Start with that picture in your mind

That’s how I begin writing; I have a picture that inspires me. It could be something like ‘three Knights on horseback on a hill overlooking a village’ or an ‘alien sitting in a restaurant looking at his watch as it countdowns to something.’ The point is, in the beginning there is very little to go on except this image but once I have it and it excites me enough I can start to ask questions about it.

Start asking questions

Questions are great for opening up the little material you have and expanding on it without you having to just think of stuff out of the blue.

Take the alien example above. I can ask questions such as:

• How did he get there?
• What’s his watch counting down to; is it the destruction of the earth?
• Does anyone recognise him?
• Where does he go after this?
• Is anyone chasing him?
• Meat or fish?

You get it anyway. What happens when I start asking these questions is that more images and ideas develop in my mind, some good, some not so good but a whole load of material will start to come together. It’s exciting at this point to think of the possibilities of the story; you can take it anywhere you want.

Follow the leads

Some of these new leads will inspire me again and form the basis of other scenes. At this point nothing should be discarded as it is too soon to decide or make judgements about what is relevant and not and what might be good in the long term. Later, much of this material may be discarded but for now every idea should be kept for possible eventual use.

Name the scenes

Now at this point I will separate what feels like different scenes and give them a short, one line description. Often they will not seem to link together in any feasible way but this again too early to question. If you try too hard to link scenes together before they are ready, you will only end up with a dull and ordinary script; due to the fact you are only using only remembered knowledge of how to write stories from what you’ve read, seen or done before. Your deeper mind will link your story together in far more interesting ways if you let it.

Don’t forget to start writing

The most important part of writing a screenplay is actually starting it! You have to follow an idea that excites you and that you feel you want to write about. It’s time to take that picture or line or whatever it is in your head and get it down onto paper. Don’t worry about a beginning, middle or an end just start with those images that inspire you and the rest will follow.

Again, dialogue is as much about what you omit as what you put in. It’s important to remember that in real life, very, very few people vocalise their thoughts word-for-word. Speech is a contraction of a thought process, often designed to evoke a response as much as it is to impart information; often speech is about disguising a thought process, diverting people away from what we think we may have given away with our eyes.

Which leads me to another point about being economical with dialogue: you need to LEAVE SPACE FOR THE ACTORS. Most writers are compelled to put every bit of information into the dialogue because they think in terms of the action having to be complete on paper, but this is simply not true. Think about the following:

Say two characters – who know each other well – are waiting for an important piece of plot to telephone them (another script-writing mistake, but we’ll come to that). When the phone finally rings, there’ll usually be a bit of dialogue along the lines of. “That’s our boy”, or something as one of them approaches the phone. It’s simply redundant (and stupid). All you need to indicate is that the characters exchange a look. If the actors are any good, the audience will know exactly what that look is communicating.

It maybe an old cliché, an actor saying he wants to cut a chunk of dialogue because he can say the same thing simply with his face, but like most clichés it’s actually true, a good actor really can impart a line or two’s worth of information with just a look – and doing it visually is always the better way; it is, after all, a visual medium. Now that may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many scripts don’t appear to reflect this.

And another cliché about dialogue is you should speak it out loud. This cannot be emphasised enough, because it’s the only way to work out if it has the correct rhythm to it. After all, if the writer can’t speak his own words comfortably, how the hell can he expect the actors to?

‘Mike Johnson’ is scriptwriter…yeah, he is.

On Writing (which is well worth a read) on the subject of story. He likens the process of fashioning a story to that of uncovering a specimen in archaeology, that you chip and brush away at the tiny fragments until finally you have uncovered a complete entity. I think he’s really right about this, because ALL STORIES SHOULD ADHERE TO THEIR OWN INTERNAL LOGIC. It’s one of the most widespread mistakes in script writing, and it largely involves making characters do things that they clearly wouldn’t do in reality (or even worse, in the reality you’ve set up).

You know what it’s like, watching a crap film, when a character suddenly does something outrageously stupid or completely out-of-character, and it’s all because the writer suddenly makes them do something for the sole reason that that the plot requires them do it – it is sheer laziness. This is what I mean about writing being a craft. If you want to do it, you have to adhere to the internal logic; and if you want a character to do something, you have to make it believable for him or her to do so.

I’ll make the example very basic. Say, at a particular juncture in the events, that your main character has a choice of three different avenues to pursue: now the lazy way is simply to have him choose the route – avenue 3 – that leads him to the desired climax of the story, but in real life (i.e. internal logic) it’s not so simple, there may be a variety of reason why avenues 1 or 2 may be taken. The best way to adhere to logic is instead of making him decide which route to take, find reasons that actually prevent him from taking avenues 1 or 2.

Just remember to listen to your characters, if you understand them enough, they will tell you which way the story is going to go next; and be prepared, because it’s often in an entirely different direction to the one you thought you were taking. This is one of the reasons why the rigidity of the “three-act structure” or the card system can work against you, because sometimes you need to hear your characters speaking before you know what will happen next.

To be fair, a lot of this can be worked out when your first draft is complete and you’re going back through it.

As your first draft will more than likely be from the point of view of the main character, it’s important to go through it again making different “passes” for different characters. By that I mean going right through the script and looking at the all events from the point of view of each minor character. This is the best way of finding out whether or not they’re behaving realistically; finding out if – when someone responds to the hero with the reply “yes, that’s not a problem” – the real response is actually, “are you crazy? They know where my wife and children live!”.

A lot of this comes down to really getting to know your characters and the worlds they inhabit – in their own heads and beyond. Most of them are simply versions of you who have been through different experiences. But don’t mistake this difference. Say, for example, you have a character who suddenly gets a gun pointed into their face; if that person is a soldier, or a bodyguard or an armed robber, they’re going to act differently than if they are a teacher or singer; and if they are the latter, they’re going to turn cold, feel faint and possibly shit themselves. Just because they are your heroes, you can’t fake bravado in the face of cold reality, it just won’t wash.

Mike Johnson is a scriptwriter

Try to give your characters names of differing lengths: it’s a lot easier to take in who’s saying what if the speakers are called RICHARD, TED and MR. STEVENSON than if they’re called DAVID, JAMES and STEVE. (You don’t have to stick with these in the dialogue – in speech they can call each other whatever you want them to – just as long as their character name is consistent ahead of the dialogue and in the stage directions).

Put your scene headings (INT. POLICE STATION – DAY) in bold, it makes the location changes much more obvious, particularly during action sequences. (The Final Draft default doesn’t set them in bold, but it’s simply enough to customise)

Break up your stage directions into paragraphs, there’s nothing more tedious when you’re trying to read quickly than three-quarters of a page of unbroken text. Try to think of the action in terms of camera and break your paragraphs accordingly: when moving from one character’s actions to another; or when you think there’d be a cut from a medium-ish shot to a close-up; that sort of thing.

However, DO NOT WRITE CAMERA DIRECTIONS,

it works against you, in much the same way as writing huge, long chunks of description at the beginning of every scene does. This is information for camera and art department, not for an initial reader; the best chance your script has is if it reads at roughly the same speed on the page as it eventually will on the screen.

If information has to be imparted, do it within the scene, through the movements or action of characters; learn how to INTEGRATE, and you will do your work much more justice.

The basic mistake is to think that describing exactly what is in your mind’s eye gives the reader a more accurate picture of the location. It doesn’t, what it gives is a glut of information that blurs the initial image the reader will have in their head from the first sentence.

This is an example of how I think description is done best. Say your character is coming into a seedy bedsit (already, if you use those two words, it creates a fairly strong image in the reader’s mind), don’t give us half a page of the bed, the sink, the walls, etc. just give us something like:

JOHN walks into the seedy bedsit, its filth illuminated by a single, unshaded light-bulb.

Now there’s enough in that single sentence to produce an image in the reader’s mind that is more than enough to play the scene in. It doesn’t matter that the image may be bit different for each reader, the idea is to put them immediately into a place the action can take place in.

- LEARN TO LEAVE OUT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.

Like good music, good writing is as much about the beats you leave out as those you put in.

That said, you should really make the effort to write your stage directions as good as you possibly can, because if they aren’t interesting, they will get skipped and the reader will miss a lot of what is going on in the script. If the stage directions are economical, pithy and enjoyable to read, more of your script will cross that huge gulf between the printed page and the reader’s mind.

‘Mike Johnson’ is a scriptwriter

Now there are plenty of books on the market which will tell you the right and wrong ways to write a script; this is a fallacy –

-THERE IS NO RIGHT OR WRONG WAY TO WRITE A SCRIPT (other than “on time” if you’re being paid).

Every tutor or manual in the world spends half its time banging on about the three-act structure, in such a fashion that I believe it has now become detrimental to creative script-writing. “Three act structure” is just another way of saying every story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, which every good story achieves, usually without requiring that such-and-such piece of information has been imparted by page 35, and so-and-so a character has reached the peak of his arc by page 68. Knowing that a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end is just common sense, and so writing a good one is much the same.

Basically, whatever works for you is the correct way to write, be it a system of plot-points on cards, a huge wall chart filled with characters and arrows, or simply an idea for an opening line on page one that spurs you onwards. This last approach may seem like madness, but that’s exactly how the Coen Brothers write scripts – almost blindly, without any real inkling of the outcome of events.

One of the first and easiest traps to fall into when writing is to constantly re-write. On your first day you may write, say, six pages, then on day two you’ll fiddle with those pages before you continue, thus getting sucked into the trap, and what you’ll find, a week later, is you’re still re-writing those same six pages with nothing else to show for it. On the first draft,

-RESIST THE URGE TO FIDDLE.

The best way to write a first draft (in my opinion) is to start and simply not stop; now a lot of what you write will probably be sub-standard but that’s what first drafts are for – getting to page 100 and typing “Fade Out”. At that point you can then go back and start making it all good (or even better – as Stephen King suggests – put it in a drawer for four to six weeks and then come back to it, with a far more balanced eye for what works and what’s bullshit).

It can be a hard discipline to achieve but it’s well worth it, and all it really requires, when you become stuck on how to start or what to do in a scene, is the ability to come up with something, anything, that fits the bill enough to allow you to progress – and you’ll be amazed how much stuff you’ll eventually keep by working this way, because it’s coming from a gut level. Learn to rely on your gut, because trusting your instincts instead of a manual is how you will find your own voice.

Don’t be precious about you work, the only way to develop any sense of self-criticism (which is vital) is to approach re-reading your script as though someone else has written it. If things don’t work, you must be able to recognise that or you’ll never improve.

And even if something works, you may still have to bin it. It’s just words, they can be changed – serving the story is the important thing. As William Goldman says, you must learn to

-KILL YOUR BABIES.

You might have written the greatest scene you ever wrote, but if it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the script, it has to go; if it contains information that’s redundant, or has already been imparted, it has to go;

-IF IT DOESN’T SERVE THE STORY, IT HAS TO GO.

Don’t be afraid to gut your script, it might be the only thing that saves it. And don’t mistake homages for theft. Most so-called homages, if you removed them from the scene, would leave the scene with no reason to be there. Remember, don’t write it a certain way because you’ve seen it done before, write it because you haven’t seen it done before.

‘Mike Johnson’ is a scriptwriter held in the highest esteem and not just by his mom and pop.

A lot of people have a desire to write but just don’t know where to begin.

1. I’m not ready.
2. I’m too busy.
3. I don’t have all the answers yet.
4. I’m not a writer.

Well if you have had an idea swimming around inside you for a while then you are definitely ready, so that’s no 1 gone.

Being too busy is a reality for many of us but we could probably all find a little time each day; there are plenty of books available on time management.

You’ll never have all the answers at the start and this is true of any new task or skill you want to learn. It’s called the fear of making a mistake, wanting it to be perfect, wanting not to fail. If we give in to this one we will never start anything.

Do you think you’re not writer? Well maybe so because not everyone can be but have you tried yet? Or is it just another way of not starting? You won’t know you’re a writer until you’ve written lots and lots. And here’s the rub – the more we do something, the better we get at it: so you can scrub number 4 too.

Let’s look at ways to begin at the beginning.

Have you heard that old chestnut, “a thousand mile journey starts with a single step”? I’m sure you have. Writing is just like that. You can dance around the issue for years but until you sit down and write the story you’ve always wanted to write, it just won’t happen.

The best place to begin is wherever you are now. Make some space in your life and dedicate it to your writing. Find a physical place to work where you won’t be disturbed and begin to make it a habit to go there and write, even if it’s only half an hour a day. Have a pen and paper waiting there or set up your computer so it’s ready to go.

Write constantly for that period and don’t worry if it’ not great quality material. We want to write a first draft, not a finished masterpiece.

If you write a page a day that would be 365 pages a year and that’s a good sized novel! A screenplay is much shorter than that. Half a page a day would hit around the 180 page mark. That could be two first draft screenplays! Can you imagine how satisfying it would be to have 180 pages of your own writing sitting on your desk?

Well, at the start, aim for a ninety page script. With motivation, you can probably write three to four script pages a day. Then you could have a screenplay drafted in one month!

What if you don’t have a story yet?

If you only have one scene in your head, then write it down. Do not wait for inspiration to give you the rest of the story before you write.

Once you begin writing with excitement and enthusiasm you will be desperate to get this story out of the dark recesses of your mind. You will find, with uncanny regularity, different and usable ideas popping into your head. Creativity begins to work when you do. Once you commit yourself to the task in hand, your intuition will begin to nudge your consciousness with mysterious and connected notions. Only when you start to move forward, will your best script ideas follow. The good stuff never makes an appearance while you carry around a lukewarm desire to write something.

Persistent focus on writing will pay huge dividends and it won’t feel like work. Once that story takes hold, you will be excited and passionate and have a keen edge to your thoughts and your ideas. Put pen to paper today!

Check out these posts: How to write a screenplay: Start with the picture in your head, How to write a screenplay: Kick start your script, How to write a screenplay: Freewriting to unleash your creativity and How to write a screenplay: 7 tips for writing a great screenplay.

‘Free-writing’ is one technique that should be used by the screenwriter on a consistent basis and not just for those moments when you are absolutely stuck or desperate.

What is free-writing?

Free-writing is the very simple technique of writing down whatever comes into your mind for a set period of time, say, about five minutes and no more. You do this without censoring yourself, which means you don’t stop after one sentence and make a judgement about how good that sentence is or whether it is worth continuing with. Forget all that until you have filled up half a page, or better still a page.

• Take an idea that you have in your mind; maybe about a scene or a character.
• Pick several keywords that relate to the idea or concept that you want to write about. For example, you have a sci-fi concept, so you decide on: planet, ship, and turbulence. It could be anything.
• Pick something that excites you. Remember we are trying to get those creative juices flowing so it has to be something that you can feel motivated about and this exercise is all about getting past your own critical censor. It is a good idea to incorporate the keywords into sentences when you start the exercise. Even though you have just plucked them from the ‘Ether ‘, using them somewhere in your following free-write will give you the initial direction you need.

So now you start writing and don’t hold back and don’t worry about the words coming out. How hard is that for five minutes?

What if everything I write is gibberish?

Just keep on letting all that subconscious material tumble out. Don’t judge your work or apply any critical process to what you’re doing until the end of the exercise. The idea is that letting this constant flow of words and ideas spill out onto the page is a way of bypassing the conscious, critical mind and letting the creative imagination have full reign.

Don’t be tempted to write for longer periods like this. Free-writing is a short burst activity which you can do over and over again, as often as you want but just make sure you have a break in between sessions.

Often, when we have been sat at our desk or computer most of the day and have written one paragraph, it is because we are putting too much pressure on ourselves to come up with perfect material and the perfect script from scratch. This is an easy trap to fall into and one of the main reasons for it, is the belief that the harder we think with our conscious mind, the better the lines will be. But, there is no point in spending hours or days on a few lines when we have the rest of the story to write. Of course, we will need our brilliant, critical faculty for those times when we have written tons of material that then needs pruning and shaping but you can’t be a perfectionist with the first few drafts of a screenplay. You have to get it written and fleshed out. If you take too long about it, the original and fresh idea you had may start to seem stale and lacking in life. Once the majority of your film is written and the big picture is in place then all those smaller details can be attended to.