How to become a better writer? You may be surprised by the answer.

They all say practice makes perfect. But does it help you become a better screenwriter? Maybe there’s another issue here that you need to address if you are going to succeed in movies or TV.

(I’ve been thinking a great deal about this as I’ve prepared for this weekend’s ScreenPLAY starting on Friday evening. If you’re interested I can just squeeze one more writer in. Get in touch quickly).

There’s a great deal of evidence that practice certainly helps. The Guardian’s Matthew Syed has written an article How practice does make perfect which gives a number of examples of studies from General Electric to Stanford University. They all show that sticking to the job is one of the best ways to improve performance.

It stands to reason. If Wayne Rooney spends more hours kicking a ball he probably won’t get worse.

Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers: The Story of Success, makes a similar point with his famous 10,000 hour dictum – that all the geniuses he studied had become geniuses once they had done whatever they did for 10,000 hours.

But hold on: surely it’s also a matter of what we practice, and how?

I could spend 100,000 hours trying to put up a shelf and never succeed. Why? Because I need someone to show me how. Practising the wrong way to do something will just get me really good at doing it wrong.

Practice doesn’t make perfect – it makes permanent.

Many screenwriters keep making the same mistake over and over again, because nobody told them any better. Or suggested a more useful way to learn.

Perfect practice makes perfect.

Here’s some random suggestions for better practising. These exercises take you outside your script to give you a new perspective:

• Read a script. Take a scene from it and copy its shape and structure exactly but in your own words, with your own characters and situation.
• Go somewhere. Set a scene in this real location, then bring in an invented character and see how they interact with the environment.
• Describe a real person you know very well, and put them in a totally fictional setting.
• Write a line of dialogue. Write a response (or lack of one). Keep on going. Watch what appears.
• Now take all that dialogue and see how much you can convey by cutting it out and creating visuals instead.

So, don’t just slog away at that script. The quality of your practice is as important as the length. Step away from time to time. Get good advice and good tuition. And find some fun ways to keep fresh and sharpen your game.

If you’re interested in doing more of this I have one place left to squeeze someone in for this weekend’s ScreenPLAY. It starts 6pm on Friday 24 June and it’s in Central London. More details here.

Perfect.

Why do we call them Screen – Plays?

Want your script to stand out from the crowd? Want it to be read from cover to cover and passed from hand to hand?

It’s time to discover your inner playfulness.

Playfulness is not the opposite of seriousness. In fact, the most serious writers are often the most playful.

Who could be more serious than Kafka? And what could be more playful than the idea of a trial with impossible rules, or a man who wakes up transformed into an insect?

Go to any good production of a Shakespeare tragedy and you’ll find it full of wit, surprise, invention and trickery.

We all love reading a script where the writer plays with us, leads us here and there, turns the tables on us, uses a little wit in a description, an enjoyable piece of word play in dialogue.

In the first scenes of Bonnie & Clyde, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow flirt, tease and taunt each other – drawing us into caring about the characters and making their rapid shift to brutal violence all the more shocking.

Playing with the audience is fun for both sides. The Coen Brothers have built their careers out of toying with our expectations, as did Hitchcock.

And the playfulness can occur in many different ways. Two recent films both have fun with their opening scenes. Scene 1 of The Town toys with the idea that something is about to happen, which doesn’t… yet.

While the script of The King’s Speech gets great enjoyment from an opening description of a plummy announcer who thinks he’s God’s gift to the world of broadcasting.

Go over your recent writing and pick a few places where you could try a lighter touch. A sharper phrase. A neater surprise. A swift removal of some of the heavier clutter.

Of course, as with the greatest games and sports, you can only be truly playful when you thoroughly immerse yourself in the techniques and have mastered the skills.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun and play as you grow and learn.

After all, we do call them Screen-Plays. So go play.