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.

Top 10 Ways to be a Great Writer: #8

Today we have an attribute that I didn’t recognise for a long time.

When great artists of all kinds are discussed we usually get a load of blah about originality and spontaneity as if great creative work appears by magic. Or alternatively from individual slog, the writer alone in his or her garret.

It took me many years of mistakes and failed scripts to realise that true originality and spontaneity comes paradoxically from a deep knowledge of everything that went before. What I see in all the best writers of film, stage and literature (and also directors as it happens) is a love of Life-Long Learning.

Listen to just about any writer or director talk. Say Paul Schrader or Martin Scorsese. They have a profound understanding of their trade, of the people who went before (famous and also obscure), of the most esoteric corners of their art, and are still learning.

As a good screenwriter, what do you need to keep on learning about?

Technique, of course; structure; treatment writing; sales and marketing; mentors – the study of successful writers; the history of film and TV; language, style and vocabulary (too many writers have only one style and no ability to adapt their words to the situation); psychology (what makes characters tick); social settings; the background to your story (Kubrick became a world expert in the subjects of each of his movies); ideas.

How to learn? Any way you enjoy learning. Speaking personally these ways work best for me (in ascending order of effectiveness): websites, podcasts, documentaries, newspapers and magazines, books, personal meetings, workshops (because they compress an enormous amount into a short time).

I’ve personally also had great spin-off rewards from the information I’ve picked up while learning, including a website, magazine articles, a book, TV documentaries and script commissions.

At the same time, the most important part is that you enjoy the learning. Then that enjoyment will shine through everything you create.

Top 10 Ways to be a Great Writer: #9

I should have known better than to start a list.

Back in July I started a Top Ten Ways to be a Great Writer, (No #10 is here) and then I got ridiculously busy and now it’s (embarrassed cough) months later and here at last is number 9.

I promise not to leave it so long before #8.

Meanwhile, for the ninth top attribute of a great writer, I’m going to ask Ernest Hemingway to take a bow and present you with his very own…

Bullshit Detector

No writer can survive without it. It’s that crucial device that sits just between your ears and tells you when you’re coming up with crap.

On the one hand, it’s crucial to be able to come up with rubbish. Editing and judging too early is a major flaw in any creative artist. In the first instance it’s important to – using Stephen King’s phrase – “write with the door closed”.

First drafts are supposed to be manure. But then as you know out of manure beautiful things can grow.

However, it’s not much use if it stays as manure. That’s where EG’s great BS detector comes in.

Second draft, you plug the BS detector in, turn it on and write “with the door open.” You spot the blah and you weed it out with a ruthless venom.

Ernest used to say that he’d seek out “one true sentence” and build from there. It’s not a bad way to go.

Too many otherwise well-written scripts that I see are simply sabotaged because the writer didn’t bother to be truthful. Whether it’s a plot point or a character or just a lack of careful research.

Go looking for truth.

I promise (again) not to leave it so long before posting #8.

And that’s not bullshit.

Top 10 Ways to be a Great Writer: #10

What is it that makes a great writer great? What can we learn from them and hope to emulate? OK, it’s that time of year and maybe the heat’s got to me, but I’m starting a list – my Top Ten Attributes displayed by the greatest writers – those I admire and honour. I don’t mean that they use or don’t use adverbs or three act structure. This is much more personal. And like every list it is totally fallible and biased and mainly intended to annoy, irritate and make people foam at the mouth.

Following all the best TV Best Of lists I’m starting at the bottom, with number 10, will work my way up the list over the next weeks and months and I shall be interviewing a succession of z-list celebs. Well, maybe not that last bit.

So number ten on the top ten list is:

Humility

What? What’s he on? Humility? I thought the top 1 attribute was a massive ego.

Maybe, and then again maybe not. What I admire in the greatest artists of all kinds – screenwriters, novelists, poets and also directors, painters, sculptors, composers, singer-songwriters, street jugglers – is their lack of ego. I mean, yes, when you get them on chat shows they can sound off to save England, but when they get to engage with their material, that’s when the humility shows.

It’s when you’re face to face with the story, the characters, the situation, that’s when you have to put aside all your grand designs and your clever metaphors and your award-winning structural games and be totally and utterly – yes, humbly – at the service of your craft.

I learned this first and foremost in the cutting rooms – starting as a lowly and menial assistant editor, whose main job was to make coffee and log every shot in the rushes. It doesn’t matter what you wanted to shoot, what you intended to shoot and what you thought you had shot. All that matters is what the material tells you to do. (And how good the coffee is).

That, and not the clever ideas that you are sure will win you the Oscar/BAFTA/Booker/Orange Prize, is what actually wins the audience – and if you’re lucky the awards that follow.

The fact is that it’s your story and your characters that ultimately dictate the shape of the structure (three acts or five acts or thirty-two episodes), the tone of the dialogue, the development of the theme, all that. In fact, it’s your original premise that first dictates the development of your story and characters. And who knows where the premise comes from?

Schubert used to say he didn’t invent songs, he found them in the air and wrote them down. Stephen King writes about the process of writing (in On Writing- brilliant book) and likens it to an archaeologist slowly and painstakingly brushing the earth away from a skeleton to reveal its true shape. Note that neither of them talk about playing God, having clever ideas or making something out of nothing.

This is the humility of the craftsman.

So that’s No 10. Now go and talk over your water coolers about what could possibly turn out to be No 9. And if you don’t have a water cooler, go and find one.  This is serious stuff.