Why sometimes you have to write a bad scene

This may sound strange, but did you know that writing a good scene may not be right for your script – sometimes only a bad scene will do.

This week I reached a climactic point in my current project. Moved on past the climax – and then stopped dead. It wasn’t exactly writers’ block. I wrote a scene and it was OK, but something was wrong.

I was trying to write a good scene and it wasn’t working. I spent some time thinking of all the alternative good scenes and none of these worked either.

As Sherlock Holmes said (more or less): if you’ve eliminated all the probable answers, the one that’s left, however unlikely, has to be the solution.

Or to put it another way, if the good scenes don’t work – the only thing left is to write a bad one. At least if I wrote a bad scene, I could move on, stop thinking about it and I could always come back later and revise it (maybe even cut it altogether).

Now here’s the thing: there are two kinds of bad scenes. There are good bad scenes and bad bad scenes.

A bad bad scene can fool you into thinking it’s a good scene. A bad bad scene is a scene that has superficial technique but nothing underneath. The lights are on, but nobody’s at home.

My failed good scene was actually a bad bad scene. It ticked away beautifully, was well written, with humour and style – and went absolutely nowhere. It was a fake. The characters had no goal. Nothing happened. It was fundamentally dishonest. It sat there, like a boulder in the stream, stopping the flow.

Bad bad scenes generally come from the desire to be good rather than truthful.

I scrapped it, and wrote a deliberately unstylish scene. A good bad scene is one that may be clunky, inelegant, may break all the rules of technique – but it’s honest and it gets the job done.

I eliminated all attempts to make it funny or attractive. No clever visuals or sharp dialogue. I just put down the action that was needed to go from the scene before to whatever followed.

In the process, I freed up the story. The characters were able to be truthful and follow their needs. We moved on.

Have a look at your scenes – are there any bad bad scenes lurking there, pretending to be good? If you’re stuck, check to see if you’ve been so clever you’ve jammed yourself in a stylish cul-de-sac.

Cut all unnecessary technique. Scrap attempts to polish what doesn’t deserve to be polished. Throw out cheap jokes, false tension and unearned emotion.

And be happy to be bad.

Professional writing is about knowing more than one way to solve a problem. There are many different skills that go into writing strong and effective scenes.

If you’re interested, I’ve created one of my favourite workshops – the ScreenPLAY Advanced Summer School - so called, because you learn by role-playing. Essentially you pick up skills in the fastest and most effective way, by working like a studio screenwriter. For three days, you get a series of commissions, each of which leads you to learn a new skill and learn to overcome typical problems you will meet as a professional working in the industry.

It’s a very powerful way to become a solid confident screenwriter, with the knowledge to deal easily with the daily demands of screenwriting – and enjoy being on top of your game.

It’s in London – Friday July 27 to Sunday July 29 – full details here.

Come and dare to be bad!

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…

Give your future readers a Christmas present

Christmas is coming and the writers are getting twitchy. Are you planning to use the glorious break from everyday life to do some serious writing on that long-delayed script or novel?

Give yourself and your future readers the best possible Christmas present.

It’s only too easy to spend all that time hammering away at all the things you feel you ought to be doing – setting up plot, explaining character, making the story happen in the right order – and forget to do the one most important thing that you have to do.

That’s not what we watch movies or read books for. And certainly not what makes writing fun.

This Christmas, focus on giving your readers what they really want: a reason to keep on reading.

As you write each scene, as you finish each page, ask yourself what you are giving your reader that would make them want to read on.

Is it a question you’ve posed? Or an emotion you’ve created? A threat that you’ve made us anxious about? Is the central character deeply conflicted? Or totally misguided yet we care about her? Is her dialogue crackling with (say) wit, insight, malice or self-deception? Are we entering a fascinating new location? Or seeing a familiar place in an unusual way? Have you separated two lovers who belong together? Or united two who don’t?

It is rightly said that it is better to give than to receive.

In the same way, posing questions and creating emotions for your readers will not only be better for them – it will make your script much  more enjoyable to write.

Remember, they call them screenplays for a reason – go play.

And have a fulfilling, successful and rewarding 2012.

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?

One question that will help you sell your script

Just finished the ScreenPLAY Professional Screenwriting Weekend last week, and we had great fun. The writers all showed up with a tremendous professional attitude.

Of course, being professional implies earning money at some point, so I’m now getting ready for Selling Your First Script on July 30 (of which more below) – and thinking about both trainings led me to consider the key question at the heart of being a professional writer.

The right question follows soon. First here’s the wrong question:

Beginner writers who want to sell their scripts ask, “Who will buy this?”

That’s an important question but it’s not the most important issue. The big question is, “Who will watch this?”

Once you know who your audience is, and know it well, then finding a buyer becomes much more focused and efficient.

This is not about writing for the market – writing for the market is not a good idea. It’s about writing with an understanding of the market, so that you can ensure that what you want to write gets made and helps you pay the bills.

There are three things you need to do, to find out who will watch your film – whether cinema or TV.

1. Read the trades – for example Screen International or Variety for movies, Broadcast or Variety for TV. This is not really an option, it’s an essential investment of your time and (probably) money. If you are lucky you may find them at your local library or film institute, however a subscription now also brings daily online updates.

Also read the appropriate newspapers – in the UK that means the Guardian Media supplement for TV (Mondays) and Music & Film supplement (Fridays). I would add the Review supplement on Saturdays which covers the art and craft of writing of all kinds.

2. Thoroughly research every kind of film or TV programme that is in any way like yours. Find out who it appealed to. Where and when did it show? Large multiplexes or specialist cinemas? Prime time BBC1 or 3am on Channel 5? What was it about them that worked (or didn’t work) for those audiences?

The film and TV guides are essential here. Also some of the trades, such as Screen International have online databases that will give you background information.

To some extent your target audience will probably start with you – most writers write films or programmes that they would watch themselves. But you need to go deeper than this, if you are not going to be left with an audience of one.

Be ruthlessly honest with yourself here and don’t take anything for granted. Don’t assume you know what appeals to a multiplex or specialist audience. Find out. Which leads to…

3. Get out and talk to industry professionals. Try out your ideas – find out if what you are proposing will work for the audience you think is yours.

Go to festivals, networking events and trainings. Again, these are important investments of time and money. There is no substitute for direct contact with other industry professionals.

Once you know your audience, you are much closer to knowing who to sell to – because they will most probably be making the companies you’ve just researched, making films and programmes for the same audience as you.

And if you’ve taken on board what your research has told you, you’ll be able to target them in a way that will make them want to read your script.

In Selling Your First Script, I’ll be helping a select group of writers research their audiences, as well as develop strong pitches, learn what producers want, how to approach them, how to take a meeting and how to negotiate a good deal.

I keep the numbers low – around 12-18 – so that we can discuss everyone’s project in very practical ways. Many people have gone on from this workshop to sell their scripts.

If you’re interested, it’s all day Saturday July 30 in Central London, there are places available at the moment and you can read more details and book here now.

Happy hunting!

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.

Sneaky Ways To Hide Exposition

As the June Weekend Summer School comes closer I’ve been working on some of the advanced techniques we’ll be covering, and one of the most crucial is how to handle exposition.

This one really sorts the professionals from the wannabes, and I’m going to share one of my top exposition techniques with you here.

First, if you want to have serious fun working thoroughly on professional screenwriting skills, from linear and non-linear, flashbacks and strong characters, to top-level editing, believable dialogue and evocative visuals, over a weekend at the end of June, and do it as you would in a studio, then the link to find out more and to book your place is:

http://www.euroscript.co.uk/screen-play.html

Meanwhile, back to exposition. Many writers think exposition means clunky dialogue-ridden scenes where the characters tell you important but heavy-handed information such as:

“Did you know you can get jobs that help you get out of the ghetto?”

“No, really, would that help us escape deportation and also buy eggs that we can’t get inside?”

“Funny you should say that…”

In fact that is what is technically known as bad exposition! I call it “overt” exposition.

Great scripts are full of exposition, but in “covert” form – great writers are adept at hiding their exposition so that you get the information without noticing it. There are 22 different ways of doing this, all of which we study at the Summer School, and I’m going to share the first of them.

If you’re interested in giving yourself a challenge, all 22 can be seen in a single brilliant sequence of Schindler’s List written by Stephen Zaillian. It’s the sequence approximately 25 minutes from the start in which Stern hires Jews in order to save them from deportation to the death camps.

Anyway, here’s the #1 exposition technique: dramatic action is the heart of all good scripts, so if you have exposition to hide, use the dramatic thrust of the scene.

For example, in the sequence from Schindler’s List, Stephen Zaillian first creates a strong dramatic throughline: Stern and his colleagues want to save as many Jewish men, women and children as possible, but the Jews of the time were confused and uncertain as to what was going on.

Within this context it is totally logical that Stern and his colleagues should use the information they have to try to persuade the Jews of the enormous danger they are in and how they can escape.

We are hooked by the drama, and in the process we learn a host of facts which will be essential to understanding the story that will follow.

Making the exposition part of the unfolding dramatic structure is a very powerful way of imparting information to the viewer in a hidden way. Try it in your current script.

However, be aware that it will not always be possible to make every piece of exposition dramatic. Sometimes the structure won’t allow it. Sometimes it would simply take too long, or involve action that would not be right at the time.

This is why we need the other 21 tricks.

Check out the movie and see how many different tricks Stephen Zaillian uses to slip exposition in without you noticing.

(You’ll need to watch the actual film, this sequence is not included in the early draft script available on the net).

As I say, we’ll be looking at all 22 ways to hide exposition in the weekend Summer School which starts 6.00pm on Friday June 24. I want to make this an intensive experience for a relatively small group, where you are immersed in the techniques of professional screenwriting whatever your level of expertise.

If you would like to be involved go now to http://www.euroscript.co.uk/screen-play.html.