Losing faith in your work?

It happens to the best writers – and it can be lethal. The story starts to feel flat. The emotions false. The scenes mechanical. Soon you wonder what you even saw in the idea.

The issue is not one of technique or skill, because the most skillful writers can fail because of it. You need to ramp up your mental game.

Most often, the problem lies in focusing too much on the outer story of your script or novel. You need to refocus the writing – to engage with the inner story.

And stop playing safe.

Most writers put most of their effort into the outer story. They read the books and go to the seminars on structure and expend great effort on developing their three acts and their turning points. Or, if they prefer, on  their non-linear fragmented structures, their flashbacks and parallel narratives.

Either way, they are avoiding dealing with the heart of their stories – the very thing that attracts and holds both the audience – and the writer. The inner story.

All About My Mother

The inner story is where you face your character’s flaws, issues and vulnerabilities. But – and this is why most writers avoid it – those flaws and issues will also be your own. To write them honestly and powerfully you have to stop playing safe and risk facing the reality of the flawed person you really are.

This applies equally to mainstream blockbusters and indie movies, to cinema and to TV, to novels and short stories. A good story comes from a writer facing themselves and taking risks.

Conversely, one constant fault with the majority of treatments and scripts I read at Euroscript is the failure of the writers to engage with their own flaws.

Here’s one method for sharpening your mental game and getting back in touch with the heart of your story.

Step One - Identify the inner story.

This can be easier said than done, and I spend much time in workshops helping writers find what their script is really about under the surface.

Here are some places you’ll find clues: look at your central character’s major flaws? How do they change? What are they able to do at the end of the movie that they couldn’t at the start? What do they fail to do at the end that brings about their downfall? What it is that would solve their problem, if only they did it?

In Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, the outer story concerns a mother’s attempt to find the (transvestite) father of her son and correct the wrong she did by not telling him about his child.

However the inner story deals with a woman achieving emotional maturity and coming to terms with the truth about her life and herself as a mother.

In Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman tells the outer story of an ambitious puppeteer who tries to make money exploiting a portal that takes people into John Malkovich’s head.

The inner story explores issues of manipulation and the difficulty of letting go.

Step Two - Look honestly at your own issues

Write down anything that comes to mind about how these issues show up in your own life.

Being John Malkovich

This is the time to be honest, even if it hurts. How have you failed to deal with them? How should you have dealt with them? What’s stopping you?

This honesty is what we want from our writers. You face your vulnerabilities, so that audiences (and producers and directors) can find the strength to face theirs. But it only works if you’ve really faced them.

Almodóvar and Kaufman could only write their scripts because they were brave enough to face their own flaws.

Step Three – Make your characters face those same issues

Once you have identified the key issues, you put them at the heart of every scene. Comedy, drama or thriller, your dilemmas become the characters’ and vice versa.

The issues, being live for you, will bring the whole script to life again. The characters’ dilemmas will release energy and engagement for you, and for your readers.

Envigorate your mental game

If you want more ways to bring life and energy to your mental game, I’m running one workshop this year – The Mental Game for Writing Success, March 31st – April 1st in London.

You’ll discover a new approach to how you think and deal with things. You’ll get practical exercises to help you understand what makes you tick as a writer or film-maker – and get back in touch with your passion and self-belief. And you’ll learn faster and more effective ways to develop characters and scripts.

The Mental Game for Writing Success, March 31st – April 1st

Stuck? A simple way to get your work moving.

Are you stuck for ideas? Is your writing in a mess? Do you need a way to get critical distance?

Here’s a deceptively simple method for literally getting your work to move forwards – but don’t be fooled. Like many simple ideas it can be profoundly useful. It works for all kinds of screenwriting, and other creative work, and also for problems in directing and producing.

I like it because, like everything I use and teach, it’s simple and based on the working methods of real writers. Real writers don’t have time for complicated 99-step processes invented by writing gurus. This technique was actually developed from the working practice of a top Hollywood studio.

Recipe

Before you start you need:
1 problem
3 different places

The problem could be all-encompassing – sorting out the entire premise, revising a whole draft, reconfiguring the structure – or very specific – a single line of dialogue, the right setting for a scene, the name of a minor character.

The three places could be any different places. They could be three rooms. Or three chairs. Or a swivel chair, a sofa and a rug. You could presumably do it with three different towns, or even countries, but your travel costs might be a bit high.

Let’s say it’s the third, which is what I use. The swivel chair (place A) is the Creative spot. The sofa (place B) is the Organising spot. The rug (place C) is the Critical spot.

Now you start. First you sit in the swivel chair and brainstorm ideas for solving your problem, creating your premise, writing the next dialogue scene, finding finance, whatever you want. Anything goes, no limits, write all the ideas down, or if you like record them on a voice recorder. You can fix a time, or just sit as long as you like.

When you have a fair number of possibles, you move to the sofa (or whatever your second place is – second chair, second office, Belgium… and here you organise those ideas. You arrange them, cut or rethink the ones that don’t work, build on the ones that do. And when you’ve done enough of that you…

Move to the third place – the rug, the third chair, the third office, Croatia…

This is where you unleash your full critical faculty. Here you pull holes in what you’ve made so far. You do your best to find every fault. You nitpick, you tear it apart, you hammer at it until you’re confident you’ve found every possible thing that could be wrong about it.

This will probably have left you with some new problems to solve. So you go back to the first place, the swivel chair, etc, and again and run the process again.

In fact, you keep rotating round the circuit as many times as you need until you feel confident you’ve solved every potential issue and are happy with the result. Then you go and have a cup of tea and start on the next problem.

Variations

Simple, yes, but a very powerful technique with many different uses and variations, and not just writing. You could use it for creating a pitch, thinking out a marketing strategy, blocking out a shooting schedule, or even a business plan.

Three places could become three fonts – one font for speed writing, one for organising the draft and a third for editing it down. Or three colours of paper. Or… the only limit is your imagination.

The Mental Game

The psychology of writing – using simple psychological techniques like this one – is the bit that is missed from just about every screenwriting book or course. But I do believe that it is crucial.

Sadly, skill and talent is not enough to get you through the barriers any more.

You have to deal with your doubts, and build self-belief. You have to keep in touch with what you love even when struggling with writing problems, or facing rejection. You need to avoid being sabotaged by your weaknesses and to discover how to play to your strengths.

If you want more simple and practical techniques, based on understanding the psychology of real writers, then come to my Mental Game workshop. It’s a weekend course, Saturday March 31st to Sunday April 1st in Central London.

People who have come – writers, actors, producers and directors – have found it refreshed and often completely revolutionised their ways of working, so that they saved time, gained energy and reconnected with themselves.

Go here to check out the details and the reviews…

Is your script predictable?

I’ve read hundreds of scripts by very competent writers, and very few have ever given me a single moment of surprise. Yet all the great scripts I’ve read are constantly surprising.

So what’s going wrong?

By coincidence, I was listening to Robert Harris (no relation) talking about his new novel The Fear Index – set in the world of finance and computers.

He was talking about the way finance computers exploit our fears. Essentially, when people are afraid they become predictable – the computers that buy and sell in the City and Wall Street like it when we’re predictable.

Unfortunately audiences don’t. In fact, it’s one of the quickest ways to ensure that an otherwise well-written script ends up in the bin.

What to do?

Look at your mind-set first. Are you approaching writing with a feeling of anxiety? Probably. I don’t know any writers who are calm and relaxed all the time, much as they might like to be.

Actors, too. But I’ve helped nervous actors turn those natural “performance” nerves into creative energy, even playfulness. Writers can do the same.

How often do you sit down at the computer in a spirit of play? Could you imagine doing it? What difference would it make to how you write?

Actors, like musicians, footballers, and other performers also know that the best way to free up and lose your inhibitions is (paradoxically) to train constantly at the skills of the craft.

It doesn’t surprise me that the most consistently surprising writers and directors are also those who have studied film most profoundly. Martin Scorsese, to name one of the greatest living directors, is more knowledgeable about the history of the movies than any film buff.

(And if you love film and haven’t seen Hugo, you absolutely must, in 3D if possible).

So – surprise everyone: be playful and study your craft 24/7. Get so good at your craft that you can dance with it, with freshness and spontaneity.

Writing successfully in a recession

I’m thinking a good deal about creativity at the moment, as I plan Unblock Your Creativity. In particular I’m aware that these are difficult times to let yourself go and be your full creative self.

This applies to all writers – however great the level of experience. When life is so tough for many people, the writing itself can become a problem.

It is easy to put off our most valued plans – or just find that the writing doesn’t flow as richly as it could.

The irony is that this is a vital time to be writing – the media become even more important to people in a recession. The demand for good quality writing grows stronger than ever.

From personal experience, I feel that the key to performing well under pressure lies in your unconscious mind and in learning how to stay in full contact with it.

Roughly 5% of your mind is conscious – the part that plans, runs and observes what you do. The remaining 95% is unconscious. However this 95% is a crucial source of inspiration – it is that 95% that provides you with the energy, the excitement, the ideas, the flow that you need to succeed creatively.

When the pressure is on, the temptation is to fall back on the 5% that we have direct control over. However the result is almost invariably an anaemic, over-controlled, thin kind of creativity.

By contrast, we all have experience of those moments when surprising, fresh ideas just seemed to come automatically, the words fell into place, the characters came to life – if only for a moment. That is the working of the powerful resources of your unconscious.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be able to draw on those deep, rich resources on a regular basis? That is a central skill that successful writers need to develop.

One way to do this, is to use your habits.

Habits are unconscious actions. We have bad habits – some writers procrastinate, others fall back on tried and tested ideas that have run out of steam.

We also have good habits – such as brushing your teeth, reading books or going to movies.

One quick and powerful method of training your unconscious is to link a habit you’d like to have with one you already do have – by chaining one activity onto another.

For example, immediately after a habit such as brushing your teeth in the morning, think of one thing you could do that will improve your writing.

You could (for example) spend the next ten minutes writing the first page of that draft script you’ve been meaning to start. Next day, page two…

Or you could spend an hour playing with an aspect of your writing you’ve been aware of neglecting (develop a character, explore a theme, write a joke…)

After a week or so, the new activity will become a good habit, enriching all your work.

In Unblock Your Creativity, we have great fun playing around with a whole number of powerful ways to get re-inspired and tap into your unconscious mind with all its energy and inventiveness – advanced, practical techniques.

You can learn to turn bad habits into good ones, to get rid of bad habits, to create vivid characters in a matter of seconds, to write down ideas you never thought you had and allow your story to tell you the best way it wants to be told.

To learn more techniques this go to the Unblock Your Creativity page.

Find Time for Your Real Writing

My son Oliver, whose first novel The Hollow Man came out this year (it’s great and I’m not biased) has a good insight into how writers use time in their writing – both in how we write and also what we write.

Let’s start with What.

Oliver talks about how he learned to “buy time” at the start of his novel. His story grabs you from the start, creating questions and in particular involving you in a complex and off-beat central character. This draws you in and “buys time” for the writer to step back and allow the plot to unfurl at its own pace.

You can see this technique at work in many great film scripts. Sunset Boulevard begins with a dead body (whose owner narrates the story of his own life up to his own murder) and then cuts straight to a chase, allowing Billy Wilder, and his co-writers Charles Brackett and DJ Marshman Jr to buy time to develop the central characters in a series of more thoughtful scenes that follow.

Could you imagine using this creative technique to boost up what could otherwise be a sedate first act?

The same idea also applies to How we write.

Our creative minds often need a little nudge to get going. Often we also feel guilty because there are other demands on our time. We tell ourselves we’ll sit down to write when we’ve done all the other work – but often that work is never-ending – and if it does end we are generally too tired to take advantage.

In this case, I suggest you buy time by doing a deal with yourself. Start the day with a fixed amount of time devoted only to writing. It doesn’t matter how short, you can get a great more written in regular 30 minute or 1 hour slots early in the morning than in a snatched day or two, grabbed out of your schedule at irregular intervals.

It may involve a little motivation – getting up early perhaps, or cutting down on the time you spend on other things – but the good feelings you get as you start immediately moving ahead will soon be their own reward.

If you want to learn more ways to get your creative mind working in powerful ways, then click here.

I’m running Unblock Your Creativity for Euroscript on Saturday November 26th (note this is a date change from the printed brochure).

We’ll be exploring advanced writers’ techniques for enriching your work, whether you are blocked, going slow or just want to tap into that writer’s muse to create better scripts.

These are all practical techniques that I use myself every day in my professional working life, and have kept me creating and earning now for many years.

Join me on an inspiring and invigorating journey into the essential ways of working as a creative writer. Click here to learn more.

How to get writing by getting nasty

What links Tom Waits, suicide and the Klu Klux Klan? They’ve all come up in a recent podcast I was listening to about creativity, writing and the mental games we play.

The more I write, the more I realise that my creative life depends on how I handle my mental game – how I use that highly complex lump of grey matter in my head.

Everyone gets stuck, everyone procrastinates at times, everyone has days when writing comes easily, and days when it doesn’t. The key to unlocking that creative flow is how you handle those issues.

The podcast I was listening to came from the excellent people at Radio Lab, I do recommend them. Titled Help! it looked at various ways that different people have tried to get to grips with that arch-enemy that always seems to be sabotaging our best efforts – ourselves.

Nice or nasty?

And this is where the nasties came in. Because it turns out that while being nice to ourselves may well be a useful way to persuade our mind to get down to work – sometimes it needs a bit of a fright too.

Stuck writing his first book, Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, became so frustrated with his lack of progress he made a serious pact with himself that he would kill himself if he didn’t finish the draft.

Would he have gone through with it? Even he doesn’t know. But what happened was that suddenly his writing mind shifted into gear and words started to flow. The start of a long writing career.

One woman, not a writer this time, found she could only give up smoking if she pledged in front of a friend that she’d donate $5,000 to the Klu Klux Klan if she ever smoked again. The horrific thought of having to go through with her promise succeeded where years of trying had failed.

Could you imagine making such a commitment to writing your next script? Or novel? How successful might you be?

Mind you, I’m not sure that nasty is always the way. Tom Waits was also quoted, saying that every song needs a different approach to getting it to reveal itself in full. Some need to be coaxed and cajoled, others seduced, tempted out and persuaded.

And – yes – some need to be bullied too.

That’s the thing about being a professional. When it comes to getting the work done – you need to be ready to commit to whatever it takes.

Charles Harris is running masterclasses in pitching and how to use your brain for writing success at the London Screenwriters’ Festival from October 27, and Unblock Your Creativity on November 12 2011. Details of both at www.euroscript.co.uk

Want to succeed? Maybe do the opposite.

A short one today.

Have you heard of Kelly Marcel? If not yet, you soon will. You’ll probably, if you’re like me, be deeply and painfully jealous. And she might teach us something.

Kelly is a British writer and actress whose first screenwriting sale has hit the big time. She wrote a TV series which has been bought by Steven Spielberg. Terra Nova, said by the Sunday Times to be the most expensive TV series, per episode, ever made, comes out this Autumn and has already been shortlisted in the Most Exciting New Series category at the Critics’ Choice Television Awards.

Envious yet?

It is, as I say, her first ever writing success. Indeed her first sale. But here’s the important thing.

I heard Kelly say recently that after many tries at screenwriting success Terra Nova was “like nothing else I had ever written.”

Think about that.

How often do you write something that is “like nothing else” you’ve ever written?

Most writers keep writing the same thing, in the hope that somehow the world will change and recognise their greatness.

After struggling to sell scripts whose genius went somehow unappreciated by the industry, some years ago I decided to do something totally different. I set out to write my next script in an entirely different way. Not just the story but my entire approach.

I examined everything I normally did, and did the opposite. I also studied how other writers worked and learned from them.

That screenplay was the first script I sold and indeed went straight to Hollywood to be packaged by a major agency and offered to a major director.

I hope you had a great time during the holidays, and whether you did or didn’t are raring to get writing again. Or maybe you never stopped. Either way, is your writing helping you succeed?

Or is it time to write something like nothing else you have ever written?

Have fun!

Just one trick for screenwriting success

A month to go before my Exciting Treatments workshop means that I can take things easy for a bit, and muse about odds and ends, such why a baby biting his brother’s finger is the most popular video on YouTube and how this can help writers find screenwriting success.

Finger biting for screenwriting success

My good friend writer-director-producer Alan Denman sent me an article about this from the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s the thing – the clip’s called Charlie Bit My Finger – Again! It’s just a short clip of a baby biting his brother Harry on the finger.  Spoiler alert! Harry gets annoyed, then laughs. End of clip – 56 seconds in all. It’s no great art. It’s not even a great video clip.

And this clip has apparently been watched 335 million times!

I’ll repeat that – it’s not a typo – 335 million times. Why?

(My original question was slightly longer and contained a few deleted expletives).

A study by Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania, quoted in the WSJ, analyses success on YouTube – and concludes that success bears no relation to intrinsic content or quality.

Your video can be as clever, relevant, meaningful, or well-written as you like. Nobody cares.

What people want is emotion.

To put it another way, when you watch Charlie Bit My Finger  – or any other film/video/programme – what turns you on is a sequence of strong feelings. You watch two people going through pain, laughter, friendship – here viewers get a whole spectrum in just 56 seconds. And they connect.

Emotional connection – it’s what’s bound people together since humans became humans, if not before.

Why am I saying this obvious thing?

Because this one simple trick is the one thing that 99% of screenwriters forget to do.

They write a thriller or a comedy or a romance and they’re so busy trying to keep all the rules, and get their story points in order, and explain what’s going on (all important in their own way) that they completely forget to do the one thing that will bring them screenwriting success.

Make us feel.

In a good script at least 95% of the scenes should be alight with one of the primary emotions of the film. (That leaves a just few moments of contrast and relief).

Let’s get practical.

The best, in fact the only, way to get people to have emotions is to have them yourself. But digging into your own emotions can be hard work.

However there are some advanced exercises to help you get into the emotional swing. The following exercises should be exciting and energising – for success you should dive in wholeheartedly – do them 100%.

1. Ask yourself what primary emotions you want your readers to feel? This shouldn’t be too difficult – if it’s a thriller then the main emotion is probably fear. A comedy – laughter. A romance – you want them to feel romantic.

2. Stepping out of the script for a moment, go back to a time when you felt that emotion of (say) fear, laughter or romance. Preferably in your life, or if not then in a movie or maybe you’ve heard of other people talk about their own memories.

Whichever, write the incident down as if it were a scene in a film. Make the event and the emotion as real as possible, and as strong.

Make a note of any elements in the scene that created those feelings. Was the context important?  Was there something in the way someone spoke, or acted? The weather? The location? Something you saw, or heard?

What details added extra emotional impact – large or small?

3. Now go back to your script and find a scene that has potential. What elements are creating the emotion you need and can they be added to? What would it feel like if you were really there – feeling fear, or laughter, etc? What might strengthen those feelings? Are there any distracting elements that could be cut?

4. Do that with another scene, and another. Until at least 95% of the scenes in your script are on fire with strong, honest, felt emotion.

Now, do you think that might help bring you a little screenwriting success?

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.