The Art of Screenplays - A Writer's Guide

The Definitive Handbook for Screenwriters

Robin Mukherjee

• Publisher: Creative Essentials
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781843442011
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

The Art of Screenplays is a working handbook for screenwriters with stories to tell.

Addressing the key issues of creativity and craft, its aim is to connect with our natural understanding of story, to demystify the screenwriter's art, and to enable fresh, original and authentic writing. Working on the central premise that drama reflects nature, and screenplays simply echo life as we know it, the areasthis guide discusses include:

• The Writer's Eye - How to gather, ferment and communicate Story
• The Art of Action - Understanding Structure through observation
• Who Am I? Delving into the levels of Characters
• Vertical Structure - Say what you mean. Mean what you say
• Speak The Speech - The art of not writing Dialogue.

'An insightful guide that prompts readers to think for themselves' - The Scriptwriter

'A really interesting mix of theoretical study and practical experience...Highly recommended for both beginners and experienced writers' - Write So Fluid

'Brilliant and original...far and away the best writing guide I've read. It should become must reading for all of us, students and tutors alike' - Paul Bryers - award winning writer, filmmaker and producer

STUFF

WHAT IS STUFF?

The word ‘Stuff’ means material, substance or fabric. Although this might seem less tangible in a work of literature than, say, the wood of a tree or the waters in a lake, we know it’s there because we can experience it.

Stuff also means ‘text’, but we’re not just looking at words on a page. The Stuff we’re concerned with lies in what those words are about.

As writers, it is our source material. It is, in a sense, what wood is to a carpenter. All of your skills, ingenuity, passion and dreams are nothing without it. And just as a carpenter needs to understand wood – where it comes from, what it’s composed of, the different types, their virtues and limitations, how to shape and frame it – so the writer needs to get to grips with the Stuff of drama.

Stuff originates from experience. It starts with the senses. And, being of the nature of experience, it follows that every waking moment of every single day is awash with it.

Much of it, of course, we hardly notice. If you look back over the day, the week, or even further, you may become aware of large tranches of time that left no residue at all. These are the most mundane, the most unremarkable types of moment which, necessarily, yield the least Stuff.

Some moments, or the details thereof, are memorable only as long as they need to be. Where did I leave the car keys? What time is the train? Some are simply a part of our organisational imperative. Where do I live? What’s my job, again? And some are stuck in the mind, it would seem, only to annoy us. Did I really say that? This isn’t Stuff, but data. It serves a purpose and helps us to function. It doesn’t necessarily produce great writing.

Take a moment to glance back through time, starting with now. Did anything happen to you at any point that struck you as interesting, unusual, or in some way remarkable? Hopefully you won’t have to look too far. Once you’ve found something, grab a pen and write down, in a paragraph or two, just enough to cover the salient details. What happened, when, in what context, who was involved, what did you say, see or do? How did you feel about it at the time? How do you feel about it now? If nothing strikes you as remarkable, at least go for something memorable. You’ll know it’s memorable because you can remember it – even if it’s just yesterday’s breakfast, or putting the bin out.

What you have just done, of course – assuming you did it – is write. Which, for any writer, is a good start. Now ask yourself why you chose that moment. What made it remarkable? Perhaps it had some kind of emotional resonance. It might have been sad, comic, poignant or scary. Perhaps it told you something, said something about the way you see the world, who you are, what anything is. It had meaning. Meaning is what distinguishes a remarkable moment from a mundane one. Meaning means ‘to make known’. And what it makes known is some territory of human experience.

An aspiring writer once complained to me that his life was so comfortable that he had nothing to write about. I replied that he hadn’t been looking. You don’t need trauma to write, just a good eye. In some ways, life itself is a trauma: we arrive screaming and leave reluctantly. That, in itself, is worth writing about. There are many writers who can yield sublime Stuff from the minutiae of everyday life. Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett are obvious examples. In the hands of a writer like Bennett, a biscuit under the sofa can evoke metaphysical conundrums that make Nietzsche look shallow. Personal crises might provoke serious reflection, but look closely enough at even the most ordinary moment and you will find questions to ask, mysteries to unfold, the gentle presence of Stuff.

A few years ago, one of the major returning TV series decided to crack this whole coming up with ideas thing through a focus group. They plied a room of ‘ordinary people’ with alcohol and asked them what they were worried about. The focus group noted their primary issues as a lack of social cohesion, failing educational standards, the state of youth, and an overall increase of fear within society. When the drama executives triumphantly presented these findings, one of their writers said that he’d got all that from his train journey that morning.

He recounted how he’d noticed, across the aisle, a young man with his feet on the opposite seats. The writer had wondered about saying something, but didn’t want to cause a fuss or get punched in the face. Instead he’d squirmed through a series of feelings from guilt, to outrage, to fear, and back again. Then he had noticed other passengers going through much the same, at which point something interesting happened. The writer began to wonder what was going on in the young man’s mind: where he came from, what drove his anger, his hopes and fears, what he was saying by this act of defiance, and what the writer, along with all the other passengers, might have looked like to him.

The writer hadn’t just demolished the point of the focus group, he had come up with real Stuff, from his own experience, which no amount of secondary research could ever match in depth or quality. The key is in that view from the subject’s eyes. Just for a moment the writer stood in the shoes, or sat in the seat, of the young man with an attitude. Anger, resentment, challenge and alienation are known to all of us at different times and to different degrees. The writer knew them, and could find them, and could empathise with the young man. From that moment on, he had something to write about.

Writers are, by nature, people who test and savour their experiences. This makes them attuned to the world around them, to the Zeitgeist, to the ideas of the day, to the subtleties of human behaviour. It’s why so many of them are socially awkward, self-doubting neurotics! Words on the page are merely the product of that. We might more commonly be defined, categorised or recognised by the act of scribbling, by the pages we produce; but that scribbling can only follow from our reflections. And our reflections can only be as good as the stuff it comes from. Your writing starts, therefore, not with dreams of glory but from what’s in front of you, your experience. How you read that experience is up to you. And how you choose to convey it will be in the gift of your artistry. But that you do read it is the inescapable source of all your writings. The absence of Stuff, put simply, is nothing to write home about.

So let’s take a look at the nature of this material, of Stuff. What exactly did the writer connect with in that moment on the train?

There are three components here:

One is the simple architecture of the circumstances: a train, a journey, a young man with his feet on the seat, the reluctance of others, including the observer, to intervene, and perhaps the greater social context in which all this is taking place.

But there is also a sense of meaning: social cohesion or a lack thereof, the indifference of youth and timidity of grown-ups, fear, courage, and so on.

Thirdly, there is the act of observation which, in some ways, is an act of interpretation. The circumstances could be seen as comic, tragic, disturbing, etc.

We are probably familiar with the concept of theme. Often these are indicated by a whole load of Big Words, like Love, Justice, Loyalty, Greed, and so on. But these are words only. The realm of theme can be too nuanced, layered and textured to be pinned down by one or more of these thunderous indicators. The key remains with experience itself. The more richly layered, or textured, that experience, the richer the writing which comes from it. Even if we’re writing about the experience of someone else, we need to find those areas within our own that will give us a personal insight into the meaning. For that reason we don’t necessarily have to come up with the Big Word (except to pitch it, maybe). We just need to feel its authenticity in the realm of our own observation. It will sit at the heart of our drama. Its Stuff will be the material with which we work. So let’s see how that works in practice.

IN SEARCH OF STUFF

IF YOU GO DOWN TO THE WOODS...

I was lucky enough, a few years ago, to hear a wood-carver talk about his morning forays through the forest in search of material. He described the early mist lingering over the low shrubs, of not quite knowing if he was going to find anything at all, of picking up a piece of wood and turning it around in his hands to see if it was useful, interesting or beautiful. He described the quickening of his heart when he found something perfect, either for what he was planning to work on, or because it gave him a new idea. He called himself a ‘wood-botherer’, and his works were exquisite. Sometimes, if I’m early enough at the desk, I’ll think of him as the sun rises over the trees, out there in his wellies, leaning down to pick something up, turning it around, cold and damp in his hands, studying, feeling, assimilating; the day’s artistry beginning to flow, potent and sure, from that very moment.

Like a piece of wood yielding its possibilities to the wood-botherer, our moments become ‘Stuff’ when they reveal a truth, or truths, which can be communicated to others. This might be some cataclysmic event. It might be a biscuit under the sofa. ‘Drama’ has come to signify ‘big’ or ‘in yer face’. A flower arrangement rarely becomes ‘dramatic’ by virtue of its modesty. But the true Stuff of drama is potency of a different order (although exploding helicopters might get your audience’s attention). There is a beautifully crafted passage in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse where Mrs Ramsay contemplates a dull errand to the shops. The dullness is entirely from Mrs Ramsay’s perspective. For the reader, her contemplation of dullness, and her steps to alleviate it by taking Charles Tansley along, is full of pathos and a kind of urgency to find something real and permanent amidst the transience of life. It is a dramatic moment, and all the more so for challenging dullness head on.

A few years ago I got into conversation with an illustrator, after which we agreed to exchange contact details. He flicked through the little sketch book he was carrying and, unable to find a blank sheet, scribbled his email address beside a drawing. What struck me was how many things had caught his eye. A box on a post – which I would have passed by without a glance – gave him a shape, a form, a pattern of light and dark, a little quirkiness, a tiny puzzle, a nugget of story. And, of course, he’d sketched it. His notebook holds the Stuff of his art and you’d never catch him without it.

There are good reasons for keeping a notebook, for making your own, more literary, sketches as you go about your business:

• The first is that, if you see something or have an idea, you won’t forget it. I am often amazed, when going through my own book, how the slightest detail of a tiny moment can provide the basis for an entire story, even if, at the time of jotting, it was so unremarkable that it might have been forgotten a moment later.

• The second is that you become more observant. You practise seeing and therefore start to see more. At the same time, you train your mind and heart to absorb and organise, sift and consider. You start to look like a writer, by which I mean your eyes tune in to the existence of Stuff (not that you’ve bought a beret or hang around all day in your dressing gown). My illustrator friend wasn’t just collecting, he was practising. With every sketch his eye refined, with every twitch of the pencil he became a better communicator.

• The third is that, the moment you write something down, it takes on a creative life. The notebook is less of a memorandum than an organic process. It is as much a thing in your mind as it is in your hands. Noting something down has already begun the process of reflection. That reflection joins all the other reflections jostling around in the book, in your head. They meet up, flirt, move away, pair up and sometimes breed. A bit of idea joins another bit of idea. Years may pass. Suddenly you spot something else, and that partial, half-formed, semi-gestated notion looms out of the swamp to devour it, to merge with it. And now it’s a whole thing; maybe the seed of a complete story, maybe a moment to further a scene, or a tiny detail in the background of a character’s speech. But it will have an authenticity and conviction which comes only through experience. You haven’t just thought it. You’ve felt it. And making your audience feel it, too, is what the writing is all about. The writer doesn’t walk from idea to idea, but allows them to fester in this swamp, soup, compost heap – however you like to think of it. And you never know when something will crawl out, or stand up, ready to be written. But it’s a joy when it does.

Not every writer keeps a physical notebook. And sometimes it wouldn’t be appropriate, or practical, to make a note even if you had one handy (I’m thinking of dinner parties or windsurfing). But every writer goes into the woods to gather. In fact you can’t avoid it. You might be walking along the streets, or sitting in a café, or doing your day job, or arguing with a salesman, parking attendant or friend. But you see somethi...