Screenwriting

Office Hours

Q.

Hey George,

Long-time reader; first-time caller. Thank you for everything you do here with Story Club. Apologies if this question has been asked before.

I'm a screenwriter curious about your thoughts on how (if at all) your approach to writing differs when tackling a format not meant to be read in its final form (screenwriting, playwriting, writing for TV, etc.). I know you've written in some of these mediums before, and I'm curious to hear any wisdom or advice you might have for those of us who write for the screen or stage as opposed to the page.

Thanks so much,

A.

Thank you for your question.

I have written screenplays before, without much success, honestly. There was one I really loved, for “Sea Oak” (its concluding few minutes are below). We shot a pilot episode, back in 2017. The experience was great, collaborative, inspiring – but then Amazon elected not to pick it up.

Ben Stiller and I have been working, on and off, since 1998 (!) to do something with “ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” but so far…no.

Other than “Sea Oak,” I’ve never yet had a screenplay I’ve written get made, which tells me that, yes, there’s something very different between writing fiction and writing for film or TV – some essential mojo that has, so far, eluded me. I’ve never tried an original screenplay, just adaptations of my own work.

So, clearly, I have zero expertise in this area.

But I know there are many (many) talented screenwriters in the Story Club community, with years of experience and wisdom – so my inclination here is to just turn it over to all of you.

A couple of thoughts to get us started….

One idea I’ve had about this adaptation thing is simply that each art form has its own mode of currency. We proceed through a work of art, in time, and as each little time-nugget passes by, we decide whether to carry on. (In an earlier post about screenwriting, I referred to this nugget as a “power-conveying artifact” (PCA)).

When we read the first lines of a book, we’ve got everything the writer has: a first word, a phrase, a sentence. When the writer was working on that book, he could experience that nugget over and over again, adjusting it until it was just right.

In a film, it’s different. The writer writes: “Exterior, Day, Mall: A man walks through a typical suburban mall, talking on his phone,” and that’s a nugget but, because of the way films get made, we don’t know if that nugget is any good or not. It all depends – on how it’s shot, on the performance, on the music, and so on.

Or, we might more correctly say that the whole simultaneous package (action, angle, lighting, music, etc) is the nugget.

So, the difference between fiction and screenwriting begins there, I think.

If I wanted to open my book with a man walking through a mall, talking on a cell phone, I’d have to come up with a charming, convincing way (a sentence) to make you see and believe that – make you buy into it. I could work and work at making that sentence good, and it’s all me doing the work – there aren’t any unknowns, really. I write it, read it, revise it, on and on until I feel you’ll be convinced.

In film, that guy is just there. There he is, right before our eyes, in a certain shirt, and so on. So, that element of co-creation isn’t there…or it’s there a little differently. The director has made some choices about how the guy looks and the angle from which he’s shot and so on – choices that, in a book, the reader and the writer would be making together

I find writing scripts both frustrating (the skill I’ve trained in all these years – the sound of language, for the most part denied me) and also liberating. If I want ten thousand ecstatic penguins dancing on a bald guy’s head – I just write that, and a talented team of people will supply it. (I don’t need to work at constructing the sentence that will make you see it).

This is what people mean, I think, when they say that screenwriting is about structure – you can have whatever elements you like. You just….type them. The power, then, moves over to what you choose to do with them, and in what order.

When I’m writing a script, I often get to a place that feels similar to the place I get to when writing music: I feel, somehow, that I don’t love the form enough to make the hardest choices. I reach a decision point and it seems unclear which is the best direction to go.

Although it may not be that I don’t “love” the form, exactly (I dearly love music). It may be that, for whatever reason, forms other than prose aren’t deep enough in ingrained in me. When I pick up a page from a story I’m working on, I instantly have opinions – strong ones, which I would die on a hill for.

With music, with scripts, I feel more like a happy amateur. (I feel myself saying, “Is this good? I don’t know.”) Whereas, in fiction…I know.

My work in those modes lacks a certain commitment; I find myself more often asking, “What is usually done?” and trying to do that, whereas, when writing fiction, I only ask that so that I can swerve the hell away from it.

But, again: we have true experts among us, and so let’s hear from them.

Here are some things I find myself wanting to ask the pros among us:

What, for you, is the primary difference between fiction and screenwriting?

If you are a dedicated screenwriter, when was the moment in your life that sent you down that path? That first, “Ah, I love this” moment?

Are there methods you can think of, that might help a fiction writer make the leap into screenwriting?

What’s the best advice you ever got or read about screenwriting?

And finally: what’s the best script, made or unmade, ever written? (Not best movie, necessarily, but script). And…why is it the best?

Thanks in advance, for your advice and thoughts…