The Screenwriter's Path

From Idea to Script to Sale

Diane Lake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317232940
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Screenwriter's Path takes a comprehensive approach to learning how to write a screenplay—allowing the writer to use it as both a reference and a guide in constructing a script. A tenured professor of screenwriting at Emerson College in Boston, author Diane Lake has 20 years' experience writing screenplays for major studios and was a co-writer of the Academy-award winning film Frida. The book sets out a unique approach to story structure and characterization that takes writers, step by step, to a completed screenplay, and it is full of practical advice on what to do with the finished script to get it seen by the right people. By demystifying the process of writing a screenplay, Lake empowers any writer to bring their vision to the screen.

Part One
Taking the First Steps

What You Need to Know to Write a Screenplay

1
Original or Adapted

Which Are You Writing?

While it may seem odd to begin talking about screenwriting by asking this question, it really is the first question you need to answer.

An original screenplay is one that you write without basing it on anything else. So you haven’t taken your story from a book, a magazine article, an editorial in the newspaper, etc. The story for this screenplay is something that you came up with. It can be purely fictional or it can be based on a real event. But in both cases, the story is yours.

This is an easy distinction if you’ve come up with a story about a young kid who stows away on a spaceship bound for Mars. It’s easy to see that’s certainly fictional and unless you copied the idea from someone else’s work, it would be your original story. But if you write about a murder that really happened in your town, is that an original story? Well, the answer is, “it depends.”

If the murder has certain facts that define it—what happened and when it happened—and you don’t rely on anyone else’s analysis of this murder, you can write your story of the murder and it would be original. However, if you take your analysis of why the murderer did what he did from a newspaper reporter’s analysis of the guy’s motives, then it’s not original—it’s based on someone else’s unique telling of that story.

It’s a fine line, isn’t it? If a murder happens, 10 screenwriters could write about it in 10 different ways, each telling their own original story of that murder.

If you read a series of articles by a newspaper reporter and you use those as the basis for your story, you’re writing an adapted screenplay, not an original one. You can contact the newspaper reporter and ask her permission to use her articles as the basis for your screenplay, but believe me, you’ll have to pay her handsomely for the privilege! (More about optioning rights to stories in Chapter 8.)

So if you’re basing your original story on real events, just be sure that your telling of those events is from your unique perspective and you haven’t used anyone else’s analysis of those events.

Many screenwriters, though, simply want to write an original story about a road trip or a romance or a death or a cyborg or whatever. You have this story that just sort of ‘came’ to you and you have the need to tell it. That’s definitely an original story, no question.

Interesting fact: more adapted screenplays are produced each year than original ones. That means more stories based on novels, biographies, newspaper articles, etc., are produced each year than original stories. A big reason this is the case is that studios and producers like to be sure a story has public interest. If a novel has been published and has sold well, there’s a bit of validation there that the story is of interest to people, so more people might go to a movie based on that novel. If a series of newspaper articles on the drug underworld in Manhattan really captured the interest of the public, the studios think there’s a good chance the story might capture people’s interest on film as well. Bottom line? The studios—and many producers—are risk-averse, they want sure things. As we know, there are no sure things when it comes to making a successful movie, but if the genesis of the film is a successful book or newspaper article, they’re more inclined to take that risk.

So ask yourself, which will it be, original or adapted?

Original Screenplays: What You Probably Want to Write

If you want to be a screenwriter, chances are it’s because you have original stories you want to tell. They can be stories loosely based on your own life or they can be stories you’ve totally imagined, but either way, you just have something inside you that makes you a storyteller.

My mother, a very simple woman who left school in the 7th grade, asked me once where all my stories came from. I thought about that because, well, I’d never really thought about it until she asked that question. So I tried to think of a way to explain it that she could relate to. Here’s our conversation:

MOM

Where do all them stories you

write come from anyway?

ME

Well… think about it like this.

Imagine you’re on a bus. You look

across the aisle and see a man.

Don’t you wonder what he’s doing on

the bus? What he does for a living?

What his life is like? Don’t you

wonder about that?

MOM

Huh? I probably just look at him

and wonder how come he’s got such

a big nose.

And believe me, she wasn’t being funny. My sweet mother didn’t look at the world the way I did at all. I guess most people don’t. I expect most people look at others and analyze them given their own wants and desires as far as that other person is concerned, but do they really wonder about the inner life of their boss or grandparent or the check-out clerk at the supermarket? Doubtful.

But that’s what writers do. Writers wonder about those things and imagine the answers—and those imagined answers become stories.

Some people dream stories, others look at one thing and that makes them think about another thing and from the connection comes a story idea. Every person I meet, every person I know, could be a story. Therapists are driven to listen to patients’ stories and help them make sense of them in regard to their lives. Writers are driven to write those stories down and imagine even bigger stories, stories that resonate even more.

However you make connections, the stories that keep coming back to you—that stay in your head and just won’t go away—those are fodder for an original screenplay. If a story stays with you a long time or if it just comes to you one day and sort of makes you gasp with wonder, however it happens, you’ll know when you need to write a screenplay based on it—the story itself will speak to you.

So it’s understandable that you’d want to write stories that mean something to you, that resonate with you, and that’s the most common choice for the beginning writer. Nothing wrong with that. But there’s a whole other story area that you need to think about, and if you do, maybe you’ll change your mind and jump ship from writing original stories.

Adapted Screenplays: What You Should Really Think about Writing

Adapted screenplays, ones that are based on another source, have outpaced original screenplays in terms of production for quite a few years now. Interestingly, it’s the same with reality television right now—more of those shows are popping up than ever before. Is it because they’re better and of a higher quality than scripted shows? Stupid question, right? To those of us who write stories, reality shows are the scourge of our time! But let’s think a minute about just why they’re so popular.

Could reality shows be as popular as they are just because they’re true? They’re ‘real’ people, ‘just like us’ one could say. No one can say the stories being told on Survivor or The Bachelor are unreal, can they? In fact, part of the fun for many people watching them is to see how far these people will go in their quest for money or fame. People like real—witness the ancient Romans creating spectacles by having the Christians fight the lions, and the popularity of sports is never-ending—people love watching things happen in real time where they can’t predict the outcome. Which means, bottom line, people like to watch stories that are happening now, that they can follow in real time. The real holds more allure than the ‘made up’.

So maybe you should rethink that original screenplay you think you want to write and ask yourself if there’s a ‘real’ story out there that you could tell. Whether it’s adapting a fairy tale (nearly all of which are old enough to be in public domain), or your great-grandmother’s trek out of Germany to escape the Nazis in WWII, or the story of a race car driver’s comeback after being injured, there are a multitude of real stories that are dying to be told.

Another reason to try an adapted story is that there are so many of them! If you love to write, let’s say you’ve written short stories or plays or newspaper/magazine articles but aren’t sure exactly what you’d write if you were to tackle a screenplay, going the adapted route may be for you. If you can find a true story that you can bring, through your original eyes, to the screen, it’s a way for you to get going.

Getting going is important. A lot of people talk about writing a screenplay but not many of them ever actually do it—and that could be just decision anxiety, i.e., “what do I write first?” Writing an adaptation will let you get underway now, not a few months from now.

Another reason to write an adaptation is to have it in your repertoire—you want an adaptation sample script to be able to show that you can tell true stories.

If you’re adapting a 500-page book or a long, involved trial—well, that’s probably too big a task for a new screenwriter… better to understand how screenplays are done by writing your own, original screenplay first. But a fairy tale? Might be interesting to tackle.

The ins and outs of writing an adaptation are discussed in more detail in Chapter 8. For now, just be aware that if you’re drawn to true stories, adaptations may be the way to go.

Whichever You Choose, a Story Is a Story Is a Story

This is hugely important to understand, whether you dream up a screenplay about a child battling leukemia or whether you write a film based on the true story of a child who is battling leukemia, you need for that battle to be a story that’s worth telling.

Wait a minute, you might say, any story of a child battling leukemia is important. Agreed—for sure. But that doesn’t make it worthy of telling as a screenplay.

There was, for a very long time, a category of TV movie called ‘the disease of the week’ movie. A young woman (almost always a woman, sometimes a child) fights against all odds to overcome her terrible disease and return to her loving husband/boyfriend/parent/family. You see vestiges of this sort of story on television today, no doubt about it. It’s a formula that some networks found to work for them very well:

ACT I:	Life is good, then she finds she has a disease that will either kill her or severely ruin her quality of life. Oh, she’s usually beautiful, too.
ACT II:	Her battle with the disease is arduous—it takes a toll on her and her significant other, perhaps even strains the bonds of their relationship. She has a best friend who is always there for support, though. But the battle is tough and as the act ends, it looks like it will be a losing battle for her—she will die or be disfigured for life or end up in a wheelchair or whatever.
ACT III:	After she’s reached her lowest point, something happens to turn everything around … she begins to get better! And the support of her significant other is a big part of her improvement. As the act wears on, we can hardly believe it—maybe she’s going to make it! And as the film ends, she does. All is right with the world.

Did you feel a bit of cynicism creeping into my summary? Yeah, well, you’re right—this is not my favorite way to tell a story. It’s formulaic to the max and it pulls on our heartstrings—I mean, if we say we didn’t like the movie, that could be taken as us not having any empathy for people battling leukemia, or whatever disease the character had.

There was, by the way, another category of TV film called the ‘woman in jep’ movie—the woman in jeopardy. Just as with the disease of the week movie, the woman in jeopardy followed the same format—but in place of the disease, she was in some sort of situation where she was threatened by an ex, stalked by a co-worker, a witness to a mob killing, etc. This put her in jeopardy and she spent the movie trying to get out of it and also have her tor-mentor captured… you can plug in the woman-in-jep points to the disease of the week outline and see how that story went.

Your job as a screenwriter is to tell moving s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Fade In
• PART ONE Taking the First Steps: What You Need to Know to Write a Screenplay
• PART TWO Slogging Away: How to Know If You’re on the Right Track
• PART THREE You’re Done!—So What’s Next?
• PART FOUR Knowing Your Business
• Fade Out
• General Index
• Film Index