government, in the form of the notorious Black and Tans, or certain English landowners in Ireland, and only gradually does the hero's friend emerge as the antagonist.

So it's not necessary to establish your typical bad guy right from the outset. But your story does need one.

The more daunting the opposition, the greater the danger you're hero will find themselves in, and the greater the struggle they face. Which makes for a good story.

Hence the need to prepare, as you develop your project, rather than dreaming up an idea and launching yourself straight into the script. Because some things simply cannot be overlooked. And one of those things is the antagonist.

Some stories try to get by without the hero really wanting something. By and large, this doesn't work.

And some stories try to tell themselves without the hero facing any real opposition.

Where's the drama in that?

DEVELOPMENT: 5

2009-04-16T13:16:00.002+01:00

Okey-dokey ... so, your premise is being honed, refined and polished. You've got your basic set-up, you're paying attention to the genre and you've given some thought to the most appropriate format for the piece.

You might even have a title (but don't get too attached to it just yet).

The development of your project now takes place along parallel lines.

On the one hand, you'd be well advised to build your basic premise up in stages, aiming first for a half-page synopsis, then maybe a synopsis of a page or two, maybe making it to a five or six page outline after a little while.

This is how a great deal of script development is carried out in television. It's a simple Cartesian process, starting with the most basic 'synopsis' - the premise - and progressing to ever more detailed outlines.

('Synopsis' and 'outline' can mean the same thing; I tend to call the earlier stages synopses, and the more detailed story work outlines - the synopsis summarises the story, the outline goes into more plot detail.)

We'll worry about treatments separately. They are a blessing and a curse, and will need to be looked at shortly.

For now, though, what do you need to be thinking about as you build up your story from the premise, through a synopsis or two, to an outline?

Let's start with your characters. You've already established who your main character is - the protagonist who wants something but will have to overcome obstacles to achieve or acquire it.

What about the other principal characters?

Have you begun to establish a clear antagonist? A villain, rival, nemesis or shadow?

Has your hero got a side-kick, a friend, ally or partner?

Is there a love interest anywhere in sight?

Not all stories need all four characters (HERO, SHADOW, SIDE-KICK and LOVE INTEREST). What is more, a character can quite easily shift from one role to another. A side-kick can turn into a love interest, or even into a rival or shadow. A love interest can become an enemy.

Giving some thought to these central characters at this stage is helpful. Too often, scripts have quite strong central characters, partly because the writer identifies with the hero, but the satellite characters are two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs who exist only to advance the plot or do what the hero requires them to do.

Urgh! Avoid that at all costs. The simplest way to do so is to remember a fundamental fact:

WE ARE ALL THE HEROES OF OUR OWN STORIES.

Every character in a script, if they are going to feel at all real, must have his or her own agenda. Just like the hero, they want something, and something stands in their way.

So - while you're gradually building your story up from premise through synopsis to outline, do a little work on the side with your characters.

You don't need to fill out a whole questionnaire about each character, but you should know what each character wants and what's preventing them from getting it.

This is essential for plotting your detailed storyline. It's also fundamental to the drama of your script. If everything's too easy for your hero (because that's the only character you care about), then there's likely to be too little drama. The struggle's not there.

But if every major character is acting as if they were the hero in their own story, wanting things, struggling to achieve them, facing obstacles, making decisions and taking action, then you'll get conflict of interest, stronger characters and a better plot.

And never forget that character is revealed through action. Character is what character does. So make sure that your characters are able and willing to do things. They're not pliant or dormant. They're not just there to do a bit of talking. They're real people, with needs, desires, fears and foibles. And they DO things.

DEVELOPMENT: 4

2009-04-14T12:25:00.003+01:00

Many thanks to those who sent in their story premises after my last posting. Premises are great - such a simple task (maximum three sentences), and yet such a universe of possibilities! I do believe it's well worth taking the time and trouble to hone your premise until it really works: it says what you mean it to say, and you can hold it in your head like a mantra, ready to pitch it at a split second's notice.

But now that you've been mulling over your story premise for a little while, honing and refining it, it's time to step back a little ways and look at the idea from some new angles.

There are two things which need considering. The first is - what's the genre? The second - what's the format?

Genre first. It's a bit of a dirty word, genre, but it's more important than it looks. It might be worth checking back through the postings on this site to find the one about genre.

Take a good look at your premise and ask yourself, 'What kind of story is this going to be?' Is it a comedy? Fine - so you're sure that this is going to be funny, right?

If it's a character-based story (otherwise known as 'drama'), do you have sufficiently strong and interesting characters, and is the situation going to push them far enough? If it's a horror, is it going to be horrifying enough? A thriller? Better make sure that there are going to be some thrills, and that the premise feels like a good pitch for a thriller.

It is possible (and rather contemporary) to throw several genres together, but all in all it's best to choose your genre and then stick to it. And then immerse yourself in that genre - read books and scripts and watch movies from that genre. Soak up the implicit rules of that particular genre. And make sure that you're staying true to the rules of that genre from now on.

You may find that your premise doesn't point to the sort of genre you have in mind (one writer I remember once tried to pitch a 'comedy' which, as a key plot point, involved a rape; she insisted that it would be a 'funny' rape, whatever that might be; part of the problem was that she wanted to write a comedy, and was trying to force the wrong story into that genre, so make sure that your story suits the genre you've decided on - if it doesn't, change one or the other, the story or the genre).

Next, format. How do you see your story developing - into a full feature-length screenplay? Into a TV mini-series, a single-strand TV drama, a sit-com, a short film, maybe even a short story or a novel ... Again, as with the story's genre, never try to force your story into the wrong pigeon-hole. You might have a great pitch for a short film, but that may not make it suitable for development as a theatrical feature.

Look long and hard at your story, and let your story tell you what if has to be - a full-length romantic comedy for cinematic release or a horror short lasting no longer than ten minutes; a three-part melodrama for television or an airport novel.

Don't try to force your story into the wrong format or genre.

And don't try to push a 'theme' or 'message'. In television drama, a lot of writers like to preface their premises or synopses with some pithy sort of rhetorical question. Actually, there only ever seems to be the one question, which goes something like: 'How far would you go to protect someone you love?' To which the only sensible answer is 'Inverness' or 'Addis Ababa'. Not only is a pert moral question like 'How far would you go to protect yadda yadda' unlikely to be answered in any depth during an episode of 'The Bill', but who's to say that your script will actually pose that question?

Did Shakespeare start work on 'Hamlet' by scribbling down the question: 'Is it right to want to kill your step-father?'

Probably not. Ignore questions about theme or message - they're an absolute waste of time and they lead to shallow thinking. It's up to a person reading your script, or watching the end result, to decide on what the 'theme' or 'message' of the story might be - it's certainly not your problem.

Trust your story to tell itself without imposing themes or messages on it, and let your story decide what genre it belongs to, and what format it's best suited to. There are times when you are the master of your material, and others when the material has to speak for itself. This is one of the latter occasions. Let the story choose its proper format and genre, or be prepared to alter the story if you have to fit a certain genre or format.

Don't try forcing a square peg into a round hole.

DEVELOPMENT: 3

2009-04-01T11:52:00.002+01:00

So now we know what a set-up involves - a character, a desire and an obstacle or two.

The chances are that, once you've got your set-up, you'll be imagining all sorts of exciting things which can happen in your script. Which is terrific - you need all that excitement and creative energy - but keep all those ideas to one side for now.

Don't get distracted by your bright ideas. The process of screenwriting is one of expansion and contraction - some of the time, you'll need to be expansive in your thinking, open and receptive to ideas; but some of the time, you'll need to focus, to be clear and precise, and not let all those ideas get in the way.

Now is a time to focus. You've got your basic idea (set-up) and it's worth converting that into a short and pithy statement, something a little like a brief blurb on the back of a book.

The aim is to summarise your great idea, so that it can be easily and readily conveyed to a reader or listener. Also, the summary (or 'premise') will be something that you can memorise and hold onto when the going gets rough. One of the toughest things a screenwriter has to do is to remember at all times what you set out to do in the first place. Creating a succinct and enticing premise will be one way of remembering what got you going - what your original idea actually was.

An alternative name for a premise is the 'pitch'. They both serve the same purpose - to convey your idea in a concise and engaging way.

A successful premise or pitch will give the reader or listener a good sense of what your story might be, where it might go, and whether they want to know more. So it's a sales pitch, basically. You're selling your idea: your character (or characters), your situation, your set-up.

Three simple sentences should be your absolute maximum. Arguably, two simple sentences are better. Two or three sentences should suffice to express your idea. If you can't get your idea across in three simple sentences - max - then you need a new idea.

(This isn't quite 'high concept', that ghastly creation of the 1980s which gave us such awful pitches as 'Nurses in wet T-shirts', 'Whoopi Goldberg plays a nun' or 'Tom Cruise in a jet fighter'. When executives get lazy, and creatives pander to their laziness, you end up with dross like that. But no executive is so lazy that they can't get through a pitch expressed in two simple sentences. Writers can learn to organise their thoughts, and to express their idea succinctly, without stooping to the brainlessness of the 'high concept'.)

Now, there is a kind of workshop situation which can be extremely useful when you're working on your premise. A group of writers hear or read your premise, take it in, and then comment on it. Does it work? Does it leave them confused? Does it leave them wanting more? Does it actually say what you think it says?

Most importantly, how might it be improved?

This is really the start of your development process, and it's worth getting your premise to the point where it really does its job - it gets peoples' interest, it establishes the basics of the story, and it suggests a darn good script in the offing.

So - if anyone has a premise they want comments on, I would suggest that they leave it as a comment on this post, or email it to me, and we'll invite feedback. The feedback has to be constructive, of course. But as the best way to polish up your premise is to find out how other people receive it, what they make of it, and whether they think it's working or not, I think we should use this site for comments and feedback on premises.

There's your challenge. Express your script idea in two or three fairly straightforward sentences. Post it as a comment (or email it to me) and we'll 'workshop' it.

How neatly can you summarise your idea?

And can you avoid the dreaded dot-dot-dots ... ?

Over to you.

DEVELOPMENT: 2

2009-03-26T12:38:00.002Z

Okay, so a script needs a good set-up if it's going to stand any chance of becoming a script (see previous post).

But how do you know if you've got a good set-up?

Well, you need three things:

1) A character
2) A desire, objective or goal
3) An obstacle

When I'm leading screenwriting workshops, I'll often break the ice with a couple of games. The first requires everyone to write down, pretty quickly, five simple sentences starting with the words 'What if'. This usually provokes the 'right-brain' to throw up some story ideas. (When I'm in psycho-analytical mode, I also think of this exercise as 'Hopes and Fears', because the 'What ifs' really do offer an insight into the minds of the participants.)

The next game is a bit like the old game of 'Consequences'.

Start the page with the words: 'The story is about'.

Then invent a character. Five words are usually enough to get the idea across.

Then write 'who wants'.

Then think of a goal, a dream or an objective. Again, five words will usually do the trick.

Then write 'but'.

Now you need an obstacle, or several obstacles. No word limit, this time. What sort of thing can prevent somebody from achieving their goal?

Finally, write 'stands in the way'.

So, when you've finished, you should have a sentence which reads:

'The story is about a CHARACTER who wants SOMETHING but SOMETHING OR OTHER stands in the way.'

When there's a group of people, playing this game like 'Consequences', so that each new element is supplied by somebody who doesn't know what was written previously, usually generates some bizarre stories - so you end up with things like:

'The story is about a tall, dark, introspective librarian who wants to combat global warming but self-esteem issues and a giant six-foot rabbit stand in the way.'

The game is just a bit of fun, but the outcome is invariably a set-up. The three vital ingredients are there: there's a CHARACTER, an OBJECTIVE and one or more OBSTACLES.

Rule of thumb: the grander the OBJECTIVE and, even more so, the bigger the OBSTACLES, the better the problem.

This problem is what your protagonist (or 'hero') will spend much of the script trying to solve. The story revolves around the character's struggle to overcome or outmanoeuvre the OBSTACLES in order to achieve the OBJECTIVE.

In the first quarter or so of the script (Act One), the CHARACTER, the OBJECTIVE and the OBSTACLE/S will be clearly established.

In the middle half of the script (Act Two), the CHARACTER will pursue the OBJECTIVE in the face of OBSTACLES.

In the final quarter or so of the script (Act Three), we will discover whether or not the CHARACTER finally deals with the OBSTACLES to achieve the OBJECTIVE.

So - for your set-up, ask yourself:

1) have I got an interesting CHARACTER?
2) does that character have a good, positive OBJECTIVE * ?
3) are there sufficiently daunting OBSTACLES in the way?

(* The OBJECTIVE should always be a positive. Don't come up with something like a character who doesn't want to do his homework - give them something they actively want to do instead. And don't make it a random objective based entirely on luck, like winning the lottery. We want to see the protagonist being pro-active, so whatever the objective is, it should be something that the character can achieve if they really put their mind to it, and not just something that might happen if they cross their fingers.)

If in doubt, write down - without thinking about it too hard - some 'What ifs'. Then look at those what ifs and imagine a character in that situation.

Let's say that you wrote down: 'What if we ran out of water?'

You might then think of someone - a twelve-year old boy, for example - who wants to find a source of clean water.

What's the worst problem he could face? Is he a wheelchair user? Are brigands roaming the land, claiming all the water for themselves? Does he have a rival who will betray him at the first opportunity?

Whatever ideas you might have for scripts, this should always be your starting-point. Do you have a strong main CHARACTER? Does the character have a clear OBJECTIVE? And are there definite OBSTACLES to be overcome?

If you have all three, then you've got your set-up.

DEVELOPMENT: 1

2009-03-24T12:46:00.002Z

In a sweltering hell-hole the only work to be found is with an American oil company - and they're not hiring. But then, an opportunity arises. A fire at an inland oil rig demands action. Four men are selected to drive two truckloads of nitro-glycerine along treacherous mountain tracks, deep into the jungle. If they survive, they'll make enough money to be able to get out of the place ...

Henri-Georges Clouzot's 'Le Salaire de la Peur' (1953) is pretty well pure cinema. Once the characters and the situation have been set up, and those two huge trucks are rolling into the mountains with their explosive payloads, the suspense becomes intolerable. It's tough, it's brutal ... and it's great.

Four desperate men are hired to drive two truckloads of nitro-glycerine deep into the jungle to put out a fire at an oil rig. Will any of them make it?

Brilliant.

What makes it work is something very simple. The set-up is established, and then we're off, into the world of adventure, that dangerous road crammed with obstacles and difficulties. Characters are tested to their limits.

I'm not going to tell you how it ends. But if you get a chance, watch it.

You can almost think of 'Le Salaire de la Peur' as two films. There's the first section, when we meet the characters who are stuck in a dreadful village in the middle of nowhere. Then there's the second section, when the 'lucky' few have a chance to earn their way out by undertaking a kind of suicide mission. The first part is the set-up. The second part is what we pay to see - it's the fun stuff.

I'm forever reading scripts in which the fun stuff never comes. We seem to be wading through set-up constantly. More information, more ideas, more background - but never a movie.

With scripts like that, the writer is behaving just a like a hero in a story, but a hero who never commits to the adventure. The consequence is a script which never really gets out of Act One.

Act One is often a chore (the opening part of 'Le Salaire de la Peur' is rather slow), but it's necessary to set up the characters and the circumstances of the story. Act Two is the story. Act Two is where the writer (and the viewer) has fun. Act Three just rounds everything off.

If you don't organise a good enough set-up for yourself, you won't have a story.

And when you've got a good set-up, you have to discipline yourself. Set up the story and then GET ON WITH THE STORY. In other words, organise your set-up and then ENJOY YOURSELF.

Spend a certain amount of time establishing your characters and then SEND THEM OUT THERE WITH THE NITRO-GLYCERINE. And, what's more, MAKE IT AS HARD AS POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO SUCCEED.

And then you've got a story.

I've been thinking of this since my last post. One comment (thanks, Chelle) suggested that script development really is an issue. So I'm going to post a few blogs which examine the process of development. This post can be thought of as a preface, or an introduction to the 'Development' posts.

Before you even start working on a script, ask yourself: 'Have I got a good, strong set-up?'

'Have I got good, strong characters and an interesting problem?'

'Have I got a story?'

And let's be clear - the story is what happens after the set-up. In 'Le Salaire de la Peur', the story is four men, two trucks, a huge amount of nitro-glycerine and a dreadful journey along appalling roads. That's the story. Everything else is just setting up the story (Act One) or resolving the story (Act Three).

So - before you start, you need to know that you've got a great situation which you can really have fun with, torturing and testing your characters for up to an hour of screen time.

Next time, we'll look at how you create a good set-up. But for now, always bear this in mind -

A lot of scripts fail because the story isn't there, and because there isn't a story, the writer spends the whole time trying to set one up. Which would be like 'Le Salaire de la Peur' never leaving the village, never setting out in those beat-up trucks, never facing the thrills of the mountain road.

If you haven't got a good set-up, you haven't got a story and you haven't got a script.

Here endeth the lesson.

YOUR THOUGHTS

2009-03-17T13:04:00.002Z

I'm back!!

Have you missed me?

Anyway, now that I am back I'm going to canvas some opinions. Here's the thing. One of the agencies for which I occasionally work has raised the issue of some more workshops.

Now, I've been thinking about this one for some time. I've done umpteen zillion 'Introduction to Screenwriting' workshops, taster sessions, courses, blah blah blah.

But I've always worried that those who come on such courses then get kinda dumped. Where do they go from there? They've done their introduction, and then they're cut loose and left alone, without visible means of support.

So I started thinking about follow-up workshops or courses.

And I came up with two ideas. Let me run them by you, and then, if you'd be so find, I'd appreciate any thoughts and feedback ...

One which I've long wanted to focus on is format.

Format.

The dreaded format.

A lot of people (students especially) seem to feel that screenwriting format isn't a problem, these days, because there's SOFTWARE that can do it all for you.

Ha! Couldn't be more wrong. Relying on screenwriting software is a BIG mistake.

Format is the essence of screenwriting. That's because the format requires you to think in a certain way. And if you can't do that, no amount of clever software is going to format your scripts properly. But if you can train yourself to THINK in screenplay format, then you can write a screenplay (without needing the software at all).

So that's one option. A Screenplay Format workshop (don't think that it's just about the layout on the page - script format is more a way of life).

And then, there's development.

There's a process that screenwriters usually go through (especially if they're working for television). It's a case of building your story up in several stages. The idea is that, by the time you come to write 'FADE IN:' at the top of your first page, you've already plotted your script.

Now, I'm a great believer in not over-plotting your script. Some development processes go too far. For example, in television, you're sometimes required to do a 'step-by-step', or 'scene-by-scene', treatment for your script.

That might work for some. But I find it intolerable. Why?

It's unnecessarily hard work, and it takes all the fun out of writing the script.

So a development process which organises the script for you, sorting out certain story and structure problems before they arise, but leaves you free to enjoy the actually scripting process - that might be worth exploring, don't you think?

Those, then, are the options:

1) FORMATTING (how to 'think' in scripts)
2) DEVELOPMENT (how to plan your scripts most effectively)

Your thoughts, please, ladies and gents.

Which one do you think would be most useful to you?

GENRE

2008-12-18T14:25:00.002Z

I want to talk about genre.

I never used to want to talk about genre. In fact, genre seemed to be a subject well worth steering clear of. Especially after I spent a whole afternoon in a tutorial discussing the finer points of genre. 'Never again,' I thought.

But now I'm going to talk about genre, and for a very good reason.

A lot of writers seek to eschew the very concept of genre. They see it as unnecesarily restrictive, like they're being made to compartmentalise their work. 'My writing can't be pigeon-holed like that,' they seem to say, 'I'm a free spirit.'

Sorry, that won't wash.

Say you decided to watch a film. What kind of film do you fancy? Hmmnnn ... how about a romantic-comedy?

So you watch it. And it's not very romantic. And there's not much comedy in it.

How do you feel? Like you've been had? Do you feel cheated, let down, even maybe a little angry?

Maybe you went for a horror. Which wasn't very horrifying. Or a thriller, which was noticably short of thrills. Or a drama, which had very little drama in it.

See what I mean? Writers who insist that they don't adhere to genre are everso likely to upset their readers.

Genre is about rules. We come to every genre with a set of expectations. If you refuse to fulfil those expectations, you might well alienate your audience.

Sure, you can mingle genres. 'Shaun of the Dead' made a very good job of mixing horror and romantic comedy (or rather, 'slacker' comedy with romantic overtones) - but that was because it was horrific and funny.

Terrible things happen when a writer sets out without a clear notion of the genre he or she is writing in.

Or if they try to pick 'n' mix genres and end up making a mess.

Don't try and run away from genre. Don't pretend you're above it all.

Genre matters. It's important.

There aren't many (and you're highly unlikely to invent any new ones).

But if you're writing drama - make it dramatic.

If you're writing romance - make it romantic.

If you're writing comedy - make it funny.

If you're writing horror - make it horrific (NB: horror must have a supernatural component; believe it or not, 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' is not a horror - it's a thriller.)

If you're writing a war movie - what do you need?

Figure out what genre you're going for and stick with it. USE the rules of the genre to make your script really shine. Look at your particular favourites in that genre. How do they work?

Don't try to buck the trend. Genre is not an enemy. It's there to help you and it's there to help the reader or viewer.

Genre is your friend.

THE STORY

2008-12-15T14:08:00.002Z

I've discovered a dangerous new drug. It's called Authonomy (www.authonomy.com). It's for books, not screenplays, but I uploaded part of my historical book about 'King' Arthur onto the site last week and since then I've been hooked.

If you want to read a helluva lot of free fiction, go there. It's also a great learning experience.

One thread on the forum touched on the issue of how many stories there are in the world. A contributor announced that there were seven (perhaps he'd read Christopher Booker's 'The Seven Basic Plots').

At different times, I've been told that there are eight stories. Or ten.

But, actually, I think there's just one.

That's right: one story, told over and over again, all over the world.

Basically, it's about a character who undergoes a challenge.

The character wants something. Something stands in the way. There's a struggle. The main character has to develop in order to overcome the obstacles. That's the story.

A more elaborate version of this was published many years ago by Joseph Campbell. His 'Hero With a Thousand Faces' boiled down hundreds of world myths to find the essential core, the regular pattern.

If Campbell's book seems a bit high-flown and esoteric, Christopher Vogler created a more user-friendly version of the theory, especially for the screen industry: it's 'The Writer's Journey'.

The thing about this story is that it's universal. It's the same pattern, in essence, as the journey undertaken by the initiate or the neurotic. In order to grow, to become more solid in ourselves, or to pass from one phase in life to the next, we have to undertake a journey - literal or otherwise.

We have to suffer, one way or another. It might be as a candidate for Special Forces, it might be as teenager on the brink of adulthood, it might be love's pangs and heartache.

We have to go down into the depths. We have to confront our demons. We have to keep going.

Dr Carl Jung once said of one of his patients: 'Thank God he made up his mind to become neurotic!'

In screenwriting terms, that can be read as: 'Thank God he made up his mind to accept the Call and embark on the adventure!'

All the other stories that writers and commentators try to make you believe in, in reality, merely variations on a theme.

That theme being, character wants/needs something (although they may not, at the beginning, know that they want this) and has to suffer in order to achieve or acquire it.

That's the story. There is only one.

Everything else is how you tell it.

DIALOGUE

2008-12-10T09:48:00.002Z

There were no camcorders when I was a kid. Those of us who were odd enough to want to make our own movies had to use something called Super 8.

Super 8 had the advantage of being film - a lovelier medium than video. It came in cartridges lasting 3 minutes and a few seconds, which meant you were careful about how much footage you shot. And it was silent.

There were systems which could sync sound with the picture, but they were expensive, and getting a decent edit was a nightmare.

So I learnt to make silent films.

After a while, the limitations of my home movie set-up became apparent. The original 'Star Wars' might have been made on a shoestring, but George Lucas wasn't obliged to cast his Mum as Princess Leia and to pay for it all out of the money he got for Christmas. So I drifted away from Super 8, but its legacy remained with me.

For most of my teens, I was hopeless with dialogue. I hadn't been learning to listen.

But I had been learning to SEE.

The screen is primarily a visual medium. There was even a theory, when sound was first married to the moving image, that this was a Bad Thing. It stopped cinema being a Universal Language. Sound detracted from the magic of the image.

Now, I don't think that's necessarily true. Great dialogue - a great soundtrack in general - can make a movie. But still, we go to SEE a film. We WATCH a movie. It is a story told with pictures.

A lot of writers, when they start writing for the screen, assume that it's all about dialogue. It isn't. In fact, I'm constantly trying to persuade my students that dialogue is the least effective weapon in the screenwriter's armoury.

Inherently, I think a lot of writers know this. Many scripts start with an excitingly visual opening sequence. But then the writer relaxes, and as the script continues the dialogue runs out of control. Page after page goes by, in which characters talk at one another incessantly.

A page of properly formatted script should equal roughly one minute of screen time. A page of dialogue, then, even if it is formatted properly, is a minute of talking. That's a whole minute of somebody's life, and you want them to spend that minute listening to the random thoughts of your characters, or hearing one of them explaining the plot to another.

Now, there's a handy rule in screenwriting. It's called GILGOE.

That's 'Get In Late, Get Out Early'. GILGOE.

Start your scene at the latest possible moment and then end it as soon as you can.

Ask yourself, 'What is the function of the dialogue in this scene?' If its only function is to pass the time of day, GET RID OF IT.

Really good dialogue bears little or no similarity to the way people actually talk. Most human beings are incapable of expressing the simplest of concepts without warbling endlessly. But, as Hitchcock observed, film is life with the dull bits cut out.

It's our job to zone in on the crucial moment. Unless you're writing for a soap - in which case, banality is the remit and the talking-to-action ratio is entirely out of kilter - it's your duty to shut your characters up. Let them burble away to their heart's content if you must, but then go back and cut out the yakking.

Clint Eastwood might not be the best actor in the world, but he understands the screen. When he was cast as the Man With No Name, he did something truly remarkable - indeed, earth-shattering - for an actor. He cut at least half of his lines.

He knew that the less a character talks, the more we might listen.

Be like Clint. Cut out at least half of your dialogue.

Then go back and cut some more.

And keep cutting, until all that remains is absolutely necessary.

Talking is for radio. On the screen, it's what we see that matters.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

2008-12-09T11:15:00.002Z

After watching one of my things on telly, I turned to a friend and said, 'Well, what did you think?'

'You could tell you wrote it,' he said.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, it had your fingerprints all over it,' he replied.

I was intrigued. I tended to assume that the production process would remove all fingerprints from the script. So I pressed him for an example.

What kind of fingerprints did I leave? How could he tell that it was a script that I, as opposed to anyone else, had written?

'All your character have memories,' he said.

Was that all?

It got me thinking. My friend was a fairly sedentary creature. He knew what a television set looked like - he spent enough time in front of them. So, presumably, he was familiar with TV drama ... familiar enough to spot an anomaly, something that one particular writer might do that others might not.

And no one, at the time, was probably more familiar with my work than he was.

So - one of the things that made my writing individual, apparently, was that my characters tended to have memories.

I'm always fascinated by the little things we do that we're not necessarily conscious of doing. Not least of all because I suspect that 'art' is something that is only partially under conscious control. Writers, like poker players, have tics or 'tells'.

But memories? Don't all characters have memories? Surely they do.

Well, no, apparently not. Otherwise my friend wouldn't have pointed out that my characters tend to have memories.

How weird. I mean, if you think about it, memories are what we are. As individuals, we are the sum of our memories.

But, seemingly, the world of drama is filled with characters who don't have memories (or, at least, are unlikely ever to refer to them). Which must mean that they enter, all nice and clean, without pasts or backgrounds, and then they do their thing, and then they disappear once more into the ether. They are transient. They have no real existence.

To be honest, I never thought about my characters having memories (that is, I never did those naff character questionaires and noted down such quirks as 'This character's worst memory is ...') Their memories must have sprung spontaneously to the surface, sparked by something they had seen or heard, something that had happened in the plot.

It's just a thought, but do your characters have memories?

Maybe they should. Because memories make us human.

THE STUDY OF SCREENWRITING

2008-12-08T15:00:00.002Z

I've a confession to make. No one ever taught me how to be a screenwriter. I taught myself.

Assiduous followers of this blog will have noted that I started by learning to copy the screenplay format from a sample page in the writer's directory. To be honest, I found the screenplay layout fascinating - it was so unlike anything I'd come across before. Over the years I learnt not to be experimental with the layout, not to customise it, but just to let it do its work. The screenplay is the format, the format is the screenplay.

There were no How To books that I knew of, and no courses to go on - if there had been, I'm not sure I'd have enrolled on one anyway. I just practised writing scripts in the proper format and, one day, I became a professional.

It was five years or more into my career, by which time I'd already won a Writers' Guild Award for my work on a 'Best Original Drama Series', that I decided to find out how I did what I was, apparently, already capable of doing.

I bought dozens of books on screenwriting, which had magically appeared in recent years, and set myself the task of learning how to do it better. I was already an experienced professional, but there's always room for improvement.

I guess I was lucky, in that I could weigh up everything I read against my own professional experience. If a writer was talking nonsense, I could tell. If a book had something useful to say, I'd be able to spot it.

I'd say about 95 per cent of what I read was absolutely useless. No, it's worse than that. 95 per cent of what is taught in books and courses on screenwriting is actively damaging.

These people are making money by trying to teach a chrysalis how to turn into a butterfly. You must do this, you must not to that ... It's a wonder that any newcomer survives this process, because the art of screenwriting is largely intuitive. It's like being taught how to tell a joke.

You may have noticed that I had a go at Robert McKee in a recent posting. He's made a fortune, and a name for himself, out of telling people how to write for the screen.

A few years ago, I taught a short screenwriting course. At the end of it, one of the students emailed me, thanking me for making the process seem so clear. He'd read dozens of books, all of which merely mystified the process for him. 'Ever heard of Robert McKee?' he wrote, by way of illustration.

Some time later, I was staying with a film actor friend of mine whose girlfriend worked for the BBC. She had been called in to attend a weekend seminar led by the Great McKee. She was rapidly losing the will to live.

What a bastard! I mean, seriously - he gets PAID to make the magic of screenwriting a bewildering and painful subject.

It was, sadly, typical of the BBC to fall for his snake oil. For a while (although I believe they've abandoned this) the BBC even ran its own 'Writers' Academy', in which poor lambs were instructed in BBC scriptwriting technique. In reality, I suspect that they were browbeaten into churning out the kind of meaningless drivel that the BBC prefers these days to meaningful drama.

All of which makes me wonder - why is there now an industry devoted to teaching people how to write screenplays?

Get this: the cinema had been around for a hundred years before this self-help Teach Yourself Screenwriting industry appeared.

Now, I'm all for democracy and meritocracy, and I really enjoy helping would-be screenwriters to grasp the intricacies of the craft.

But I fear that so many of these books and courses don't really help. They either stuff your head with useless nonsense, making the task of screenwriting infinitely more difficult than it needs to be - that, or they encourage a kind of machine-like approach to the script.

And I daresay I've been guilty of that myself, every now and then.

So, are they helping, all these books, courses, seminars and festivals?

The short answer is: no. Scripts aren't getting any better. In some areas, they're getting worse.

The greatest screenwriters in history - people like Ben Hecht, Robert Towne, William Goldman - did not have tutors. They didn't learn their craft from books. Maybe, if they had, they'd have been as confused as anybody trying to become a screenwriter these days, and their scripts would have been as torturous and uninspired as so many now are.

If you can master the format, you can write a screenplay. We've all seen movies, we all watch TV. So we know what works and what doesn't.

Learn the format, and then write. And write. And write.

And bin all those books. And throw darts at a picture of Robert McKee.

Just do it.

PRAISE WHERE IT'S DUE

2008-12-06T13:26:00.003Z

I have to say this.

I watched 'Mastermind' last night (yes, good old middle-class TV). One of the contestants - the winner, in fact - was answering questions on W.C. Fields.

It turned out that this guy had had his own minor brush with Hollywood. Once upon a time, he had been brought in to improve the dialogue for a film.

This wasn't just any old movie. This was a schlock exploitation movie, one of those with a title like 'Lesbian Bikers Meet the Cannibal Zombies from Mars'. Something like that.

As if that wasn't promising enough, it was revealed that our guy got kicked off the movie for trying to make one of the zombies a 'forlorn vegetarian'.

Sir - I salute you. Not only do you know quite a lot about W.C. Fields but you managed to have a whole screenwriting career in miniature.

You were brought in to help polish up a turd, which is what screenwriters spend much of their lives doing.

You were sacked because you brought to this eminently trashy production some genuine wit and originality.

Like all good screenwriters, you rose and fell according to the whims of some idiot calling himself a producer.

And you managed to do it in about five minutes flat.

Must be some sort of record.

FORMAT

2008-12-05T16:50:00.002Z

At last! As promised - FORMAT! The downfall of many a budding screenwriter.

I love it. Screenplay format is great. It's what turns a screenplay into poetry (yes, really). Crack the format, and you're a screenwriter. Learn how to master the format and your scripts will be crisp, clean and tight.

And you know what - it's bloody easy. Nothing to it.

Actually, I'm misleading you a bit, here. It is easy, but only when you figure out that it's not really about how the words are arranged on the page. It's about how the thoughts are arranged in your head.

Screenplay format is a way of thinking.

When I started out, there weren't any books about screenwriting (or if there were, nobody told me where to find them). No: the massive global industry of self-help screenwriting tutelage exploded in the 90s - strangely, at about the same time that executives started distancing themselves from writers and became REMOTE and UNREACHABLE.

So how did I get to learn format? Well, there was a book called The Writers and Artists Yearbook (all good retailers), and back then it had a page - ONE page - of standard screenplay format for you to copy.

That's how I started learning format. You can bin all those books that tell you how to do it because they'll just mess with your head. Most books on screenwriting make the whole process far too complicated. And Robert McKee is a charlatan. He knows nothing.

(There - I've said it; tee-hee-hee).

Format is about three things. Because the script contains three kinds of information.

1): The Scene Heading (where we are, what time of day)
2): Action/Scene description (what's happening - what we see)
3): Dialogue (what is said)

That's all. Nothing else. Don't worry about all those 'CONTINUED:' or 'CONT'D:' or 'CUT TO:'s because they're irrelevant. Just remember to use Courier New 12-point, black ink, white paper (A4) and to write on just one side of the page.

Oh, and if you submit a handwritten screenplay you will be taken out and shot by the Writers Guild, and rightly so.

So - three different kinds of information. And, to make things nice and clear, each one is laid out in a slightly different way.

1) SCENE HEADING. Always in capitals. Don't bother numbering your scenes - somebody else can do that.

Generally, a scene heading will start with INT or EXT, then a dash or full-stop, then a quick name for the LOCATION (which will be the same every time you return to that same place), then another dash, then some idea of the lighting conditions (DAY or NIGHT).

That's the scene heading:

INT. OFFICE - DAY

Couldn't be simpler.

Now double space.

2) Action / Scene Description. This stuff is not in capitals and should be written in short, single-spaced paragraphs, preferably of no more than four lines each.

It should be justified to the left-hand margin. Do not justify to the right (that's sound political sense as well).

Please do describe what we are seeing. So many writers introduce a CHARACTER (capital letters) without telling us anything about them. Please think about your poor reader and throw 'em a bone, yeah? They need to visualise what you're writing about.

All action should be written in.

Double-space between paragraphs of action or scene description.

In fact, rule of thumb: every time you switch from one kind of information (say, action) to another (say, dialogue), double-space.

Scripts like it when you double-space. It gives them room to breathe and makes the page look nice and uncluttered.

So, you've written a paragraph or two of action. Then you

Double-space ...

3) Dialogue. Boy, does this cause problems.

The name of the person who is speaking is written in CAPITALS roughly in the centre of the page. Do not 'centre', though - use the tab key. The same number of tabs each time (I find, on my Word default setting, five tabs does fine).

Single-space.

If you need to explain how the CHARACTER is saying something (parenthesis), put it in brackets on the line below the CHARACTER's name. Better still, don't. Actors think they know how to speak lines and don't like being told what to do - not by a writer, at any rate (secretly, actors hate writers, because we're clever and, generally speaking, they're not).

If you must use (parentheses) then use to them indicate the CHARACTER's emotional state. Don't put actions in here - they count as action.

Single-space.

Dialogue is single-spaced, written normally (lower and upper case type as appropriate - you know all this) and occupies a column in the centre of the page.

Do not 'centre'. Use the tabs. Five tabs for the CHARACTER name. Four for (parenthesis), which you don't really need. Three for the dialogue.

Keep it neat and for God's sake don't let it sprawl right across the page. Nothing looks less professional than dialogue that doesn't know it's place. Down the centre of the page, please, in a nice, neat column.

Double-space between snatches of dialogue. Double-space between dialogue and action.

If you wish, you can write FADE IN: at the top of your script (left margin, then double-space). But it's not obligatory.

Don't write TITLES in your script.

And that's about it.

It's so simple, and yet so often it goes wrong. Writers try to cheat. They put too many words on the page (fatal mistake). They forget to change scene when a CHARACTER goes from one space to another. Their dialogue wanders all over the page. Everything's too cramped and messy.

If your format is chaotic, then your thoughts are too. Which means you haven't got a screenplay - you've got a mess.

Training yourself to write good, clean, clear format will teach you how to write a screenplay.

It's all about WHERE WE ARE, What we see, and WHO says what.

Keep it to that, keep the three things separate, make your page look nice and neat, and you can't go wrong.

(COMING SOON: Rocket Science - a piece of piss.)

PRODUCERS

2008-11-30T13:20:00.002Z

Between ten and fifteen years ago, something terrible happened.

(I'm talking about the UK here - the US has specialised in terrible things for a great deal longer than that.)

What happened was unnecessary. Worse than that, it was completely counter-productive.

It was a power battle between producers and writers.

This was a pretty one-sided battle, and it was initiated by the producers. And it was a BIG mistake.

Let's start with a basic fact. A screenwriter without a producer is like a novelist without a publisher. You can spend all your time creating wonderful stuff, but if you're not paired with a producer, it's just paper with scribbles on.

At the same time, of course, a producer without a screenwriter is a mere wannabe.

It's a symbiotic relationship. Writers need producers to turn their brilliant ideas into a kind of reality. Producers need writers to give them those brilliant ideas.

They're the Yin and the Yang of the industry. As such, they're inseparable.

Except that producers forgot that fact. A new breed entered the industry. They were ambitious, they were keen to get on. And they didn't want any lowdown writers stealing their glory. They wanted complete control.

Nowadays, it's almost impossible to consider writers and producers as equals. We're programmed to see producers as god-like individuals with the power of life and death.

But let's remember what a producer without a script looks like. A bit naked, really.

Traditionally, a producer would seek out a writer whose work he or she admired. There would then be a meeting - possibly even an agreeable lunch - and ideas might be batted to and fro.

Between them, the writer and the producer would agree on a plan, a story they wanted to develop. And the producer would say, 'Right, then, off you go, write that script; we'll stay off your back, but if you want us you know where we are. See you in a few weeks.'

That's how scripts happened. Basically, the producer accepted that writing a script is what scriptwriters do. That's why they hired them.

But then came the Cult of Management, along with a trickier environment (commissioning editors were scared, knowing that if they made a mistake they'd be laughed at, and somebody younger with a smarter suit would possibly take their place). The industry ground to a halt. Decisions weren't being taken.

Enter the new producers. The new bunch saw the writer as a problem. These damned writers were, unfortunately, necessary. So to stop them getting ideas above their stations, the producers decided to mess with their scripts and their heads. The idea, I guess, was that the producer would be able to say, 'Well, realistically, I wrote that script: the writer was really just a glorified typist.'

Inevitably, perhaps, there was a massive cull of writers. Projects were damaged because producers who knew nothing about scripts had started interfering, and then some.

Producers began to believe that actors were more important. After all, if you're trying to impress somebody, isn't it better to say 'I'm working with so-and-so, the famous actor', than, 'I'm doing this thing with a writer you've probably never heard of.'

As more and more writers were forced out of the industry, a new crisis arose. No writers! Of course, this meant there were opportunities for newcomers. And these newbies, being young and innocent, had to be steered through the script process by producers. They didn't realise that it's the Writer's Job to Write the Script and it's the Producer's Job to Produce the Damn Thing.

Which is why writers these days are expected to write draft after draft, revising and revising, until the producer accidentally stumbles across whatever it was they were after in the first place.

This is a most unhappy state of affairs, and it will not improve until two things happen.

First - producers have to realise that the relationship between the writer and the producer is not one of hired hand and demanding client. It's more equitable than that. It is, in fact, one expert going into business with another.

Second - writers have to remember that they are the gifted children. Yes: they need producers, because otherwise they may not eat. But they must never forget that producers need them.

It's time for writers to hold their heads up high. The Writers' Guild has been working on a Writers' Manifesto. That in itself is proof of the fact that the relationship between writers and producers has deteriorated - and it is all the fault of the producers.

So - writers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but drafts 4 to 11 of your wonderful script.

Let's remind producers of where they'd be without us, the ungrateful bastards.

THE CALL

2008-11-28T11:58:00.002Z

I think it was Francis Bacon who effectively said that there's no such thing as learning - only remembering.

I'm reminded of that idea time and again when I read screenplays. The reason being that the basic laws of screenwriting should be embedded in practically all of us.

There are, if you will, two aspects to screenplays. There's the stuff that does need to be learnt. Formatting, for example - that takes some learning. And then there's the stuff that really we just need to remember.

Like how a story works.

Unfortunately, just as many writers stumble over the problems of format (really should address that one, some time), so the basics of story elude them. We should all be masters of story. It should be second nature - like remembering to breathe. After all, it's not as if we've never come across stories before, is it?

What happens, in my experience, is that the essential elements of story make it into the script, but in a muted, unconscious sort of way. This in itself is revealing. The fact is, we know how to write stories. We just don't know that we know.

So I'm going to look today at one of the first thing that happens in any story: the Call.

Okay, so a story has to start somewhere. And where that story starts is a place we can call the Ordinary World. The writer sets up a situation, showing us what life is like for our main character (or characters).

The 'Ordinary World' is just that. It's our starting point. We need to see what everyday life is like for our hero, before the adventure starts.

One thing we can be pretty sure of is that the Ordinary World is lacking in something. It's not ideal. The hero is bored, restless.

Then comes the Call.

It can come in many forms. A chance encounter, a summons to the boss's office, an incident witnessed on the street ...

This Call represents an invitation, from the World of Adventure, for the hero to make a move. On the one hand, it's an intrusion. Life had been trundling along, as per normal, in the Ordinary World - and now this. Something has happened, and life may never be the same again.

A good script sorts this out pretty early on. The sooner, the better.

In previous postings I've banged on and on about the three Acts of a script. The Ordinary World and the Call are (quite bleedin' obviously) elements of the first Act. And we need to get them out of the way for the first Act to work towards its conclusion, so that we can then get on with the fun stuff, otherwise known as Act Two or 'The Story'.

So we've met the hero and the hero has received the Call. Then what?

Let me ask you: have you ever been asked to do something quite out of the ordinary and found that you had doubts about the whole thing?

Isn't it easier to stay in your comfort zone?

I mean, after all, life in the Ordinary World might not be everything, but it's a damn sight safer than wandering off into the unknown, yeah?

So what does the hero do?

He, she or it REFUSES the Call.

Adventure comes calling, and the hero tries to avoid it.

(There are, of course, circumstances wherein the hero is not really in a position to refuse the Call. It would be unseemly of James Bond to tell M, no thanks, I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing, send somebody else. In such circumstances, the Refusal of the Call takes another form. Sometimes, he won't head straight off on the assignment because there's some woman for him to dally with. At least Moneypenny will give him a wistful look when she says goodbye, which indicates that, although Bond can't refuse the Call, somebody else might wish that he would.

(Alternatively, there's the 'Where Eagles Dare' option. Richard Burton can't refuse a Call. But one of his (shortlived) fellow soldiers can, by questioning the point of the exercise.

(One way or another, the Call must be refused.)

Often enough, at this point, screenwriting mirrors life. I've read many a screenplay in which - usually unknowingly - the writer has got the Call in there. At which point, it's not their hero who refuses the Call - it's the writer themselves. A lot of writers, I've found, are happier fiddling around in Act One than actually committing to the story of the script. Result - the script never gets on with it. Which is bad, bad, bad.

After the hero has refused the Call, usually by finding reasons not to go off on some madcap adventure, something else then has to happen.

The decision has to be taken out of the hero's hands.

Some kind of enemy action or divine intervention is needed to give our reluctant hero a kick up the arse. Because, for there to be a story at all, the hero must cross that threshold into the World of Adventure (the Story).

So - in the simplest terms:

1) The hero is bored in the Ordinary World;
2) Adventure calls;
3) The hero tries to avoid going on the adventure;
4) Something else happens - now the hero has no choice;
5) And we're off ...

These are the bare bones of any Act One. This is how pretty well every story ever told begins. It's a tried and trusted formula. It's practically unavoidable.

So why fight it? Make sure that your story, after a quick set-up of the Ordinary World, has a Call. A moment when the riskier World of Adventure irrupts into your hero's settled existence.

Then make sure that your hero has doubts, second thoughts, or simply appreciates that adventures can be scary things.

And then give them such a boot up the arse that they're left with no choice in the matter. Adventure, here we come.

And for heaven's sake, get all this over with before your script starts dragging on and going nowhere. Both heroes and writers need that lightning bolt which propels them into the story, somewhere towards the end of Act One (and Act One, please remember, should be a quarter of the script - no more).

This isn't learning - it's remembering. We all know this.

But so many writers spend so long refusing the Call themselves that they end up with a script without a story.

Which is a shame, to say the least.

LESS IS MORE

2008-11-19T13:49:00.002Z

What's the sexiest moment in movie history?

That's a tough call, but for my money it just might be in Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'. Grace Kelly holds up a nightdress and tells Jimmy Stewart (who has broken his leg), 'Preview of coming attractions.'

There. Not a nipple on show. Not a glimpse of buttock. But it worked for me when I first saw it.

But why? I mean, okay, Grace Kelly was moderately attractive, and the thought of her wearing a negligee could drive a man to distraction. In fact, that's just it. Sure, I'd like to have seen her wearing it. But the THOUGHT of her wearing it - the IDEA that, when they got married, lucky Jimmy Stewart would get to see her wearing it EVERY NIGHT - well, wow, there's a thought.

Like they say, it's the thought that counts.

Now, say what you like about Alfred Hitchcock, I think he was a genius. There's a lot we can learn from his movies. Beyond the camera trickery and the odd quirks, Hitch really understood cinema. And so what if most of his movies turn on the same plot (male victim of mistaken identity goes on the run and encounters a cool blonde)? He knew his audience.

And one of the things he knew is that sometimes it's better not to show things.

Now, there's a conundrum. The screen is a visual medium, and now I'm suggesting we shouldn't show things. Hmmnnn ...

The imagination is an exceptional tool. As screenwriters, we're supposed to go where our imaginations lead us. And we live in an age when, if we're lucky to have an indulgent producer with unlimited funds, we can show whatever our imagination comes up with.

This is largely thanks to a process known as CGI or 'Computer Generated Idiocy'. When it first appeared (think back to 'Jurassic Park' and 'Terminator 2') it was amazing. Now, I think it's a bit tired. But it seems to appeal to the juvenile among us. That's why movies and TV are obsessed with it. It's expensive, it's not convincing, but the kids love it.

(I suspect that the kids love it because they've grown up in a virtual world.)

However, just because we can show giant monsters destroying New York City, or flying dragons attacking a castle, or people having their skulls blown apart, the real question is - should we show these things? This is the great moral quandary - call it the problem of science: just because we CAN do something doesn't mean that we SHOULD do it.

How many werewolf movies have you seen which completely fall apart the moment you see the monster?

Maybe the real problem is that while screenwriters indulge their own imaginations and budgets go through the roof, what about the audience's imagination?

If the audience has to imagine the monster, the horror, the ghastly injuries, they'll often do a better job of it than our special effects experts can. It's called 'fear of the dark', or 'fear of the unknown'.

One of the scariest films I ever saw was a black-and-white adaptation of Henry James's 'Turn of the Screw'. It's called 'The Innocents', and I've been lucky enough to work with the cinematographer (the legendary Freddie Francis) and to befriend the first AD. Not much happens in the movie. There's no gore. There are no giant monsters. They only just manage to show us a ghost. But it's chilling, terrifying, and absolutely brilliant.

A well-known British producer (Tony Garnett) had something of a catchphrase, as I remember. It went 'There's nothing less sexy that a shot of heaving buttocks'. I suppose much would depend on whose buttocks were doing the heaving, but in fact I think he's right.

The juvenile, 'I want' part of the audience maybe only wants to see shots of heaving buttocks, between computer generated images of mass destruction. The most juvenile culture in the world is that of the United States, which means that America produces metric tonnes of this shit every week.

And while the BBC keeps trying to attract younger viewers, we'll have to put up with more of this expensive, unimaginative toss on our small screens.

But let's remember that, if you want to reach a mature audience, or an audience that might actually read books, or an audience that doesn't feel the need to stuff its face with junk while whooping at the screen, we need to use our imagination.

Which also means letting the audience use theirs.

'Preview of coming attractions.' I'd take Grace Kelly saying that over a load of CGI nonsense anyday.

FOUR CHARACTERS

2008-11-15T11:38:00.002Z

The range of characters available to the screenwriter is unlimited. But, as with anything to do with screenwriting, in practice it's pretty simple.

I'm not going to talk about background characters, here. If anything, I'm going to talk about character function.

Characters exist for a reason - and, if they don't, they shouldn't be there in the script. They must be doing things, fulfilling a purpose, adding to the brew. Always ask yourself: is this character important? Vital? Really adding to the script? Or have I simply found a character I like, but who may not belong in this story?

Certain character types are indispensable. They keep cropping up. There are four of them, and while it isn't necessary to have all four in a script, it's difficult to avoid having at least two of them.

These four more-or-less essential characters are:-

HERO
SHADOW
SIDEKICK
LOVE INTEREST

So - looking at them in turn ...

1. THE HERO. Try telling a story without this one.

Now, first of all, the HERO and the PROTAGONIST are not always one and the same. Usually, but not always.

The word PROTAGONIST comes from the Greek: it means 'first actor' or 'first contestant' (a memory of the time when drama was a competitive sport, as well as the struggle that lies at the heart of drama). The PROTAGONIST is simply the main player or lead character.

There are certain rules governing heroes, however. First, the word HERO. It again derives from the Greek and means, essentially, one who protects and serves. A PROTAGONIST does not need to engage in self-sacrifice; a HERO does.

In fact, the story of the HERO is universal. There is often something unusual or miraculous about their birth. They are often raised apart from their parents. They answer a certain 'call'. They make the journey into the World of Adventure for the good of their society. They struggle, they suffer, they bring back the magical key, the secret, the vital clue. They make their world a better place and, as a result of their endeavours, they GROW. They CHANGE. Their personality becomes stronger, fuller, more complete, as a direct result of the journey they've undertaken and the struggles they have undergone along the way.

2. SHADOW. Or, if you prefer, the VILLAIN, NEMESIS, RIVAL or BADDIE. But I prefer SHADOW. Thanks to Dr Carl Jung we know that every individual personality has a Shadow, which is composed of those elements of our psychological make-up that we don't like. We project them onto other people, or even other races.

When somebody takes an instant dislike to somebody else, that's usually the Shadow at work. For example, I don't want to think of myself as a conceited show-off, so when I meet someone who seems to be a conceited show-off I don't like that person. Why? Because, deep down, they remind me too much of my darker self.

As we know from 'Star Wars' (in fact, 'The Empire Strikes Back'), the SHADOW is not necessarily the polar opposite of the HERO. Psychologically, the SHADOW consists of those elements in the HERO's personality which have not been integrated. Thus, when we discover that Lord Vader is Luke's father (shock! horror! hold the front page!) what we're really learning is that the Dark Side has been present in Luke all along. He can resist it or he can assimilate it. Luke is a goodie (boringly so) because he opposes the evil forces. But the SHADOW is a function of the HERO's personality. Fighting it is not always the answer. Turning the negative aspects of the SHADOW into positive ones (making a friend of the SHADOW) creates psychological completeness.

But, of course, that seldom happens. In our shoot-'em-up world, the SHADOW must be destroyed. (What a better world it would be if our stories taught us to integrate the SHADOW side of ourselves, rather than projecting it onto others and then destroying them: the War On Terror is, in many ways, a war between the West and its Shadow, and wars like that can never be won).

So, the SHADOW is the HERO's 'opposite', the Yin to the HERO's Yang.

3. SIDEKICK. Sometimes called REFLECTION or ECHO. But SIDEKICK is better, because we all know what that means.

A SIDEKICK is usually the HERO's friend. They exist to make the HERO look better at what they do. Think of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson: Watson is a clever guy, but Holmes is miles ahead of him.

In many movies, the SIDEKICK doesn't make it to the end. This, again, is part of demonstrating how amazing the HERO is. The HERO survives, the SIDEKICK doesn't. Ergo, the HERO is better than the SIDEKICK.

The SIDEKICK can be thought of as a representative of the audience. They get us closer to the HERO, and show us how much better/braver/cleverer the HERO is than we are. Because of their friendship, the SIDEKICK can have conversations with the HERO that others can't. So the SIDEKICK sheds a new light on the HERO.

(The lighting image is quite a good one. The standard lighting set-up involves three light sources. Imagine the HERO as the subject. The HERO's confrontation with the SHADOW, the struggle between them, acts like the key light, thrusting our HERO into the spotlight and casting a large shadow. The SIDEKICK provides the backlight, lighting up the HERO from another angle. The LOVE INTEREST acts like the fill light, removing much of the shadow and giving us a somewhat softer, more rounded image of the HERO. Technical stuff, but a good mental image to hold in your head: the three satellite characters exist to 'light' the main character beautifully.)

4. LOVE INTEREST. Or ROMANCE. If the SHADOW is the enemy, the rival, and the SIDEKICK is a friend, the LOVE INTEREST is the lover, the prize, the object of desire. Attaining the love of the LOVE INTEREST is often the HERO's reward for having successfully undertaken the adventure.

So, we can picture our HERO in the centre of a space. The SHADOW stands before them in apparent confrontation (remembering, of course, that the SHADOW is composed of those elements of the HERO's psychology that the HERO doesn't like or want to know about). The SIDEKICK stands behind the HERO, making the HERO look braver, more romantic. The LOVE INTEREST stands to the side of the HERO, and slightly in front, showing us the HERO's softer side.

As I said, all four are not compulsory. Sherlock Holmes was seldom bothered by love interests. What is more - and here's the fun part - in the weird World of Adventure where the story happens, a character can switch from one function to another:

A SIDEKICK can become the LOVE INTEREST, or the SHADOW. The SHADOW might turn out to be the LOVE INTEREST (I think Jung would have loved that). In some stories, the main character is merely a Protagonist, and it is the LOVE INTEREST, or the SIDEKICK, or even the SHADOW, who turns out to be the HERO (undergoing tests and trials and emerging as a new, improved person).

So there's plenty of fun to be had with these four. You may not need them all in your story, but it's not a bad idea to have all four.

Remembering, of course, that the HERO, the SHADOW, the SIDEKICK and the LOVE INTEREST all have their own stories. Each of them has OBJECTIVES and OBSTACLES (yes, and INNER and OUTER ones).

Create four interesting major characters. Make sure they each have their own story (OBJECTIVE and OBSTACLE). Be prepared for them to change their function during the script. And ensure that the satellite characters exist to reveal the HERO, giving us three different angles on the HERO's character.

And then, you should have a pretty solid constellation of characters at the heart if your script.

CUT TO:

2008-11-10T12:30:00.003Z

Why write CUT TO: at the end of a scene? Why do it?

I mean, how else is the editor to get from one scene to another? They don't need us to tell them to cut from one scene to the next.

And what the hell, exactly, does QUICK CUT TO: mean?

Not so long ago, it was common practice to have loads of neat CUT TO:s lining the right-hand margin of the screenplay. But, little by little, we began to realise a couple of things.

1) the producer knows that we're going to be cutting - it's not as if an experienced script reader will get to the end of a scene and then stop, wondering 'But how do we get to the next scene? How?'

2) how much space is taken up by writing CUT TO: after every scene?

It is a paradox of screenwriting that, while 100 to 120 pages feels like a great wilderness of space to be filled, on each page of script the space is severely limited.

One page of script = one minute of time. The script has to keep moving. Every time we stop to write CUT TO: we are depriving ourselves of script space. We are wasting a precious commodity.

There ARE occasions when it can be useful, if not indeed necessary, to give the reader a break and drop in a CUT TO:. But they can be few and far between.

Let's think of a script not as a succession of scenes but as a number of sequences. To be honest, I'm not a great fan of scenes. Of course they're the building blocks of drama. But they can often be short and stumpy. In television (that great monster) they can also be clumpy. The format in which TV scripts tend to be written (not the same as screenplay format) tends towards scenes which function as blocks of action. One block of action comes to an end, and everything stops. CUT TO: And we're off into another block.

I always like interweaving my scenes. It creates a sense of pace. It allows the boring parts of scenes to be politely dropped. It makes separate actions seem concurrent. It can build tension.

But this means that the concept of the scene dwindles. The scene can cease to be a discrete block of action and become something more fluid. Which means that each scene is really just an integral part of a sequence.

At the end of a sequence of scenes it can be beneficial to write CUT TO: almost as a punctuation mark. It's as good as saying 'End of Sequence; take a breath'. This way, instead of breaking the script up into literally dozens of tiny bits (scenes) we get a handful of more substantial sequences.

The script moves quicker. We're not wasting space. And each scene, instead of being a lump of action, becomes a thread in the overall tapestry.

But we still have to move from one scene to another.

Dropping all those CUT TO:s allows us to focus on the art of screenwriting.

Because if there is one thing which can distinguish a professionally-written screenplay from an amateur one, it is the quality of the transitions between scenes.

Thinking more in terms of sequences than scenes tends to help the forward momentum of the script. And a screenplay is all about forward momentum. We can break at the end of a sequence in order to acknowledge that a new sequence is about to start, but during each sequence the emphasis is on keeping things moving. Seamlessly.

One of the smartest ways of moving from one scene to another is the question-and-answer approach. This is particularly appropriate because, one way or another, all scripts rely on questions and answers.

The audience starts posing questions in their minds from the very outset. The screenwriter's job is to prompt those questions and to answer them as and when. For the script to work, the reader must be asking questions constantly (if unconsciously) and the writer must provide only enough information to keep the reader glued to the script and the unconscious questioning to develop. Only by the end of the script should all the questions be answered.

(A lot of producers and script editors, reading scripts in offices, question EVERYTHING in the script. They lose sight of the fact that, on screen, the forward momentum of the story should negate a whole lot of questions. The problem comes from being too picky, and leads to the kind of drama in which every question is answered without the story maintaining momentum - result: dull drama.)

Question and answer. This goes to the heart of drama. It's a kind of 'will they, won't they'? Will they find the secret? Will they survive? Will the cavalry arrive in the nick of time?

One way of getting from a scene to the next is to pose a question, which is immediately answered at the start of the next scene.

This links the two scenes. In TV drama, cutting from one scene to another often slows the momentum. But stitching the scenes together using the Q-and-A technique keeps the thing moving.

There's another form of transition I like. It's a bit tricksy, but it can work beautifully. Technically speaking, it involves cutting the picture and the dialogue at different moments. So that the dialogue from the first scene continues, briefly, over the start of the second scene, or the other way round. The dialogue from the top of the second scene can start while the image of the first scene is still being played on the screen.

Again, just like the Q-and-A technique, this approach knits scenes together. The act of cutting between scenes does not then create a 'jump', as it might otherwise. Instead, one scene flows relatively smoothly into the next. If you will, the reader or viewer is carried over the transition, either because the two scenes are linked by an idea (or question/answer) or because the break between scenes has been staggered.

Obviously, one must exercise caution. Too many fancy transitions between scenes could make for a script which is just too darn clever-clever for its own good.

But surely devising innovative and satisfying transitions between scenes is better than cluttering up a script with loads of redundant CUT TO:s.

And besides - it makes the script feel more professional. So what's not to like?

P.S.: All those 'jargon' terms for interesting cuts - QUICK CUT, JUMP CUT, TIME CUT, DISSOLVE, FADE, MIX, etc. - are kinda pointless. You can embed brilliant transitions in your script without scattering this kind of rubbish throughout. As with all 'tricks', like flashback or voice-over, try it without them, and then only put them in if there really is no better way.

P.P.S.: Hi Ted!

CHANGE WE NEED

2008-11-05T12:55:00.002Z

At four o'clock this morning, British time, I found myself laughing. Others cried. Some danced. I laughed.

The forty-fourth president of the United States of America had just been elected. A historic moment.

I laughed for sheer joy. I speak as a man who managed to smuggle the words 'Vote Barack Obama' into a rendition of 'Sweet Home Alabama' this summer, sadly to a bunch of Brits who were not eligible to vote in the US election, but hey - I did my bit. The whole world wanted Obama. Thank you, America. Thank you.

The past eight years have been characterised by everything that is wrong with human nature and, in particular, with right-wing politics. It has been a period of lies and misrepresentations. Of obscene wealth and escalating despair. Of cynicism and mistrust. Let's face it, the twenty-first century has not started well.

Obama's victory sends out a signal. America and the world wanted change.

But what has this got to do with screenwriting? Possibly, everything. Change is now in the wind. And, as screenwriters, change is what we need.

There are signs of good news. The BBC is assessing how much it pays, not only to its top 'celebrities' but also to its overpaid, overpromoted executives. That's good. The truth is that between one half and three quarters of BBC management could disappear tomorrow and nobody would notice - except that, a year or so down the line, the quality of programming would show a phenomenal improvement.

He wasn't solely responsible - he was more of a figurehead, a poster-boy for the self-centred opportunists - but there is no doubt that George W. Bush poisoned everything. His adminstration gave out a simple message: if you're rich, get richer; if you're poor, fuck off. And don't, for a single moment, imagine that the truth means anything. There is no truth anymore. Just verbiage. Soundbites and lies.

All that has now changed, thank Goddess.

A shift is taking place. American voters have rejected the lies, the arrogance, the plain old stupidity and cupidity of the Bush years. The world now wants genuine leadership. Change. Hope.

This cannot be ignored, not even by those who have ridden the gravy train of the past decade, acquiring bullshit job titles and rolling in money while simultaneously demonstrating their uselessness. The tide is turning. I truly hope that the end of the Bush nightmare will also spell the end of the cult of managerialism, the end of the contempt those at the top have been showing for those at the bottom, the end of a culture based on spin, gloss, and the celebrity freakshow. I truly hope that we may now begin to get back to what really matters. Systems that work. Management that is there to facilitate, rather than to obstruct (and to pay itself vast dividends as it does so). The acknowledgement that we are all in this together.

Not so long ago, I came across an article which asked: 'Why didn't popular culture warn us about what was about to happen in the global economy? Where were the Gordon Ghekkos of the noughties? Why was this obscenity allowed to run riot without writers - the conscience of their societies - bringing such excesses to our attention? Where were the siren voices?'

The fact is that, during the past decade or so, those who control broadcasting have preferred to pump out meaningless nonsense, asinine froth, rather than tackle serious subjects. I said that writers are the conscience of their societies. We are the Cassandras who warn of dire consequences. But if the powers that be deny us the chance to serve our true calling, if they fuck up our scripts and prevent us from reaching our audience, if they force us to write soapy pap rather than genuine drama, then they are colluding in the Great Lie that has characterised the Bush years.

That Great Lie is now in its death throes, and the world is looking towards a new era.

It may not last. Bush and his cronies might have damaged the US and world economies beyond repair. Some right-wing nut might assassinate Obama. Things might be about to get a whole lot worse.

But the tide has turned. The worst kind of censorship is the kind which doesn't announce itself, which pretends that it doesn't exist. There has been censorship of an extraordinary kind at work over the past decade. It has been necessary to protect the interests of those who have made their fortunes, mostly by raiding the public purse and/or inventing phoney finances. Censorship of the kind that calls itself 'responding to market forces' is what has allowed a non-stop stream of empty-headed drivel to replace true culture, true drama, true debate. That kind of censorship has sold us all short. Dumbing down was its way of hiding what was really going on, of drawing a veil over boardroom greed and managerial incompetence.

Now the people have spoken. A grassroots movement has rejected the politics of greed and slander. America has voted for change and the rest of the world is cheering.

Soon, let us hope, we may get on with the task of telling it like it is, without fear or intimidation. Yesterday's vote may be the best news we writers have had in years.

WHAT PEOPLE WANT

2008-11-03T11:58:00.002Z

Hi, folks! Welcome to November!

Today's thought for the day concerns the market. Perhaps that should be The Market. What is it? And how do we work with it?

For whom do we write our scripts and screenplays? Generally, we write them for ourselves. Nothing wrong with that - if you're not enjoying what you're doing, why do it? At some level or other we have to write for our own satisfaction, otherwise writing anything at all is difficult. This is why our era of multiple rewrites is such a curse on writers. We lose our own investment in the script as we try repeatedly to satisfy a gormless producer and their team of marketing idiots.

But - apart from ourselves - who do we write for?

For the people, of course. For the consumers, the great unwashed, the masses out there who are crying out for quality entertainment.

Right?

Actually, no. The market - in the UK, at least - amounts to about five people. If we're sticking with TV, for now, the 'market' might amount to one person.

That one person is to be found somewhere at the top of the TV tree. Their word is law. They say yea or nay.

Forget about the multitudes out there. Yes, I know it's with them in mind that we toil at our work stations. In an ideal world, a writer would write directly for the audience, for the consumer, but ours is not an ideal world. In the real world, we write in order to satisfy an executive. One person.

That person might have started their new job that week. They might be scared shitless by the sudden responsibility of their post. They might be having a bad day. They may not be in the ideal position to make a sensible judgement.

Worse than that. They might well be caught up in the media buzz.

In London, the media world is surprisingly small. There are certain places where media people hang out. Some of these places should be bombed. The Groucho Club, for instance, is an example of everything that's wrong with today's media. Rather than spending time out there, amongst their people, their audience, the consumers who pay their wages, our successful media types lock themselves away in an ivory tower with others of their calling and do all they can to avoid the people they really work for. Which is bad.

The 'media', as we think of them, have demonstrated sheep-like instincts in recent years. They all bleat the same message. They're all looking for the same thing. What that is, exactly, changes on a more-or-less daily basis.

I had a film script once. This was what we call a 'spec' script. I had taken it upon myself to write it without bothering to get it commissioned first.

It had taken me two-and-a-half years to find the subject and a further twelve months to complete the script. It was based on one of the world's greatest love stories - one that, as far as I could tell, had never been turned into a movie before.

I put everything I'd got into it. Everything I'd learnt over a decade or so of working in the industry.

My agent practically combusted spontaneously when he read it. The film department at my agency got involved. It was all looking very good.

But then, things went rather quiet. I started asking what was happening. Little by little, I began to hear a rather familiar refrain:

'It's not what people are looking for.'

This struck me as odd. I thought, 'So what you're saying is that nobody out there is really interested in an epic based on one of the world's greatest love stories?'

Still, the same message kept coming back. 'It's a great script, but nobody's looking for this sort of thing.'

The screenplay was entitled 'Tristan and Isolde'. Four years or so after I'd written my script I began to hear about a major production, with Ridley Scott as executive producer, that went by the title 'Tristan and Isolde'.

There was no plagiarism, here. Examples of producers and companies running off with your ideas and making them without crediting or paying you for them are legion. But in this instance I was to learn that Ridley Scott had spent something like twenty years looking for a 'Tristan and Isolde' script.

So. The script that 'nobody' was looking for could have been sold. Had anybody decided not to listen to the herd but to just get out there are sell it.

I had been told, in no uncertain terms, that there simply wasn't a market for my script. I had refused to believe that. And I had been right. But by then it was too late.

This situation creates enormous problems for the scriptwriter. What it means is that The Market, so called, has nothing whatever to do with what people want. It means that The Market is whatever the media sheep think it might be today. Tomorrow, it'll be different. However, if your script was rejected on a day when 'Nobody's looking for that sort of thing', who's to say that it will be revived when, suddenly, everybody's looking for that sort of thing?

Who are we writing for? For the viewers and listeners? For the executives who have the power of life or death over a script? For the media herd (most of whom have no ideas of their own, which is why they swill around listening out for somebody else's idea, until today's consensus has been agreed on)?

What is The Market?

A good writer will always know, instinctively, what the public will be looking for - not now, but in two or three years time, when, with a fair wind, the project might just about be ready to hit the screens.

Sadly, the people he or she will be relying on in the media to advance the project can only reference what they saw on the box last night.

This is a real conundrum. I suspect it will continue to be a nasty Catch-22 for the earnest writer until the media industry sorts itself out. When the media realise that the writer's creativity and natural instinct for what people want, what stories they want to hear, matter more than the moronic received wisdom of several hundred hangers-on whose purpose, in life and in the media, is obscure. It will not change until the decision makers stop surrounding themselves with people whose judgement is risible but whose sole purpose is to keep the media mogul isolated, away from the clamour of creatives.

Till then, we find ourselves in an awkward and often unworkable position. We spend months - possibly even years - developing and reworking our material, content, deep down inside, that there is a market for this sort of thing. Sometimes, it turns out we were right. But the boat has been missed, because too many people without ideas of their own have convinced themselves that they know what The Market is and what it wants.

Till then, we will continue writing, not for the majority of citizens, but for a tiny handful of people - those who hold the power, and those who cluster round them trying to look like they know what they're doing.

All the time, the gap between the writer and the true market (the audience) widens dramatically.

This is not a good thing.

WHAT PRODUCERS DON'T KNOW ABOUT SCRIPTS

2008-10-30T12:08:00.002Z

I had a series with the BBC. The scripts had been commissioned, one after another, with such alacrity that my agent was prompted to say, 'This is unheard of.' There had been discussions about the second series. Then - a quick round of musical desks, and I've got a new boss.

'We like the scripts', I was told, 'but there'll have to be changes.'

An intake of breath. Wait for it.

'We want the characters to be younger.'

Now, this wasn't the first time I'd had this note on this particular project. At the start of the whole process, nine months earlier, I'd been told to drop the ages of the characters. And I had done so, as far as credibility would allow.

(One of the characters was a consultant forensic psychiatrist. There's about a twelve year training period involved in becoming one of these rare and exotic creatures, so thirty was about as young as I could reasonably make the character. Besides - who'd want a consultant forensic psychiatrist in their twenties?)

But this time, I was worried. For a start, the scripts were written. The previous management had accepted them. Suddenly, though, there had to be changes. The characters would have to be younger.

So, presumably, a lead character who had twin children would maybe not have those children anymore. And all the others would be a slick bunch of 'Hollyoaks' rejects. And we couldn't have them making mistakes because that would make their youth seem like folly. So maybe they'd have to be better at their jobs than their slightly older and more experienced originals. Which means that we've just thrown any attempt at realism out of the window.

The project died, there and then. I knew that to make major changes to the characters would destabilise the stories we'd got.

The note - 'We want the characters to be younger' - had not been thought through. Implementing the new requirements would create major script problems. The management would then weigh in with another dumbass idea, with more suggestions as to how to make it work (it was working to begin with, but then we started making changes) and the whole thing would gradually unravel.

It's too easy these days for producers to make remarks such as 'We want the characters to be younger.' I'd had a glimpse of this new tendency at the BBC a year or two before. This was on a series I was familiar with, having worked on Series One, and it was only after the third draft of my script had been handed in that someone in management - Armani suit, just back from the Algarve, definitely the new breed - stepped in and demanded that the beginning and the end of the script must change. The result - that script was ruined.

What makes producers think that they're entitled to behave like this? If they haven't got a sensible suggestion to make, why can't they shut up?

They really do seem to believe that a script is a document that can be rewritten ad nauseam, pulled this way and that, until it has reached a kind of homogenised state that nobody could take offence at.

In reality, what producers are doing when they fiddle with our scripts is they are taking away our own individual style, our voices. They are removing the 'author' from his or her own work. As a result, the script will lack 'authority. It will be 'unauthorised'.

This takes us back to yesterday's blog. Producers these days say that they like working with soap opera writers. Soap scripts are designed and constructed in such a way that they can be changed over and over again. Scenes do not rely on one another - a whole storyline can be lifted out and replaced.

In a real drama script, the story evolves, developing organically, as, little by little, the flesh of the script is put onto the bone of the plot. Making any major change at any point in the process, especially if that change has not been thought through, can ruin the story. Till then, the characters have been developing, taking on the forms that they require for the story to work. Suddenly, the characters are capable of being anything, doing anything, if it appeals to the producer. It doesn't matter that this new kind of character behaviour is violently at odds with the way the script has been developing. The producer has demanded it, so that's that.

In days gone by, producers tended to be excellent script editors. They also knew how to delegate. A scriptwriter was hired to do a job. They were hired because the producer believed that they could do this job. They were helped, advised, guided, but generally left alone to do the job they'd been hired to do.

Not anymore. Respect for scriptwriters and scripts has pretty well vanished. Producers who simply do not understand scripts, the processes by which they come into being, the delicacy of the strands which hold the various elements of the script together, feel that they have a natural right to alter any aspect of the script, at any stage in the process, whenever they feel like it.

This is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It leads to appalling scripts. It leads to endless pointless rewrites, and to writers trying to incorporate stupid ideas delivered by producers who haven't got a clue.

It leads to producers trumpeting the merits of soap opera writers over and above experienced dramatists.

It leads to crap drama.

This is what writers are up against, these days. If it isn't tough enough breaking into the industry, the writer then has to be broken by that industry. On many series, they only employ writers because it takes too long to train a monkey to type.

So - suggestions, please, as to how we can overturn this horrendous state of affairs. We need to generate a debate on the future of scriptwriting for film and TV. At the heart of that debate must be the status and role of the writer.

Until some semblance of the old respect for writers is restored, we'll continue to see our working conditions deteriorate, and the quality of our scripts too.

How do we persuade big, scary producers that we know what we're doing - that we don't need their idiotic input?

Any thoughts?

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?

2008-10-29T11:13:00.002Z

Soap opera is not drama. It is melodrama.

At a BBC Drama Group launch, some years ago, Script Doc sat at the back and watched as clips from the forthcoming drama season were screened for assorted hacks. Amongst the single-strand dramas (films, in other words), series and serials came a few excerpts from the BBC's soap, 'Eastenders', which takes place in a mythical land somewhere near the Thames. And Script Doc wondered, 'What is a soap opera doing here in the midst of all this drama?'

The fine points of why soap and drama are two different things can be explored elsewhere. The point is that Script Doc was right to feel a bit of concern, somewhere deep inside, about the classification of soap as drama.

Not so long after the Drama Group launch in question, the Doc came across an interview with one of British TV's up-and-coming young producers. 'We like working with soap writers,' said the Bright Young Thing. 'They always deliver.'

This statement intrigued the Doc. Was Ms Producer suggesting that drama writers who don't specialise in soap actually don't deliver? Or was she saying something else?

I think the latter. Soap writers have no ownership of their characters. They are accustomed to rewriting a script because somebody, somewhere, has changed their minds about something. A drama writer has an emotional investment in the script. Too many rewrites, too much second-guessing, inflict untold damage on a real drama script. Soap scripts can be rewritten indefinitely. Soap writers simply do as they're told.

Soap has become the behemoth of British TV. Even shows which struggled to define themselves as something other than soap have adopted soapy elements. Emotionally manipulative, socially meaningless, dramatically contrived, soap has come to dominate British TV drama over recent years.

So what, you might well ask. Well, as writers have lost control over their own scripts, the BBC has fallen into the trap of believing in celebrities. This is the classic Hollywood producer's mistake.

We're currently seeing a startling number of complaints made to the BBC about two massively overpaid comedians whose questionable prank calls made to an elderly actor have offended many people. Nobody queried whether the prank calls were a good idea at the time. They were made by two of the BBC's highest-paid celebrities, so how could they possibly have been a bad idea?

Let's compare the level of editorial control exercised over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand with that wielded by drama producers during the script stage. In the first instance, no editorial control whatsoever. Those two are celebs and therefore they can do no wrong. In the latter instance, all writers must be soap writers so that they will accept excessive, even abusive and exploitative levels of editorial control without the reservations that a real drama writer would have.

Power has shifted in the industry. This has taken about twenty years to achieve, prompted initially by the right-wing governments of the 1980s (Margaret Thatcher's husband was a particularly vocal, and unelected, critic of the BBC). What has happened during that period can be compared with the banking sector. A small, hugely privileged elite has been allowed to accrue enormous amounts of power - without responsibility - and has been rewarded with grossly inflated pay.

In the meantime, the majority of creatives have been forced to toe the line, on short-term contracts, and have been subject to the whims of over-promoted suits.

All writers have become soap writers. Hacks. Carefully screened and trained up to believe that creating the soapy drivel that passes for drama these days is some kind of achievement.

Today, there is one rule for the celebs and another for the drones. The former get showered with money and told to do whatever they want. The latter are kept on a tight leash and face oblivion if they dare to question the wisdom of their gobbledegook-spouting 'superiors'.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is a system in decline. It is a slave economy engineered to benefit a tiny minority. By treating writers as slaves while allowing celebrity loudmouths to demand ever higher fees, the BBC management has shown the contempt it feels both for the vast majority of its staff and - even more tellingly - for the consumer (that's you and me, folks).

But there is good news. As noted in a previous blog, the BBC's grandly-titled Head of Fiction is leaving White City imminently, and the removal of her dead hand can do the BBC's drama output no harm. But the real issue is a bigger political one.

Governments around the world have, in recent weeks, woken up to the devastating effects of a certain mindset being allowed to dictate its own terms. The partial nationalisation of certain banks represents a huge political upheaval - the final realisation that a system based on greed and the imagined impeccable status of a lucky few will inevitably create its own demise.

Where the banking sector is concerned, we have all lost money. Where the BBC is concerned, we have all been short-changed. Senior management has been too busy enjoying its perks and congratulating itself to tackle the real problems that are now endemic within the Beeb. Staff morale is at an all-time low. The viewer is fobbed off with no end of junk. The creative voice has been silenced in order to allow the inane, self-centred babble of a few so-called celebrities to be heard. Standards have declined, opportunities have dried up, some people have become fabulously wealthy.

Is this what we want?

Let's hope that a fresh wind is about to blow. We've lived in a world of lies for years now. The consequences of doing so are now coming home to us. And, if history has taught us anything, it's that revolutions happen when too many people are browbeaten into harming their own interests for the sake of a pampered minority.

Don't be a soap writer. Don't be a slave.

Stand up for real drama. For the right to write, and the right to be heard.

The voice of the writer matters more than the right of a couple of overpaid celebrities to make prank calls.

FLASHBACK & VOICEOVER

2008-10-23T10:48:00.002+01:00

Imagine a flashy, trashy TV series. Something like 'Miami Vice'.

Our two leads work for Lieutenant By-the-Book. They are Flashback and his colleague, Voiceover.

Flashback was probably in 'Nam, where he caught the dreaded VFS (Vietnam Flashback Syndrome) disease. That, or he saw his wife murdered. Or - well, you know the sort of thing: a trauma that just won't go away.

Voiceover is a smartass with a personality disorder. He has a compulsive need to narrate his own story, to tell himself, and anyone else who'll listen, what's going on.

What adventures these two could have! Voiceover could tell us precisely what he's thinking and doing while Flashback is continually reminded of something that happened in the past. One stays cool while the other goes bonkers - but it all works out right in the end. Voiceover can tell us what he and Flashback have learnt from the experience, while Flashback rearranges his memories so that they don't keep jumping up and biting him on the bum. And they'll both have a wry laugh with By-the-Book, who just ten minutes earlier was about to fire them.

What a pile of faeces.

They'll probably commission it.

Flackback and Voice Over (V.O.) are two of the budding screenwriters most familiar allies. And, if you want my advice, you'll steer well clear of them both. Because they're idiots.

Scripts convey information. Two kinds of information. They tell us what we see and what we hear. This information is presented in the present tense. The script tells us what the characters are doing and what they are saying to each other.

Flashback and Voice Over are attempts at presenting information that, in reality, we are able neither to see nor to hear. Both take us inside the head of a character. With Flashback we are given a privileged glimpse of a character's memories. With V.O. we hear the character's thoughts.

Apart from the fact that both are unrealistic, they both tend to be used for the wrong reasons. Flashback is often deployed by the writer to break up a dull part of the script (no script should have dull bits!) and to hint at an on-going build-up of tension. Voice Over is resorted to so that a) the plot will make sense, and b) the audience will identify with a particular character.

Neither is necessary.

Flashback can be used as a structural device. Some of my favourite films start with the death of the main character and then go back to tell the story of his life. That's fine.

And there's a clever way of using Voice Over to make smooth transitions between scenes (effectively, making the soundtrack cut at a different moment from the visual edit, so that the dialogue from one scene can run over or anticipate the start of the next scene). And that's fine.

But otherwise, I almost always feel that the writer has plumped for using Flashback or Voice Over, not because they should, but because they can.

Let this be a warning to all beginners: KEEP AWAY FROM THE EFFECTS PEDALS!

Flashback and Voice Over are easy options. They're often used as if they were a natural addition of the screenwriters palette. But they're not. They're cheap tricks. And I've hardly ever come across a script that would not benefit from being rewritten without them.

Try writing your script without indulging in these fancy practices. Try writing it straight - just what we see and what we hear - as if the camera just happened to be there to capture the action.

You know, before he wandered off into Cubism and started painting women with their eyes in the wrong places, Picasso really could paint a perfectly representational scene. He did what every artist should do: start by learning how it's done before you try breaking the rules.

Start by mastering the straightforward, linear narrative before you get the toy-box out. Try it. If you can tell your story without using Flashback and Voice Over, then they were never needed in the first place.

Chances are, your script will work a lot better without them.

CALLING THE SHOTS

2008-10-22T11:07:00.002+01:00

A screenplay is a blueprint. I'm sure most of us have, at one time or another, tried to follow some kind of diagrammatic instructions. Perhaps we've had to assemble some flat-pack furniture.

You'd be a bit miffed if the people responsible for designing those instructions left out crucial information, wouldn't you?

The eventual product - the movie, the TV show - is put together following the instructions given in the script. The screenwriter provides the detailed plan, the architect's design.

Evidently, then, we don't want to leave out anything from the script that we believe is important to the end product. And we certainly want to leave as little as possible to chance.

But there are certain things we're not allowed to do, or are strongly advised to avoid doing. One of these is telling actors how to speak the lines. Another is telling the director where to put the camera.

I wrote a sequence, once, of various people arriving at different doors. Maybe five or six short scenes, each with a small snatch of dialogue. The director decided to shoot them all together in one continuous, fluid shot. He was showing off. It took hours to set up and cost a lot of money.

I didn't mind because it was fun watching them set that one up. I also felt that the director was fully justified in making that creative decision.

Tell you one thing: if I'd tried to write those five or six short scenes as one continuous sequence, dictating in my script that the camera starts up high on a cherry-picker and then steadicams in to a first floor apartment, the chances are it wouldn't have happened that way. The director would have decided that it was unfilmable.

Besides, who was I - a mere writer - to tell him where to put his camera?

Now. Here's the screenwriting secret. It is our job as screenwriters to tell directors where to put their cameras but WE MUSTN'T LET THEM KNOW WE'RE DOING IT.

Let's take the tricky matter of writing action sequences.

Some scripts are easy to read. Others aren't. One of the principal differences between the two is layout. The pages of an easy-to-read script tend to be very white. Too much ink on the page makes a script difficult to read.

We need our screenplays to be neat, clear, clean and easy on the eye. There is also a rule that a page of properly formatted screenplay should equal roughly one minute of screen time.

Let's say that you have to write an action sequence. If you expect that sequence to last, say, three minutes, then the action sequence in your script should be three pages long.

Nothing will make your script harder to read than three pages of solid ink describing what happens during the action sequence.

I have a rule of my own. It goes: when writing action or describing a scene, use short paragraphs of four lines maximum. Less than four lines - fine. More than four lines - no.

Break up the paragraphs. Don't write in solid blocks. Short paragraphs, with a single line gap between them, are easy to read. Massive chunks of text are not.

This turns a daunting, three-minute action sequence into short and snappy bite-size units of action.

It also allows you - up to a point - to direct the scene. Each short, pithy paragraph of one, two, three or four lines (max) is like a single shot. You'd be a fool to put 'LS' (long shot) or 'CU' (close-up) in your script, because that's for the director to decide. Besides, why bother? The way you write that short paragraph, that discreet unit of action, will indicate how it is meant to be filmed.

Our job as screenwriters is to visualise the entire story, moment by moment, and to describe it, moment by moment.

A lot of writers make the mistake of introducing a character without describing them. How is the reader to imagine what that character is like if you don't provide the basic information? How is the casting department expected to find the right actor if you don't tell them what to look for?

How that character is introduced is up to you. You're the one who first sees that character in your head. So write what you see.

Writing in short paragraphs means that you don't describe the scene. You describe the shot. And then, in the next short paragraph, the next shot. And so on.

Actors need things to do. It's a terrible mistake to write page after page of uninterrupted dialogue (boring, boring, boring). It's also wrong to put (sarcastically) or (angrily) in there in an attempt to tell the actor how to speak the lines.

Don't write it. Show it. If the character is getting angry, show him getting angry. Give the actor the appropriate actions - clenching fists, punching walls - but don't write (angrily) there in the dialogue. If you give the actor clear instructions to behave angrily, the line should come out the way you want it to.

It's the golden rule. Don't tell it: show it. Write each scene the way you see it in your head. Short paragraphs make the script easy to read. They also allow you to adjust your focus. Each paragraph tells us what we see. So, one paragraph might briefly describe a crowd. The next might describe one person in that crowd. The next, what that person is looking at. Implicitly, you're providing camera angles. You're writing the scene exactly as you see it unfolding.

Don't tell us that a character is depressed. Show us. I read scripts all the time which state things like 'So-and-so looks thoughtful'.

Try telling an actor to look thoughtful. Do thoughtful, darling. Give me thoughtful.

Rubbish. If you want them to look thoughtful, give them thoughtful things to do.

It's by being CLEAR and PRECISE like this that you get to direct your script. It's by being vague and imprecise that you allow directors and actors to do their own thing.

An architect wouldn't produce half a plan and leave the builder to make up the rest. That could be a recipe for disaster.

You're the architect. You decide what the building should look like, what it's made of. It's your job to make sure that the building will be aesthetically pleasing and structurally sound.

Write the script the way you see it. No camera angles, no actor's notes. Just what we see, moment by moment. Don't tell actors and directors how to realise your vision. Tell them what we see, and then let them give us that vision.

Don't tell. Show.

And be CLEAR and PRECISE about it.

FIREPROOFING YOUR SCRIPT

2008-10-21T10:38:00.002+01:00

My first lesson in fireproofing came while working on a well-known British TV series.

Police are called to a house to investigate a burglary in progress. They arrive to discover that the householder has already apprehended the suspect. In fact, he's beaten him unconscious.

In my scene description for the bedroom in which the supposed burglar is found I had casually written: 'There is blood all up the wall.'

Oh, naughty screenwriter. Bad, bad screenwriter.

It was pointed out to me, by a very lovely script editor, that this could be taken as an invitation to the stage management people to cover the bedroom with Kensington Gore. The scene would then look like Sam Peckinpah had shot one of his slow-motion sequences in there. So could I please amend it to: 'There are two or three drops of blood on the wall'?

My next lesson was on another primetime TV drama. On this occasion, petroleum spirit was seen being poured through a letter-box, followed by a burning rag (ooh, isn't my work nasty?). Again, it fell to the script editor to ask me to specify that THE AREA AFFECTED BY THE FIRE EXTENDS NO FURTHER THAN THE DOORMAT. Otherwise, it was pointed out to me, Vis-FX would burn the house down.

You see, we forget, us screenwriters. While we're so busy, thrashing out our marvellous scripts, we forget that it's so very, very easy to write out a sentence, but when it comes to production, that casual, seemingly throwaway sentence can mean hours of work for somebody.

Another TV series - this one involves a hospital. I had written, without really thinking about it very much, that one car swerves to avoid another car. Easy enough, you'd think.

Er - no. Just the paperwork involved in that one 'stunt' wiped out part of a rain forest. I actually felt quite ashamed. Thoughtless me, dashing off some line about a car swerving. Did it not occur to me that that could be dangerous? That somebody would actually have to make a car swerve it order to film it?

Vile, wicked, inconsiderate screenwriter!

Perhaps I should have been more specific about how much the car had to swerve.

While all this was going on (there was about five years between the blood-on-the-wall incident and the potentially-deadly-car-swerve) I was also learning that it was not just set-dressers going berserk that you had to guard against. You don't just have to take precautions against over-enthusiastic special effects teams. In fact, anyone involved in the production side of things can make a mess of your delicate labours.

Actors, for example. By and large, they don't have to do much. A car fetches them from the hotel. They get pampered by some fresh and fragrant make-up artist. They get fed and watered very nicely. And all they have to do is walk a bit and say something or other. Simple, yeah?

Don't you believe it. Watching some actors at work on your script will make you want to cry with joy. Others will make you wonder whether the laws on involuntary euthanasia shouldn't be relaxed.

And what about directors? On the whole, I like directors. They only want to look good by turning your crummy script into screen magic, and there's nothing wrong with you taking the credit for their brilliant ideas. But don't imagine for a single moment that a director can't cock up your script.

Editors? They take decisions about what gets left in and what gets taken out when you're not looking.

In short, you slave away in a dark room on iron rations, desperately polishing your lovely script until it shines. And then you hand it over to a bunch of monkeys. Some of those monkeys are exceptionally talented. But they're still monkeys.

You have to protect yourself. More importantly, you have to protect your script.

My first lesson in this involved making the script 'stage-management proof'. My second lesson was about being 'Vis-FX proof'.

No one ever told me to make my scripts 'director proof' or 'actor proof'. I learned that from experience.

And here's the catch. Actors and directors can get a bit shirty when the screenwriter tries to tell them how to do their jobs. Sometimes, they'll do the opposite of what it says in the script, just to prove who's the boss.

So we have to be clever. We have to anticipate all the many different ways that somebody involved in the production can interpret our words and then make sure that there's only one possible interpretation.

In fact, this brings us to the essence of good screenwriting, which is all about being CLEAR and PRECISE.

It's all too easy to just write a line of action or a line of dialogue. But to fireproof it, you have to be aware that somebody else is going to be let loose with that bit of action, that brilliantly witty line. And that person may well want to make their presence felt by following their own interpretation of what you might have had in mind.

Don't give them the opportunity.

Be CLEAR and PRECISE.

It's your job to be in control of the script. Bitter experience will teach you that, if you don't carefully consider the possible ramifications of everything to write in your script, there's every possibility that you'll be embarrassed by what somebody does during production.

After all, it's your name that goes out after 'Written by'.

Fireproof your script. Be CLEAR and PRECISE about everything that happens in it. Don't leave any room for interpretation. Be CLEAR and PRECISE.

Unless, of course, you really do want blood all up the wall.

CHARACTER & CONFLICT

2008-10-19T11:21:00.002+01:00

According to William Faulkner, 'The only thing worth writing about is the conflict in the human heart.'

Try telling that to the makers of 'Butt Lovers #4'.

But there's truth in it. Most of us will have been told, at some point, that drama is all about conflict.

'Drama' actually derives from a Greek verb meaning 'to do'. As we now know, character is what character does. The hero's character is forged as he or she takes steps to achieve their objective in the face of obstacles.

It is what the hero does to overcome the obstacles which stand between him and his objective that forms the story. The drama is generated by the hero's struggle to reach his goal. What the hero does forms the drama.

As I've said before, it's amazing how many scripts get written in which the hero doesn't really seem to want anything. If the hero doesn't actually want something, there can't be anything or anyone preventing him from getting it. Ergo, no story. No drama. No conflict.

But there's an added refinement. Hopefully, you will never attempt to write a script without making sure, before you start, that you have got a

HERO

who has an

OBJECTIVE

to achieve which they must overcome

OBSTACLES.

It's vital that your hero wants something. We can look at this another way:

The BUDDING SCREENWRITER wants to write an AWARD-WINNING SCREENPLAY but LACK OF CONFIDENCE, INEXPERIENCE and the SHEER WALKING-ON-BROKEN-GLASS PAIN OF SCREENWRITING stand in the way.

Fine. But why does the screenwriter want to write an award-winning screenplay? And what's really holding them back?

Why do you want to write a screenplay? Sigmund Freud believed that what the artist really wants is power, fame and the love of women (or men). Because the artist doesn't have those things he or she sublimates their desires into their artistic endeavours. With any luck, they become successful and achieve what they always wanted: power, fame and the love of women (or men).

What does your hero really want? Yes, yes, we all know that heroes want to save the world. But why bother? What's the real motivation? And what's really stopping them from getting off their backsides and doing a bit of world-saving?

You can add depth to your characters by remembering that we all have inner and outer objectives, and inner and outer obstacles.

Let's say that your hero wants to win an Olympic gold medal. That's an outer objective - it can be seen, it can be grasped - and the audience needs to know about it early on in your script.

Your hero should also have an inner objective. Where does the desire to win Olympic gold come from? It's a lot of bother. There must be a reason for the hero to go to all that trouble, and it isn't the desire for a bit of bling.

Similarly, maybe your hero's obstacle - the thing that's standing in the way of them winning the gold medal - is that they're grossly overweight. That's an outer obstacle. There'll be an inner obstacle, too, which probably accounts for them being overweight.

The hardest obstacles to overcome are the inner obstacles. And while the plot might be all about the struggle to win gold, the story is really about achieving the inner objective - a sense of self-worth.

The story takes place on two levels. On the one, 'outer', level, it's about someone who has to get in shape and beat the competition in order to win Olympic gold. That, basically, is the plot. But there's an 'inner' level to the story that is possibly more important. On that level, it's about someone who has to overcome crippling self-doubt, personal unhappiness and perhaps some kind of trauma in order to win the praise that they never received from their father and to rid themselves of their inner demons. The struggle then isn't against the other competitors so much as it is against themselves.

All your main characters - HERO, VILLAIN, SIDEKICK and LOVE INTEREST - should have objectives and obstacles if they're going to be real characters. But you can take that further. Give them some depth. Let them have inner objectives and inner obstacles in addition to their outward desires and external problems.

And be aware of your own inner objectives. Why do you really want to write a screenplay? What is your real motivation? How will it feel to achieve your own inner objective? Keeping that in mind just might keep you going when the going gets tough.

And remember, 'The only thing worth writing about is the conflict in the human heart'.

Because the real drama consists of the struggle to achieve what we really want in the face of what's really holding us back.

TAKING NOTES

2008-10-18T11:43:00.002+01:00

And lo, it came to pass that, after trying to exterminate them for many years, white people realised it might be interesting to study the native tribes of America.

And anthropologists and field-workers went amongst the indigenous peoples and did talk to the elders of those tribes, and whatever the wise folk told them they did write down in their notebooks.

And the redskins did say unto them, 'Why do you write things down when we are talking to you?' And they asked of them, 'How can you be listening to what we are saying when you are so busy writing in your little books?'

And lo, that was a good question.

I was once working on a BBC drama series and, as part of my research, I spent a week on a police van, following the cops and observing what they did. One of the police officers told me that, only a week or two before, they'd had another writer on the van with them. This guy wrote down everything they said. Every little witticism. Every turn of phrase.

I read this other writer's script and it didn't ring true. It sounded wrong. But how could this be? Surely every line of dialogue came straight from the horse's mouth, as it were.

I think he was so busy writing things down that he forgot to listen. He had captured their words, but not the context, the thoughts or feelings behind them. Most of all, he had not caught the atmosphere on the police van. He'd got the details, but missed the bigger picture.

A lot of notes are written in this business. Perhaps the worst offenders are script editors. They go through scripts, making notes. And then they go through those notes with the writers. And the writer goes away with page after page of notes on what needs doing to the script.

What if the script editor had just read the script, thought about it, and then made some observations?

Script editors who obsessively make notes as they go through a script are like those anthropologists talking to the native American chiefs. They're not listening because they're too busy writing notes.

They're not listening to the script. Every time they stop to jot down a thought, a query, a comment they are interrupting the flow of the script. The result is that they haven't actually READ the script. They've gone through it, looking for things to make notes about. On the one hand, they've succeeded - look: hundreds of notes on the script! But on the other, they've failed miserably. Because most of those notes were unnecessary. They should have just read the script.

I've conducted many interviews in the course of my screenwriting career, and several have been interrupted by the subject asking, 'Are you recording this?' Fortunately, the answer was no, so they carried on talking.

And I listened. I let them say things that they wouldn't have said if I'd be writing everything down. And I came away with an impression of that person which I would not have got if I'd been making notes throughout the conversation. By not writing everything down I was able to observe the subject, to listen to them, to make my own mental notes.

Too much note-taking and note-making goes on. Which means that too many people in the industry aren't listening. And that's really rather rude, when you think about it.

Let's make a pledge to stop taking notes. Let's learn to listen, to observe, to take information in without disappearing every few seconds to write something down.

Let's give people, and scripts, the attention they deserve.

WHY CAN'T DRAMA BE MORE LIKE FOOTBALL?

2008-10-16T09:14:00.002+01:00

England vs Argentina, World Cup, 1998. I watched it in a pub in Bristol. Probably the smallest pub in Bristol. The place was packed.

Normally, football leaves me cold. But England's clash with Argentina at St Etienne was something else. Ninety nail-biting minutes, followed by extra time, followed by a penalty shootout. A young David Beckham (whatever happened to him?) got sent off. The community of emotion was incredible.

There were groans. There were mutterings. There were roars. There was armchair analysis. There were anxious faces. We sat, transfixed. We stood, punching the air. We held our breaths.

We lost. But watching that match I wondered, through the ever-thickening alcoholic haze - why can't drama be more like this?

People from all backgrounds, stopping everything they're doing, to concentrate on an event, a trial, a contest. Rapt attention. Ratchetting tension. A nation's heart in its mouth.

Why can't drama be more like that?

Deep down, I believe that it can be. And it's the scriptwriter's job to ensure that it is.

There's a lot we can learn from major sporting events.

First of all, there's the matter of identification. The audience has to identify with the hero. We have to make the audience invest in the hero, just as fans invest, emotionally, in the fortunes of their team. The audience must cheer the hero on, hoping and praying that the hero will succeed.

To achieve this, make your hero good at what they do. We admire people who are good at what they do. Give them a good, clear, positive objective. Let the audience know, as early as possible, what your hero wants, what they're setting out to achieve, why it's important to them. And make sure that the obstacles are formidable.

Secondly, the outcome of the story must be unpredictable. The history of sport is a history of unexpected outcomes. The audience must be desperate to know how the story ends.

This is quite tricky. We've all seen, heard and read so many stories that we know how they tend to work out. Unconsciously, readers and viewers are constantly anticipating where the story's going, what's going to happen next, how it will all end. They're like those armchair pundits with their constant, knowing predictions.

Our job is to keep them guessing. Avoid the soft option. Don't be predictable.

Lastly, a great sports match is a story of ups and downs, of dramatic twists, of sudden reversals, of heart-stopping moments, of despair followed by euphoria. It's a rollercoaster ride. A real emotional journey.

You've got to be cruel to your characters. Love them, but torture them. Give them their triumphs, then make their world collapse. Make their journey, their struggle to achieve their objectives in the face of their obstacles, as eventful as you dare. Reward every positive step with a bigger problem for them to overcome. Surprise them, and the audience, and yourself. Make the stakes as high as you can, and keep piling on the pressure, right up until the end.

These are three areas in which many scripts are deficient. We must care about the hero. We must want them to succeed. We must be gripped by the story, unable to guess what happens next. We must be buffeted, just like the hero, by the vagaries of fortune, by a range of emotions of increasing intensity.

We must invest in the hero, identifying with their cause, cheering them on, suffering their highs and lows. We must be kept in suspense. We need to feel our hearts sink and our spirits soar. We need to be on the edge of our seats, our nerves in shreds, willing them on.

If you can achieve that with your scripts, you've got it made.

CHARACTER

2008-10-15T11:41:00.002+01:00

Character is what character does.

Tattoo that on your forehead - in reverse, so that it's the first thing you'll read every morning in the mirror:

CHARACTER IS WHAT CHARACTER DOES.

Or, if you only have a little forehead:

CHARACTER IS ACTION.

I stumbled across this one when I'd been directing a 'method' actor. Every day, right up until dress rehearsal, he'd come up to me and say, 'I'm having problems with my character - I'm just not getting my character.'

Resisting the urge to beat him to a pulp (it's only acting, for crying out loud!) I realised I needed an answer to this one. How do we delineate and define character? How do we measure character? What is the essence of character?

Then it came to me. We judge a person by their actions. Actions, as they say, speak louder than words.

When I'm teaching screenwriting, I always illustrate the point this way. To my admiring students, I say 'You no doubt look on me as the fount of all wisdom. I could tell you anything and the chances are you'd believe me. I could present myself as the coolest man in Christendom. Nothing fazes me. My pulse rate never wavers. I am sang froid incarnate ...

'But what happens if a fire breaks out, or a man-eating tiger bursts into the room? If I manfully tackle the flames, or position myself between the class and the tiger crying "Women and children first!" then maybe I've been telling the truth. Maybe I do deserve a medal. But if I'm the first one out of the window, then much of what I told you was a lie. I'm not brave at all. In fact, I'm a terrible coward.'

It's not what I say that makes me who I am - it's what I do.

The same goes for characters in a script. Actors, take note: if you don't really 'get' your character, look at what your character DOES. That'll tell you what your character IS.

Characters are often a major let down in scripts and screenplays. Too often, they seem hollow, two-dimensional, only there to serve the plot. I've read countless scripts in which the protagonist has a bit of character, there's a character in there who (surprisingly) stands out, but is not a very important character, and the rest are ciphers. They have no real existence.

In order to create rounded, believable characters some writers fall back on an elaborate system. I was once working on a project (treatment stage - yuck!) when a colleague presented me with his 'tried and trusted' character questionnaire. It was about two pages long and consisted of all sorts of questions: This character likes ... / This character doesn't like ... / This character is least likely to say ... / and so on.

Now, this really is screenwriting for dummies. It's just like those games actors play ('If my character was a car, what car would my character be?') which, though they help to pass the time, have very little bearing on performance. Knowing what your character had for breakfast this morning is of limited value. Hamlet might well have had a bowl of cornflakes, but what the feck has that got to do with anything?

In the case of actors, they often do this sort of thing because they're not very good at reading maps. Sorry, I mean scripts. Same thing, really. All the necessary information is present in the script, but actors aren't very good at spotting it, or they don't trust it, so they make a load of stuff up.

By the way, I trained as an actor. I know their little ways.

A writer can dispense with all that character questionnaire crap. Let's remember that the main character - the 'hero' - requires two things, an OBJECTIVE and an OBSTACLE, to make their story come alive.

Well, the same goes for all your other characters. They, too, need their objectives and obstacles. Characters fall flat in scripts because they don't seem to want anything. They're just there, in the way.

In reality, each of us is the lead character in our own story. We all of us have our objectives and our obstacles.

Make your characters real by making sure that they want something, even if it's a small and simple thing, and that they have something that's obstructing them, just like your hero does.

If you do that - mentally - don't put it all in the script, just know that it's there - then every encounter between characters in your script instantly becomes richer. Think about it: every encounter we have in real life involves at least two people who, individually and separately, want things that something's preventing them from acquiring. So every encounter is a negotiation (i.e., will this person help me or hinder me? Have I got time to deal with their problems?) And, similarly, if every character in your script has their own, individual, natural objective or desire, and is fighting, successfully or unsuccessfully, against their own personal obstacles, then what you're creating is a little world of competing interests - which is just what real life is, really.

There's more to come on character. But always remember, characters can lie, but their actions tend to reveal the truth.

Make your hero active. Make sure that your hero sets out to achieve the objective and takes arms, one way or another, against a sea of obstacles. We all like active heroes.

And make sure that every other character is following his/her/its own agenda. They have their own desires, their own problems.

And make sure that they DO things. Because character is what character does.

Character is action.

TREATMENTS

2008-10-14T10:38:00.002+01:00

We all know what a displacement activity is. It's what animals do when they're trying to avoid a fight. It's something you do when you know you should be doing something else.

You've got a tax return to fill in, so what do you do? Wash the car, or finish that bit of grouting. Displacement activities.

Writing a treatment is a classic displacement activity. Obviously so - because what you should be writing is a script.

For the uninitiated - a treatment is between 30 and 60 pages long (actually, that's REALLY useless information). It's a kind of sales pitch for a script. So: one-page synopsis, detailed story outline, character breakdowns, any additional information. There is no actual definition of a treatment, but it's basically a detailed description of the script you're hoping to write, compiled in such a way as to allow the reader to know precisely what kind of script you're going to write.

Now. I guess when Christopher Columbus knelt before Ferdinand and Isabella to ask them for money, he was expected to give them a detailed description of the trip he intended to make. He gave them a 'treatment' - a map, if you like, of a journey he'd never made. And then he proved how spot on he'd been by discovering somewhere else altogether.

That's one of the main problem with treatments. Not only are you describing something you haven't done yet but you're running a very real risk that your journey ('script'), when you take it, will turn out to be totally unlike your treatment. So what was the point of the treatment?

Let's be clear. There are some things that a treatment is good for. It's not a bad idea to clarify what you're planning on doing, and making sure that your backers, producers, clients, whatever, are broadly in sympathy with your intentions.

But a scriptwriter or a screenwriter really only has one purpose in life, and that's to write scripts or screenplays. Anything else - like churning out treatments - is a distraction, a displacement activity.

Treatments were not actually a very big deal when I started out in British television. Way back then, producers really only wanted to see scripts. Which was fine, because I really only wanted to write scripts.

But little by little, the treatment became king. I remember sitting in a meeting, discussing some project or other. The Head of Drama said, 'Right, well I think we need a script.' I feel good and start mentally counting my fee. The Head of Drama Development (glorified script editor) said, 'No, I think we need a treatment.' I feel bad, and then worse when the Head of Drama caves in.

The result: there never was a script. I got paid about a tenth of my fee and had NO FUN AT ALL.

Because here's the rub. NO ONE has EVER gained ANY satisfaction from reading a treatment. That's partly because they're unreadable. I mean, what are they? They're not scripts, they're not novels. They are, essentially, a waste of time.

So why are these things everywhere, these days? Why must every writer (more or less) devote a considerable amount of their time, energy, attention and expertise on creating, revising and polishing treatments?

At treatment stage, a producer still feels he or she has some control over the project. The worst producers just don't 'get' scripts. I think they're jealous of us gifted, creative children. They're scared of our abilities. And they're terrified by our independent spirits. So they try to delay the moment when the writer goes off to do what he or she does best (write a script), because the moment they do so the more inadequate kind of producer instantly suffers a LOSS OF CONTROL.

Let's look at the rest of the production. Does the director have to make a kind of 'home video' version of the show first, to prove that he can do it properly? Does the actor have to present a report on how he or she is expecting to play the part? Does the editor compile a 30 - 60 page report on how the piece ought to cut together?

No. But writers, the most marginalised workers in the industry, are expected, these days at least, to do something well outside of their comfort zone (just as treatments are no fun to read, they're no fun to write) which will have minimum benefit for the script and might, in fact, ruin the script before it's even started.

Producers will argue that treatments allow us to anticipate any problems with the script and solve them before the script is written.

Nonsense. You can only ever tell if a script is going to work by reading the script. The treatment is meaningless. If the script needs to change (and often if it doesn't) it will change. The treatment is meaningless.

Worse - the writer needs to tackle the script with a degree of freshness, wonder, adventure. But all too often, every last shred of excitement has been squeezed out of the project during the treatment stage. So the treatment - a worthless document that nobody likes reading - has killed off the infinitely more important document - the script - before you've even started!!!

For now, more's the pity, treatments can't be ignored. Producers cling to them. They're a displacement activity - not for writers but for producers who dread letting writers do what they're good at.

But never make the mistake of imagining that a treatment has any real relevance. Only the script has relevance. The treatment is a straitjacket which a producer tries to force a writer into. The public will never read it, most executives will never read it, and none of the great writers of the past ever had to worry about them.

Treatments are a symptom of what's wrong with the industry these days - of how badly writers are treated. 'Let them write scripts', is what we ought to be hearing. Instead, we hear 'Let them write treatments.' Which is tantamount to 'For God's sake, never let a writer write anything! Don't let them do scripts! Keep them distracted, farting about with something pointless! Whatever happens, AVOID LETTING THE WRITER WRITE A SCRIPT!'

To those producers, I say: 'You do your job and let the writers do theirs.' And to the writers, I say: 'The script matters. The treatment doesn't.'

So there.

WHEN LINDSAY ANDERSON TORE ME A NEW ONE

2008-10-12T12:42:00.002+01:00

Ah, Cherie! The Blessed Cherie Lunghi. I had Sunday lunch with her, many years ago, when I was what you might call a callow youth.

She exuded femininity. She radiated softness and perfume, like a living ad for fabric conditioner. It was intoxicating. I just wanted to snuggle up to her. I would have gladly let her stand on my chest, if she'd suddenly felt the need to do so.

I went more or less straight from Sunday lunch in Kensington with the lovely Cherie to afternoon tea at Lindsay Anderson's place in Hampstead.

Two things I quickly spotted about Lindsay Anderson's house. 1) he was a fan of John Ford, and 2) his home life was rather chaotic.

I should explain. One of my best friends at drama school had an uncle who was a movie star. Said movie star had seen some work of mine and wanted me to write him a movie. Basically, he wanted to play a cop. American or British, didn't matter. Something a bit 'noir'. Oh, and he wanted a treatment.

A treatment?

What the feck's a treatment?

I tried to find out. There didn't seem to be many books around about screenwriting (my, how things have changed!) but I deduced, from an old copy of 'Writers and Artists Yearbook', that a treatment was between 30 and 60 pages long.

I had to write between 30 and 60 pages about my script - without actually writing the script. Okay, cool ...

After Sunday lunch in the presence of the eternal feminine (ah, Cherie!) we were off to see Lindsay Anderson, who would be going through my crude attempt at a film treatment with me. We sat around a large, round table in the corner of a large, somewhat old-fashioned kitchen - me, movie star, Anderson - and he started pulling my work to pieces.

A few minutes in and I thought that maybe the best thing all round would be if I politely excused myself, stepped outside and put a bullet through my brain.

I told myself that I was not going to cry, not under any circumstances.

I even began to stand my ground. I would suppose this was about 30 to 45 minutes into the mauling. I didn't get belligerent, because I was convinced that Mr Anderson was perfectly capable of sticking a big pin through me, dipping me in formaldehyde and displaying me in a glass case as a warning to other young screenwriters.

After an hour or so, movie star himself started standing up for me. I was young - I was from Birmingham (which, back in those days, counted as a Special Need) - at least I'd written something, unlike Anderson's regular writer, whose speciality was not actually writing things.

But, evidently, my treatment was an object lesson in everything that a treatment should not be. I think it was possibly about the right length, but that's it. Everything I had come up with was unfilmable. (At one point, sniggering, he turned to movie star and said, 'Maybe we should send this to what's-his-name, down the road - Nic Roeg - see if he could do anything with it.' So callow, so naive was I, that I didn't see the heavy irony in this; I just thought, 'Do you think Nic Roeg would be interested?')

Anyway, Lindsay Anderson treated me and my script treatment rather like a Rottweiler might treat a soft toy. He became a bit more avuncular towards the end. But I had been roasted, dissected, slapped and poleaxed, repeatedly run over, forwards and reverse, and given a darn good pasting.

I didn't cry. I wrote a screenplay - which had nothing to do with my treatment - and that got me my first five years of professional script work.

Treatments are a complete waste of time, as I will prove in some other posting.

But, on many a future occasion, in a script meeting or on the phone to a script editor, whenever I heard the words, 'We're sorry about all these notes, it sounds like it's really wrong, but the truth is we think the script's great, it's just that ...' I would always say, 'Look, it's okay, nothing you can say about my script can hurt me. I had afternoon tea with Lindsay Anderson.'

Impervious to criticism? No, not quite. Ignorant criticism is actually very destructive - and pervasive, in the industry these days. But Lindsay certainly toughened me up. Perhaps that had been what the exercise was all about.

As for Cherie Lunghi, someone really should name a hospital after her. And there's that spare plinth in Trafalgar Square ...

STRUCTURE (2): THE ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT

2008-10-11T11:31:00.002+01:00

How many stories are there in the world?

Nobody knows. Some say seven, some say eight. Some say ten. I say one.

One. With two variations. One story, told over and over again, millions of times across the world.

Must be quite a story.

Basically, the story involves someone (human or otherwise) who undertakes a journey (real or metaphorical) which will change them.

That's the story. And the two variations? Does it end happily, with the promise of new life for the hero and possibly a productive relationship? Comedy. Does it end unhappily, with the death of the hero? Tragedy. But the story remains the same.

A few days ago I introduced the image of the bridge as a metaphor for the three Act structure of a script. With the addition of the Mid-Point, the bridge tells us that scripts should subdivide neatly into four more-or-less equal sections:

First quarter: Act One ('Set Up'; approaching the bridge)

Second quarter: Act Two - first part ('Story'; crossing the bridge; approaching the Mid-Point)

Third quarter: Act Two - second part ('Story' continues; crossing the bridge, away from the Mid-Point)

Fourth quarter: Act Three (climax and resolution)

This is very useful. A full-length screenplay of, say, 100 pages is a daunting prospect. But a full-length screenplay made up of four sections, 25 pages each, is easier to tackle, especially when you know exactly what needs to happen in each section.

The Road to Enlightenment is the story structure. It fits neatly over the bridge structure for the script. Or, to put it another way, with both structures in your head (the Bridge and the Road) you have a perfect working structure that will keep your story and your script on the straight and narrow.

The Road starts with an everyday world in which something is wrong. There is, or has been, some disruption to the happy continuity of everyday life. The hero feels this. He or she is aware, if only dimly, of something being not quite right.

The hero wants something. He or she is restless. There is a burning desire in there. That desire is for a better life.

Adventure calls. This is a rule of storytelling. The hero receives an invitation to go on the quest. But the hero turns it down.

Ever been going on holiday and felt at the last minute that maybe you'd rather not go? Leaving your comfort zone isn't easy, and it shouldn't be for the hero, either.

But the story must unfold. Adventure refuses to be ignored. Something happens which makes the hero take a deep breath and set out on the road.

End of Act One. The script is a quarter of the way through.

The hero is now in a new and wondrous world. Everything might look the same, but the rules have changed. In a romantic comedy, everything the hero sees is refracted through the eyes of one who is in love. In a mystery, the hero has entered the world of shadows and duplicity that is the case. The hero has to get to grips with this new world and its rules.

Like a foreign country, the world of adventure (the 'Story' - Act Two) is both exotic and threatening. The hero must discover whether the people he or she encounters are friends or foes. The unexpected can happen at any moment.

Little by little, the hero approaches the place of ordeal. The Mid-Point. The dragon's lair. Death's citadel.

The hero has an objective. Something stands in the way of that objective being achieved, the dream realised. That something lives at the Mid-Point.

And, as we all know, dragons guard treasure. Whatever the hero is searching for, the answer will be found at the Mid-Point, where Death lives. Halfway through the script, the hero faces a major challenge. Oblivion is threatened (the loss of the loved one, failure, loneliness, humiliation or an unpleasant death). Simultaneously, the hero finds the answer - the thing he or she has been searching for.

The story is about growing up, about developing as a person. The old self has to die for a new self to be born. This is acted out in initiation rituals. It is the change which happens in the midst of neurosis. The hero emerges from his/her Mid-Point encounter with Death a stronger person. He or she now has the key to the story.

The hero must escape from Death's lair. Just after the Mid-Point, there's usually a chase or a flight, as the hero, alone or with others, evades Death's clutches, putting a good deal of space between themselves and the Death Star.

The objective hasn't yet been achieved. But the hero now knows what must be done.

The hero, stronger, now, after surviving the Mid-Point encounter with Death, has to marshal his or her forces, their resources, and take the battle to Death. For this to happen, there has to be a kind of return to the beginning. We have to get out of the story world, off the bridge, back to the world we're familiar with. The hero has to leave the world of adventure behind. Living in a story is like living in a dream - it can't go on indefinitely.

Just as the hero had to be forced to set out on the road, to leave the comfort of home behind and begin the adventure, so the hero must now be forced to put the adventure behind him and get down to the serious business of resolving the story.

End of Act Two.

The final confrontation with Death happens much more on the hero's own terms. Lessons have been learnt. The hero now knows who his or her friends are. We have also spotted Death's weaknesses. Something that was stolen or appropriated at the Mid-Point will prove to be the key to the whole thing, and that can now be used. The hero will triumph.

Joseph Campbell, who first noticed that all the world's stories are essentially the same ('The Hero With a Thousand Faces'), called the last stages of the cycle - or Act Three, in our terms - 'Master of the Two Worlds' and 'Freedom to Live'.

In Act Three - the final quarter of the script - the hero demonstrates that they now have the ability to survive both the world of adventure and the everyday world of home. He or she has conquered Death. The mystery is solved. Love blossoms. The hero is free to live.

There will be a marked difference in the hero at this final stage in the story. If your protagonist remains essentially the same at the end as he or she was at the beginning, then their hero status might be lacking.

If they haven't learnt something about themselves from their close encounter with Death, then they're not really a hero.

And boy, do we need heroes.

END OF AN ERA

2008-10-10T12:57:00.002+01:00

For more than a decade, the BBC's drama output has been increasingly under the control of one person.

Beginning her career as a secretary working in radio drama, Jane Tranter switched from the BBC to Carlton, where she worked as a script editor, in 1992. In 1998, the BBC's highly respected Head of Drama Serials, Michael Wearing, was obliged to walk the plank. He was replaced by Jane Tranter, who became Controller of Drama in 2000 and, in 2006, achieved a whole new post - that of Head of Fiction. In this capacity, she oversaw an annual budget in the regions of £440 million.

In September it was announced that Jane Tranter will be stepping down from these lofty heights. As of the beginning of 2009 she will be heading up BBC Worldwide's American arm.

The end of 2008 will therefore witness the end of an era in BBC Drama. It has not been a good one.

Tranter had not long been back at the BBC, in a position of immense commissioning power, when the corporation announced the first of its new schemes to attract writers in off the street. Screenwriting students of mine were very excited at the time. The BBC was at last opening its doors to fresh talent.

I had to point out that it was not necessarily so. In a short space of time the BBC had succeeded in alienating much of its creative talent. The call-out for beginners, enthusiastic amateurs, to fill the breach could barely hide the fact that trust has completely broken down between the already existing talent pool and the TV executives.

The BBC needed new writers, not because we had suddenly discovered that there was a shortage of good drama writers but because a shortage had been created. Experienced scriptwriters knew a thing or two - which made them 'awkward', or 'precious', in the eyes of the new regime. The BBC's Drama Department therefore had to recruit and train up a new bunch. One which didn't know the score. Which didn't baulk at doing yet another rewrite on a producer's whim.

In April of this year, Guardian journalist Gareth McLean wrote an article which asked, 'Is Drama Safe at the BBC?' His investigations had revealed 'a regime in which only one person's opinion matters, a system in which the micro-management of projects by inexperienced executives and producers is ... leading to "an anti-creative, stifling atmosphere that's killing new ideas".'

McLean's article prompted an astonishing response from people in the TV industry. With all the flair of a New Labour government the BBC had proudly trumpeted its achievements, but McLean had exposed something rotten in the state of Denmark. "Such is the lack of courage of commissioners and the climate of fear in which they operate," one BAFTA-winning writer had said, "the commissioning process is ossifying."

Gareth McLean did not get to speak to Ms Tranter about the fear and loathing he had detected amongst her underlings. Jane Tranter has a minion whose task is to keep intruders at bay. He is Ben Stephenson, Head of Drama Commissioning, a young man who came more or less from nowhere, with a marked paucity of experience, to become Tranter's loyal Number 2.

Stephenson was happy to announce that, "At the end of the day, we're all working with the same quite small pool of talent". Why that talent pool should be so small was not explained - or, at least, not by Ms Tranter's lieutenant.

McLean, perhaps, went some way towards explaining the dearth of talent when he dropped his bombshell. 'So there's no truth in the rumour that there's a list of talent banned from working on BBC dramas?'

It would be interesting to know where the Guardian journalist picked up that rumour. The sentence certainly struck this reader with some force because, dear friend, your humble Script Doc might well have been the first name to have made it onto that blacklist.

So - the BBC dips into a small pool of talent, there are dark rumours of an official or unofficial blacklist and new writers have been brought into the BBC and trained in the arts of writing soap-based drama. And doing what they're told.

Tranter's departure from White City will present the BBC with an opportunity. The most foolish move of all would be to appoint young Stephenson as her successor. This would simply mean that Tranter continues to control BBC Drama from her new post in the States. The real question is: do the higher echelons of BBC management have the nerve to appoint a real Head of Drama, possibly breaking up the colossal empire Jane Tranter consolidated for herself in order to free up the system a little?

Ten years is a long time in TV. The processes by which the BBC commissioned and produced drama have been wrenched into new, Byzantine shapes under the Tranter regime. Where writers are concerned, all but a privileged few have suffered considerably. The anger extends far beyond the world of the scriptwriter. Imperious and at times, apparently, paranoid, the supreme leader has swatted and quashed any creative who dared to question her decisions. The industry has been divided into two camps: those trusties who would never contradict La Tranter and the remainder, who have been sent out into the cold.

The tragedy is that drama has been eviscerated at the BBC, and this at a time when ITV was abandoning its regional remit to please City shareholders and high-salaried executives. The past decade could have been a Golden Age for BBC Drama. Instead, it has seen the creative element emasculated and, in many instances, cast into outer darkness. We are all the poorer as a result.

So where next for the corporation? It's unlikely that matters could get much worse. But could the new 'Head of Fiction' repair ten years of damage and return BBC Drama to its former glory?

Would whoever gets the job be prepared to relinquish some of the power that Ms Tranter amassed?

We can only wait and see.

THE MID-POINT

2008-10-09T12:51:00.006+01:00

"I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er." - (Macbeth).

Tim Burton's 'Sleepy Hollow' (1999) has a good Mid-Point. Ichabod Crane, a somewhat excessively scientific policeman, is investigating a series of gruesome murders in a remote village. Aided by two friends, a young orphan and a mysterious girl, he finds a gnarled, misshapen tree in the heart of the woods. They watch as the headless horseman bursts through the tree's roots from his underworld lair.

When I first saw the movie, I didn't need to know that it was halfway through at this point. The story had told me so.

The hero had encountered Death. And there was a girl in the vicinity.

The night before I was due to cover story structure in one of my screenwriting courses I happened to catch another film on TV. This was 'The Watcher' (2000). A detective, played by James Spader, has been so psychologically messed up by his failure to catch a serial killer, played in Keanu Reeves, in LA that he has moved to Chicago. But the killer has followed him there.

I didn't see the whole of 'The Watcher'. I still don't know how it ends. But I recognised the Mid-Point. Spader has just been to see his love interest, psychiatrist Marisa Tomei. Leaving the building, he shares a lift (or 'elevator') with the killer. The killer is on his way to meet with the hero's girlfriend.

That's a Mid-Point. The hero has encountered Death. And there's a girl in the vicinity. The cramped confines of the lift (or 'elevator') can be compared with the roots of the Tree of Death in 'Sleepy Hollow'.

Or let's take another one. An idealistic would-be freedom fighter resolves to rescue a beautiful, imperilled princess. With the help of friends he tracks her down to a prison cell, deep in the heart of an artificial planet known as the Death Star. He frees her, and they quickly find themselves inside a garbage chute ... and the walls start closing in.

So - he's ventured into Death's lair. There's a girl in the vicinity. And he's confined.

I often think of the Mid-Point as 'Death and the Maiden'. These are the recurring images which appear at this point in the story.

Returning to the image of the bridge as a metaphor for the hero's progress (see yesterday's post), evidently there is a point, halfway across the bridge, where the hero is at his (or her) most exposed. He (or she) is as far from home as he (or she) is going to be. This is the point-of-no-return. It's exhilarating, standing slapbang in the middle of a bridge. But it's also scary. What if the bridge should fall, or those crossbow-wielding skeletons appear?

Death, of one kind or another, is a necessary part of the hero's journey. The journey undertaken by the hero is essentially the same as the experience of neurosis - 'Thank God he made up his mind to become neurotic!' said C.G. Jung of a patient, knowing that only by succumbing to his neurosis, rather than fighting it, could the patient hope, eventually, to get better. Similarly, initiation rites the world over have instituted a kind of ritual death as the central aspect of their rites of passage.

The hero - the initiate, the neurotic - must descend to their lowest point, deep inside Death's kingdom, if they are to be born again in a new, more advanced incarnation.

Going somewhat deeper into the roots (yes!) of all these stories, the Mid-Point represents the Union of Opposites, the Sacred Marriage in which the opposing principles (male/female, life/death) become fused. Alchemists sought to combine the elements of male and female inside a sealed vessel, believing that what might emerge from this chemical union would be a purer material. In contemporary stories, the opposites collide inside their own sealed vessel (an elevator, a garbage chute) or at the very bottom of the World Tree itself, where Death lives (if you don't believe me, check out the first James Bond movie, 'Dr No': you'll see the World Tree growing right there in the evil doctor's underworld headquarters).

Most stories have a secret, a key, a precious substance which the hero must discover and bring to the light. Sometimes, it is, simply, the girl (or 'love interest'). Other times, it's the answer to the mystery (who on earth has been going round chopping off people's heads?). Although the climax of the story is a long way off, it is, typically, at the Mid-Point that the clue, key, secret or precious substance is found.

So, Ichabod and his friends find Death's lair in the roots of a tree. James Spader shares a lift (or 'elevator') with the serial killer. Luke rescues the Princess and then has to be rescued himself from the garbage crusher. Richard Burton gets the information he needs and then has to escape from Death's dining room in the bowels of an impregnable Nazi castle ('Where Eagles Dare') - and, of course, there's a girl in the vicinity (the delightful Mary Ure).

The Mid-Point shows us the hero at his (or her) very nadir. There will be more challenges to come (the hero's got to get away from this place, for a start) but, in many ways, the greatest ordeal lies at the very centre of the story, halfway through the script.

If you have a screenplay to hand, find the halfway point. See what happens there. (I've just tried it, at random, with 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' - the heroes think their friend has been transformed into a toad for 'fornicating with some whore a Babylon' and they meet the duplicitous Big Dan Teague, who will beat them up beside a big tree and kill their toad. Is there a girl in the vicinity? Well, yes, there's a waitress.)

The Mid-Point should be a major turning point in your screenplay. It's the fulcrum on which the story balances. It's the moment when the hero encounters Death, usually on Death's home ground, and it opens up the mystery at the heart of the story (will the hero solve the problem, overcoming Death in order to enjoy new life, symbolised by the Maiden?)

The Mid-Point will happen. It's part of our storytelling DNA. It's there in the programming. Our subconscious minds tend to let the Mid-Point happen naturally.

But you can make your Mid-Point stronger by knowing that it's there. By preparing for it. By making sure that, when you get to the heart of your script, the midway moment, you've got Death, Death's lair, and a Maiden handy.

We should be able to spot a Mid-Point at five hundred yards. The symbolism seldom changes. Its importance to the hero's story is paramount.

Make sure yours is a good one.

STRUCTURE (1): THE BRIDGE

2008-10-08T12:16:00.002+01:00

I have to admit it - I find threes interesting. It's a Celtic thing. As my mother used to say, 'Everything comes in threes.'

A script should naturally break down into three parts or 'Acts'. Ignore anyone who tells you that a script has five Acts, or seven Acts, or anything else. They're just showing off.

Now, in some ways the fact that scripts have three Acts is a bit of an industry secret. We do not - repeat, NOT - write 'Act One' in our screenplays. We just don't, okay? I've read a fair few scripts in which writers have done just this - actually written in the Act beginnings - which you must not do. It's giving the game away.

The easy way to visualise the three-Act structure is as a bridge. Preferably, a suspension bridge. One with two towers or supports which, between them, hold up the middle section of the bridge.

That middle section is your story. It's the fun part. It's called 'Act Two', and it takes up roughly half of your script.

The first part of the script - 'Act One' - covers the approach to the bridge. The final part - 'Act Three' - involves getting safely off the bridge at the other end.

There is a lot of engineering in screenwriting. It's not all art. If you tried to build a bridge without really planning it, the chances are your bridge would fall down, which would be embarrassing for you and unfortunate for anyone who happened to be crossing it. So, to avoid all that unpleasantness, we apply STRUCTURE. Two pillars to hold up your middle section.

One quarter of your script is 'approaching the bridge'. The end of Act One comes when you reach the first structural pillar. Fully one half of your script is 'crossing the bridge'. The end of Act Two comes when you reach that second pillar. The final quarter is 'back to the safety of dry land', and it ends when we all know how the story ended.

The approach to the bridge - Act One - is also known as the 'Set-Up'. If we remember the Absolute Essentials (The Story is about a CHARACTER who wants to achieve an OBJECTIVE but an OBSTACLE stands in the way) then it is on the approach to the bridge, in the first quarter of the script, that this information is given.

So - Act One is about explaining who this story's about, what they want and what's stopping them from getting it.

Refusing to leave Act One is a common mistake, both for the writer and for the hero. The writer must remember that the story hasn't started yet. The story is the middle part of the bridge. Don't spend your whole script not-quite-getting to the bridge. Act One is for setting up the scenario. And then give your hero a big kick up the backside to get them past that first pillar and onto the bridge. End of Act One. We're a quarter of the way through the script and the story now starts.

Once you, the writer, have set up the scenario (the Story is about a Character, an Objective and an Obstacle), your task now is to amuse yourself with it. Now that you've got your hero into this pickle, how many ways can you exploit the situation? You have half of your script in which to ENJOY exploring the hero's new world, making him/her fight to get what they want.

I once saw a medieval woodcut of people crossing a crumbling viaduct while skeletons fired crossbows at them. It was meant to remind people about how suddenly death can strike. To me, it was a bit like crossing the bridge. People will keep taking pot-shots at your hero.

A lot of writers forget how important it is to torture the hero. Let's not forget - the story is about the hero overcoming obstacles to achieve their desire or objective. We are often told that drama is about conflict. It isn't, quite. It's about the changes the hero undergoes while overcoming the obstacles which stand between him and his objective.

If we think of the Objective as 'getting to the other side of the bridge', well, there's not much of a story unless we make that process rather difficult.

Always make life more difficult for your characters. That's what makes drama.

So - you've worked very, very hard to get your scenario established ('set up') in the first quarter of your screenplay and now you and your hero are off. You're making your way through Act Two. You are crossing the bridge, trying to avoid the missiles and doing your best not to fall.

Halfway across the bridge, and halfway through your script, you'll come to the Mid-Point. We'll return to the Mid-Point some other time. Interesting things happen there.

Once you and the hero have crossed the Mid-Point, the 'point of no return', you're homeward bound. You just have to make over the rest of the bridge and you'll have got to the end of Act Two.

Act Three - the final quarter of the script - is, in many ways, a mirror of the first Act. To begin with, you had to approach the bridge. You weren't really telling the story - you were setting it up, establishing who your hero is, what they want and what's standing in their way. To finish off your script, you just have to tell everybody how it ended.

In the first Act, we will have learned, very early on, that there is something not quite right with the world. There is a threat, an undesirable state of affairs. In the final Act we will learn, more or less at the end, that a new state of affairs exists, and that things are, hopefully, a lot better than they were.

How come? Well, because the hero crossed the bridge. He faced down his fears (of heights, bridges, skeletons with crossbows) and made it from one side of the story to the other, from a less-than-ideal state of existence to a (hopefully) better one. He, or she, overcame the challenges to achieve the object of desire.

The Bridge is the best structure for a script. It's pretty simple. Beginning, middle and end. And it stands as a reminder that the story proper - the adventurous bit - really only covers half of the total screenplay. That's the middle half. The actual bridge bit, between the two towers.

Act One - the first quarter of the script - is about approaching the bridge. The hero's job is to realise that something is wrong with his world, something needs to be done about it, but it will, unfortunately, involve a rather scary journey. The writer's job is to ensure that we know who this hero is, along with the basic set up of the story (Character, Objective, Obstacle).

Act Two - the middle half of the script - is the fun stuff. It's crossing the bridge, with the wind in your hair, and - DON'T LOOK DOWN! OR BEHIND YOU! And - are those SKELETONS firing crossbows at us? The hero's task is to get across the bridge, overcoming every obstacle and life-threatening situation en route. The writer's task is to enjoy every second by making life as difficult for the hero as possible. Enjoy the ride.

Act Three - the last quarter of the script - hey, we're off the bridge. But we've still got a way to go before we're home and dry. The hero's job is to make it home safely, finally seeing off any last crossbow-wielding skeletons. The experience of crossing the metaphorical bridge will have changed the hero, turning him or her into a better, stronger, more enlightened person. The writer's task is to get the hero right off the bridge and to tell the people out there how the story ended.

Approach the bridge - cross the bridge - get off the bridge. Or: set up your story, tell your story, wrap up your story.

Beginning, middle and end. One quarter, one half, one quarter. Act One, Act Two, Act Three. It's as simple as crossing a bridge.

HOW MANY DRAFTS???

2008-10-07T10:56:00.002+01:00

Question: How many production executives does it take to change a lightbulb?

Answer: Does it have to be a lightbulb?

I guess you could blame Richard Curtis. When 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' came out it was seen as the salvation of the British film industry. I was working with an eager young producer at the time. When she heard that Curtis had written twenty-five drafts of the 'Four Weddings' script, I watched the penny drop. 'So', you could see her working it out, 'if we want our movie to be better than "Four Weddings" we'll have to go through twenty-six drafts.' And my little heart sank.

You don't need twenty-five drafts to make a script work. You need three.

That's right: three.

Your first draft is a foray into unexplored territory. It's a land grab. Do anything you need to do but get through it. Until you've written 'FADE OUT' or 'THE END' you don't have a script.

Your second draft allows you to re-order the material you managed to get together for your first draft. Mould it, shape it, make it work.

Your third draft is the polish. Dot 'i's, cross 't's, give it some extra punch, make it shine.

Three drafts.

If you haven't got it by the end of three drafts, the chances are you won't. Put the story aside for six months. Do something else.

Three drafts is all it needs.

Mind you, on my favourite TV drama series of all time, they didn't bother going to three drafts. 'The Sweeney' just got on with it. Each writer would have ten days to submit his script. One guy took just three days. Occasionally, once in a while, there'd be a second draft. If a third draft was required, it was a sign that a script was in trouble.

Those were the days. 'The Sweeney' is still one of the most influential police dramas ever. A consultant on 'The Bill' once said it was the most realistic TV cop show he'd ever seen. 'Life on Mars' and the atrocious 'Ashes to Ashes' are pallid, pantomimic travesties of the almighty 'Sweeney'.

One draft of the script, lords and ladies. One. Then they went out and filmed it.

By the mid-90s, five drafts of a script was the norm. Which meant that, somewhere along the line, someone in an office had decided to change the story. And the poor old writer was struggling to make sense of it.

At the last count, the Writers' Guild of GB was trying to insist on a maximum of ten to twelve drafts per script contract. Which would mean that a writer hired to produce a script could be made to rewrite that script a dozen times.

If you hired an interior designer, would you expect to send him back to do it all again twelve times over - and all for the same fee?

Would you make a chef cook you a meal twelve times over until you decided it was all right, and still only pay him once?

Let's be clear. Most of the rewrites demanded of scriptwriters these days are complete and utter wastes of time. They do not improve the script. They help to turn it into mashed potato. So why do it?

The answer is one that the media has in common with practically every other major industry these days. Too many fecking managers.

The industry is jam-packed with bright young things whose only skills are wearing suits and talking gibberish. They have no proper function. They have elbowed and schemed and arse-licked their ways into pseudo-jobs in the media. They lack training, originality and common sense.

They have no actual work to do. They have been imported for one reason only: to make their management superiors feel more powerful. What's the point of being Head of Department if there's no one in your department? Better to have a staff of thirty, even if they have no actual work to do, as long as they all respect you as the Great Media Fuhrer.

These people get in the way. They contribute nothing. They are a drain on resources.

And they think they know all about scripts. Delicate scripts, works of genius, the blueprints for drama. They think that they know better than the writer.

They keep coming up with rewrites because IT'S THE ONLY THING THEY CAN DO. Is the rewrite necessary? Probably not, unless it's to repair the damage done by the last set of notes dictated to the writer by a roomful of idiots. Even then, the script will never recover the excitement of its earliest drafts. They'll just keep pummelling it, questioning every element in it, changing their minds and, on the whole, treating the writer like shit until a) the writer has a breakdown, b) everyone loses interest, or c) someone actually has to produce the bastard and time runs out on the timewasters in the designer suits.

Even in the 1990s, producers who had a bit of nous and experience would work with a writer on three drafts of a script. Okay, once you go into production there are likely to be script changes - that's life. But the amount of time wasted - and the degree of exploitation to which writers are exposed, and that includes bullying - while 'developing' scripts until they've been trampled to buggery is a modern outrage.

Three drafts is all it needs. Ten or twelve drafts is a form of abuse.

But as long as the industry is stuffed with pointless people and producers are allowed to get away with it, this abuse will continue. And the quality of scripts will continue to decline.

So - how many production executives does it take to change a lightbulb?

I don't know. Thirty, maybe? But they'll just keep on changing it, and changing it, and changing it ...

CAN STORIES HEAL?

2008-10-06T12:43:00.002+01:00

Once upon a time - my source says it was in 1794 - a young boy had to undergo a surgical operation. There were no anaesthetics. The boy's mother started telling him a story. As she continued, the doctor successfully removed the boy's tumour.

The boy felt nothing at all. He was too wrapped up in his mother's story (for the record, it was 'Snow White').

It's surprising, really, that the NHS hasn't yet looked into the medical use of stories. Anaesthetics is a notoriously tricky practice. Perhaps the health trusts should look into hiring experienced professional storytellers (of course they do, I hear you say - they're called 'management'.)

Can anyone say for sure how much medical success is actually down to faith? And where does faith come from? Well - stories, mostly.

Stories form our beliefs. Nazism was essentially a welter of very bad stories coupled with a uniform fetish. The world's major religions are all based on books, which are themselves a collection of stories. Those of us who read right-wing newspapers are actively seeking stories which will reinforce our prejudices.

Our beliefs are moulded by the stories we're told. Hollywood has long fostered a belief that most problems can be solved by blowing away the opposition. That's another bunch of bad stories. But then, Americans are prone to believing a lot of strange things.

But if stories do shape our worldview, our belief systems, they can surely be used for good.

I was working with a writing group once when I set them an exercise. The Metaphysical Poets prided themselves on their use of the 'conceit'. This was an image, a metaphor or simile, which was clever because it found similarities between apparently quite different things. So the exercise I set was to write a short piece in which everything is described using the most unexpected images.

Exercises like this work by forcing the writer to lurch away from easy, lazy, cliched thinking. Whatever you're trying to describe, think of something that it is absolutely not like and then make a connection between the two. Genius, it is said, is the ability to make connections between seemingly dissimilar things.

One of my students wasn't getting it. I had only allowed about twenty minutes for this exercise so I asked her what was bothering her.

She was a bit distracted because she had an operation coming up. She'd had several of these operations and she dreaded each and every one of them.

I said, 'Okay, write me a piece entitled "My Perfect Operation".'

Twenty minutes later, she had finished. And her attitude towards her upcoming operation had completely changed. She had re-imagined it. Needles would feel like velvet lightly brushing her skin. Nurses would flit about her bed like butterfly fairies. She would never have felt happier or more comfortable.

She was, she announced, going to frame her little piece - 'My Perfect Operation' - and keep it beside her in hospital.

She had lost her fear by telling herself a story. Instead of repeating the same old story (needles hurt, nurses can be clumpy and brusque, hospital beds aren't designed for comfort) she had imagined a new one. As a result, her world had changed.

I doubt that 'My Perfect Operation' actually cured her. But it made her feel better. It gave her a kind of faith, which meant that she was now disposed to be cured.

Some doctors will tell you that their job is really just keeping the patient amused and preoccupied while the body gets on with healing itself.

That's where we storytellers can be useful. Maybe we can't work miracles. But we can change the way people think. We can make them feel better.

We can distract them while the nurses dance about and the doctors wield their velvet needles. Thanks to us, like the little boy whose mother told him the story of 'Snow White', they might not feel a thing.

THE ABSOLUTE ESSENTIALS

2008-10-05T12:15:00.002+01:00

We should be pretty good at stories. After all, we've been hearing them since before we were born.

Stories have been around for thousands of years, and they have changed surprising little over the ages.

We're exposed to stories every day. And yet, amazingly, I receive scripts all the time in which the basics of storytelling have been overlooked or ignored.

Think about it: we're saturated with stories, inundated with them throughout our lives, but when we come to write our own stories we can MISS OUT SOME OF THE MOST VITAL BITS.

And then we wonder why our script doesn't work.

One of the most familiar mistakes made by writers is also one of the most basic. They forget to make sure that they actually have a story.

For a story to happen you need three things:

1) A Character
2) An Objective
3) An Obstacle

Couldn't be simpler, really. Godard said all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. Chaplin felt that all he needed was a park, a pretty girl and a policeman. All any of us actually need is a Character, an Objective and an Obstacle.

Surprisingly, I get to read a great many scripts in which at least one of these three elements is missing. So there isn't a story.

Can you imagine how difficult it is to write a decent screenplay when you don't actually have a story? Uurrrgghhh - !

Never, never, never try to write a script without having first made sure that you actually do have a story. In other words, that you have a CHARACTER, an OBJECTIVE and an OBSTACLE.

Your CHARACTER is probably going to be your 'hero' or protagonist (it's from a Greek word meaning 'first contestant'). This means that the story will be their story.

Your character must have an OBJECTIVE. He, she or it must want something. And there must be something or someone who stands in the way, forming the OBSTACLE to the hero's achieving his/her/its desire.

Here's a game I play with writing students. Everyone writes at the top of a sheet of paper: 'THE STORY IS ABOUT A ...' Then everyone invents a CHARACTER. Five or six words should be plenty to describe an individual. Fold the top of the page over so that the CHARACTER is not revealed and pass it on.

The next person writes: 'WHO WANTS ...' and then invents a goal, desire or OBJECTIVE. Again, five or six words should do it. Fold over and pass on.

The next player completes the sentence. The sentence will end with the words 'BUT ----- STANDS IN THE WAY.' Those dashes represent the OBSTACLE. Make up a good one (no limit on words this time). Fold over and pass on.

Now open the sheets of paper out and read them. You should various versions of something that runs a bit like this:

'THE STORY IS ABOUT AN AGORAPHOBIC HAIRDRESSER FROM BRIGHTON WHO WANTS TO RUN THE NEW YORK MARATHON BUT A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS STANDS IN THE WAY.'

I don't know about you but I'd probably pay to see that one. It sounds interesting. It's got a CHARACTER, an OBJECTIVE and an OBSTACLE. It has, in other words, a 'hook'.

One thing I often notice, certainly with British writers, is that we don't make our heroes pro-active. They don't tend to want things. Rather, they tend not to want things. They don't want to lose their child. They don't want the building to collapse. They're trying to avoid losing their job.

Always make your character's objective a positive one. Always express it in positive terms.

And always create the biggest obstacles you can. That's what creates the tension, the struggle. The narrative will follow your hero as he/she/it fights to overcome the obstacles in order to achieve their objective. Big obstacles make for big stories.

But without one of the magic three - Character, Objective, Obstacle - you won't have a story at all. For there to be a story, you absolutely must have a recognisable central character (for the audience to identify with), a declared objective (so that the audience will cheer them on) and a daunting obstacle (which creates the suspense, the 'struggle' of the story).

If you have all three, you've got a story.

If you haven't, forget it.

SCREENWRITING SOFTWARE - YES OR NO?

2008-10-04T11:03:00.002+01:00

The number of scripts I receive that are written using screenwriting software! You can tell straightaway that a script has been written using formatting software. You can also tell, more or less instantly, that the writer hasn't understood the format.

Which means that the script isn't anywhere near as professional as it looks.

A common mistake. Screenwriting software can organise the formatting for you, but it cannot make the format work. Only the writer can do that.

I remember my first brush with professional screenwriting software. It was ... oooh ... over ten years ago, now. A production executive at a major media company had some scripts of mine which he needed to budget. That meant breaking them down into their various elements and totting up the likely costs.

He had software that could do this for him. But if I had written the scripts using the compatible software package he would hardly have had to do anything at all. My scripts would automatically break themselves down because they were written using software that matched his own budgeting and scheduling software.

He talked me into buying the appropriate software. In dollars. From California. Using Fed-Ex. Just to make his life easier.

At first I was bowled over with the package. It numbered everything for me! It remembered character names and scene headings. It put (CONTINUED) everywhere. Suddenly, my scripts just looked so ... professional!

After a while I stopped using it. You can write screenplays in Word. If anything, it's easier.

But the software has caught on. Many of my screenwriting students ask me, 'What's the best software to use?'

My answer is always, 'Don't bother.' Don't get the machine to do it for you. Learn how to do it yourself. Like I say, it's as easy to format a screenplay using Word - if not easier.

You can only learn how the format works - why scripts are laid out on the page the way they are - by formatting it yourself. That way, you get to understand that there are only three kinds of information on the page:-

1: Where we are (SCENE HEADING)

2: What we see (SCENE DESCRIPTION & ACTION)

3: Who says what (DIALOGUE)

This is all that a screenplay contains. And, properly formatted, the script differentiates clearly between these three kinds of information.

Getting the software to do this for you might make your script look superficially professional. But if you haven't mastered the art of thinking in just three kinds of information - where we are, what we see, who says what - then the format still won't work.

Computers can't do this thinking for you. It's a discipline that can only come with having to think through the layout of the script yourself. Making yourself figure out how your wonderful ideas translate into three basic kinds of information.

We'll look at format again, sometime soon. It's important. Format foxes many a writer. But it's actually as easy as pie.

Just don't expect the software to do it for you.

WHAT IF ...

2008-10-03T15:20:00.000+01:00

Everything starts with What If ...?

It's an easy game to play. I've tried it out with all age groups, using the exercise as a kind of ice-breaker at the start of a screenwriting course.

Try it: write out six simple sentences, all of them beginning with 'What if'.

It's often best if you don't try to think about it. Start writing your sentences - 'What if ...' - and then just keep going. See where it takes you.

What if the house was on fire?

What if I turned out to be next-in-line to the throne?

What if I fell down a rabbit hole? (Actually, that one's been done.)

What if my wife was a top-class assassin? (So has that.)

What if war broke out?

What if there was no winter?

What if trees could talk?

What if people couldn't?

I like this exercise. I often think of it as 'Hopes and Fears'. If you listen to six of these 'What If's that have been made up by a teenager, for example, you will get an insight into their mindset. Are they optimistic or pessimistic? Whimsical or negative?

Playing 'What If' reveals the things that scare you and the things that might give you hope. It also provides you with instant stories.

In many ways, every story begins with a 'What If?' Writers are constantly playing 'What If' in their minds, even when they don't realise they're doing it. It is one of the things that makes a storyteller: the ability to look at the world around you and for a part of your brain to be weighing up what you see or hear or encounter, analysing it, looking at it from different angles, asking 'What if ...?'

Stories have to come from somewhere. The fact is they are all around you.

Man is a storytelling animal. He thrives on stories.

Stories are what set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Stories and opposable thumbs - that's about it. Man is the only creature that tells stories.

We've been doing it for thousands of years. Making sense of our world by means of stories.

There are the stories we tell about things which have happened. And then there are the stories which we make up.

The ones we make up invariably start with a 'What if'.

So the way to find a story is to ask 'What if' and then just keep going. Sooner or later, one of those questions, one of those 'What If's, will lodge in your mind. It will take root.

It might take years, but that one 'What If' could one day flower into the most fabulous story.

Try it.

What if ...