Write What You Don't Know

Julian Hoxter

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441143877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Scrittura di sceneggiature per il cinema

Write What You Don't Know is a friendly manual for aspiring screenwriters. It encourages you to move beyond your comfort zones in search of stories. We all write what we know - how could we not? Writing what you don't know and doing it in an informed and imaginative way is what makes the process worthwhile.

Hoxter draws on his wealth of experience teaching young film students to offer help with every aspect of the writing process, including how we come up with ideas in the first place. Light hearted and full of insight into the roundabout way film students approach their scripts, it also discusses the important issues like the difference between stories and plots and what your characters should be doing in the middle of act two. Write What You Don't Know contains examples and case studies from a wide range of movies, both mainstream and alternative such as The Virgin Spring, Die Hard, The Ipcress File, For The Birds, (500) Days of Summer, Juno, Up In The Air, Knocked Up and Brick.

1

What’s It All About?

‘I saw Screenwriting Manual with the Devil!’

There tends to be a certain snobbish dismissiveness about books like this amongst some educators. That is understandable in as much as it comes from a resistance to the notion that any one volume can hope to encompass the history and traditions, the business and the art and craft of screenwriting. At least, they would add, not without diminishing it and reducing it to a series of bland diagrams and vacuous generalities. No writer likes to feel their creativity is being constrained by a blueprint, or a template, or even a set of guidelines. And yes, sometimes it can feel like that … when you take books like this too seriously.

As far as I’m concerned, manuals—now including my own—only become a problem when simple usefulness gets mistaken, by writer and readers alike, for some kind of cargo cult.

IMPLIED YOU

(coughs)

Robert McKee!

FRIENDLY ME

Oh hello. Nice of you to perk up, but in the words of the great Francis Urquhart: ‘You may very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment’.

When you read this book you will certainly come across a load of stuff that turns up in most if not all of the other manuals, including that of the estimable Mr. McKee. It’s hardly surprising, we are all talking about the same thing; we just imagine your path towards it differently. In the interests of full disclosure, when I get stuck I often refer to John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story and Dara Marks’s Inside Story. I recommend them both to you. As a grad student I also learned a lot from Richard Walter’s classic book Screenwriting: The Art, Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing.

In my classes, when we seek the advice of a simple structural model, we often call upon the late Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat: the Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. Although, as you are now reading my book, you might infer that I regard his title with a certain amount of skepticism. Sometimes it’s a great boon to have a piñata to hang up in class and beat with sticks to see what juicy nuggets of help and advice fall out. What’s important is not whether, but how you use books like this. Screenwriting manuals don’t kill creativity; lazy writers use them as an excuse to kill their own creativity.

For example, Save the Cat tends to help and annoy my students all at the same time. I get a mantra from them to the effect of: ‘Every time I turn a page I don’t know whether to thank him or slap him.’ They value his advice but are sometimes frustrated with his unashamedly mainstream tone. Although I never met the man, I imagine he might have smiled happily at this and have found a certain vindication of his project in their responses. It also tells me my students are reading him the right way, with a mixture of open mindedness and healthy skepticism. I suggest you take the same approach to my book.

Trust me, whatever kind of screenplay you are trying to write, a good manual can be a very useful thing to have to hand. That is because there will be times as you write when you can use some checks, correctives and fallback positions. Of course Alejandro Jodorowsky, writer and director of The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989) might not agree. Speaking of his first film, Fando y Lis (1968), he says: ‘I didn’t work with the audience in mind; I just did it instinctively … I am proud of this because it is real.’ We will return to Jodorowsky when we talk about creativity but, unless you really are as wildly experimental—ok, as gloriously bat-shit nuts—as he is, a safety net is sometimes a good thing.

Incidentally, I freely acknowledge a great debt to the authors I have just mentioned and the others to whom I will be referring along the way. This book was not written in an attempt to consign them to the dustbin of history, rather to act as a companion piece. I have tried to approach and assess their work from the perspective of a teacher, not a ‘script guru’. Indeed, I will be applauding them and directing you towards their ideas rather than trying to pretend they don’t matter.

I have done my best to give credit for terms coined by other screenwriting authors as I go. Sometimes it gets a little tricky to determine whether a term or principle in everyday use amongst filmmakers and screenwriters was coined by a particular author or was just picked up by them from the general discourse. I apologize in advance for any such errors and omissions. Anyway, you know which bookshelf Mr. Snyder and his friends hang out on. They will be happy to help you if you ask.

‘What’s in the box?’

My own films and scripts tend to deal with subject matter that involves at least 89% less explosions than your average blockbuster. On the other hand, I am proud to say that I am an enormous geek (what, you hadn’t worked that out by now?) and I take great delight in well-made movies that have 89% more explosions than mine. My frame of reference will become clear from the range of examples in this book. Independent movies get some love in what follows but, rest assured, there will be lots of examples from movies which are about more than what that preeminent critic of independent film, Eric Cartman, once called ‘gay cowboys eating pudding.’

What you will not find in this book is one single grid designed to solve all of your problems and guarantee you a script sale. ‘Oh, if only it were that easy,’ blah, moving on … What you will find instead are a range of different models of cinematic storytelling and loads of examples from movies. These are designed to help you look at the structure and purpose of screenplays from different perspectives. This is important, because screenwriters don’t just write stories for actors to act out. You will be writing for a diverse set of readers who all need different kinds of information from your script.

Screenwriters bitch all the time about how other people abuse their work. Frustrated at how hack directors would butcher his screenplays during his early days in Hollywood, Billy Wilder once remarked that ‘when I was asked whether directors should also be able to write I replied that it was more important that they should be able to read.’ Similarly, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, writers of Away We Go (2009), advise their readers to ‘try and find a director disinclined to removing and barbecuing your innards.’

We can only hope this happens in all cases. On the other hand, we should also make a point of understanding exactly how and why other professionals read and use our screenplays. That means directors and actors of course, but also assistant directors and the craft departments, to say nothing of all the casting people and—well, the list goes on. We will talk about your screenplay as a document used by the whole production. When you understand how that works, you will make everyone else’s job easier.

Look, stories are still stories. In his admirable book The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, David Bordwell cites the screenplay manual as evidence for his argument that: ‘In formal design, today’s Hollywood is largely contiguous with yesterday’s.’ So I haven’t somehow reinvented dramatic structure from the ground up; nor have I been miraculously inspired on some writerly road to Damascus to overthrow thousands of years of storytelling in favor of the ‘one true beat sheet.’

I do have a model, or to be precise a set of three models, to offer you, of course. It doesn’t have a cool name but, if you want to call it something for politeness sake, call it The VW Wardrobe Method. Yeah, I know, that sounds really lame, but it covers most of what you need to know starting out, and it works for most stories. The three parts, ‘V’, ‘W’ and ‘Wardrobe’ all talk to one another. More than simple templates, they are designed to help you connect different kinds of creative thinking and to focus and prioritize your efforts in story creation.

The ‘V’ is a very simple, introductory model of story structure that is designed to help us think our way from building story worlds to making them work in storytelling. We will introduce it in Chapter 3. The ‘Wardrobe’ is a way of conceptualizing the relationship between theme, character, story and plot. We will get to it in Chapter 4. The ‘W’ takes the simple ‘V’ model and makes it do its homework, to produce a more complex and responsive way of thinking about structure. That’s in Chapter 5. There is also a long case study of the ‘W’ in Chapter 6.

My ‘W’ model of screenplay structure falls into the helpful piñata category. It isn’t intended to apply perfectly to every story, but it works for many and teaches important lessons for most. It also develops logically from the first principles of premise, character, story world and theme we will be laying out beforehand.

In my experience, all that many aspiring writers want is a helping hand and a friendly guide along the jungle path, rather than the company of a master explorer who has not only cleared all the underbrush before they get there but proceeds to tell them, at length and repeatedly, how smart he is for having cleared that brush with his patented Universal Imaginary Jungle Underbrush Clearer™ which is available for a small fee from his website and by the way people paid him loads of green for the privilege and now he has supermodels on his d.

You are reading this book because you are preparing for your own adventure—let’s keep this goofy jungle explorer premise going as long as possible. All I am going to do is walk with you as you go, keeping up a cheerful banter and checking your map and compass to make sure you are still headed in the right direction. I’ll be pointing out the odd pesky snake on the trail ahead, but encouraging you to have fun and do your own exploring.

And so we learn our first lesson about both character and story creation: I, the writer, need you, dear implied reader, dear imaginary character that you are to me, to have certain specific goals and needs. If you do, then everything I write serves your purposes directly. If you don’t, then I’m writing in a vacuum and have no real purchase on what I’m doing.

There is a whole section up ahead called: ‘Why “my protagonist is kind of an everyman” often translates as: “I’m a lazy-ass writer”.’ Annoyingly I think I may have just stepped all over its point.

[1. Writer’s Chat] [Julian] Pfft, writing is hard/nerf imo.

I have written a version of you into my book, following my assumptions. I have characterized you, made you into a character, knowing that I can in no way encompass all aspects of your personality in doing so. I’m working with the characteristics that will be useful for me to keep in mind as I write for you, and I’m ignoring those which are less germane to your engagement with this book.

I am sure that there are many other fascinating and quirky, endearing and lovable and even annoying and creepy aspects of your personality—just as there are of mine. Our friends and families care about them, or don’t, but the work of this book can be undertaken without my knowing all of them. That means I get to not expend any more effort upon them.

As with this book, so with your screenplays, because this very job of prioritizing, discarding and foregrounding information that we have just been doing together goes to narrative economy, one of the most important principles of screenwriting.

How movies work, only without the complicated bits

The principle of narrative economy influences many of the decisions you will have to make while writing your screenplays. It also helps to explain the basic operating model of mainstream cinema. Indeed, narrative economy is so important that I’m going to discuss it right up front as part of a little introduction to ...