The 101 Habits Of Highly Successful Screenwriters

Insider's Secrets from Hollywood's Top Writers

Karl Iglesias

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781580625500
• eBook ISBN: 9781440519505
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

Insider Secrets from Hollywood’s Top Writers

This book not only shows how to be a screenwriter, but what it's actually like to be one. An inspiration to all would-be screenwriters, this book is about living the screenwriter's life -- the habits, writing environments, creative processes, daily passions, and obsessions.

In The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters, author Karl Iglesias has interviewed 14 top contemporary Hollywood screenwriters who offer their experience, insight, and advice to aspiring screenwriters everywhere.

PART I

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Passion

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The Urge to Screenwrite

Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite.
I gotta write.

—JAMES ELLROY

CHAPTER 1
Portrait of a Screenwriter

Before we can explore the habits of highly successful screenwriters, we have to know what they’re like. Do you have what it takes to be a professional screenwriter? Since all writers are unique, you’ll notice that the common traits that follow are unrelated to intelligence, education, environment, sex, age, or race. You’ll also notice few screenwriter comments included with most of the first “obvious” traits, since it’s somewhat embarrassing to comment on being creative, having talent, or being a natural storyteller. So what makes a successful screenwriter different from other people?

1. Being Creative and Original

Imagination is being able to think of things that haven’t appeared on TV yet.

—HENRY BEARD

It may seem unnecessary to include this trait, because most people know creativity is an essential part of the writer’s makeup, especially in screenwriting. I’ve included it, however, because many beginning writers don’t understand how important it is to be original. Reading hundreds of scripts and listening to thousands of pitches showed me how most of them were derivative of other movies, with familiar characters, uninteresting ideas, and clichéd plot twists. Beginning writers tend to develop the easiest idea that comes to mind, rather than working hard to generate original ones.

Our mentors are highly imaginative and can make creative connections between seemingly unrelated events. They’re able to daydream about situations, characters, bits of dialogue, and get immediate answers to “what if ” situations. As Pearl Buck eloquently puts it:

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, just pour out creating. By some strange, inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating.

No one can tell you what this mysterious creative energy really is. It’s not a formula. You cannot control it, but you can certainly develop a relationship to it so that it will open itself to you more often than not.

Tom Schulman: Screenwriters need a determination to be original and an unwillingness to accept clichés. Most writers I know don’t hesitate to change, or at least add something special as soon as they sense what they wrote has been done before.

2. Being a Natural Storyteller

We’re only interested in one thing: Can you tell a story, Bart? Can you make us laugh, can you make us cry, can you make us wanna break out in joyous song?

—BARTON FINK, BY ETHAN AND JOEL COHEN

Usually, a desire to write movies or fiction not only implies an ability to tell stories—whether partly natural or gained through experience, reading, and watching movies—but also a deep love for all stories. But once again, this is a critical trait that is too often missing in today’s aspiring writers. Working screenwriters have an insatiable addiction to all stories, good and bad. They are pushed to captivate an audience, and their work shows it.

Robin Swicord: Writers have the sort of mind that puts together narrative in a way that has a beginning, middle, and end. They notice cause and effect, that because this thing happened, that other thing is happening.

These are the kinds of traits that come together into a mind that makes drama. People who don’t have that natural bend for it have a very hard time really understanding what it is writers do. There’s nothing more humbling for people who say, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer” than to actually try to create an alternate reality, only to find out it’s really hard to play God.

3. Being Comfortable with Solitude

Writing is a lonely life, but the only life worth living.

—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Writing is a lonely business. As a writer once said, “It’s like volunteering for solitary confinement without knowing the length of your stay.” Writers must spend a lot of time alone, but because they tend to be introverted by nature, they usually find more psychological comfort in a book or in writing than in social interactions. This is not to say that if you’re not comfortable with your solitude, you won’t be able to write. One of the many surprises in chatting with our mentors is that many of them are actually extroverts who force solitude on themselves in order to do their jobs.

Ron Bass: I really prefer to write alone. Generally, when I have staff meetings, we talk about story and criticism, but I don’t like to write with somebody else sitting there, because I’ll talk out loud and I’ll pace around. I can be physically active when I write. I usually sit but I also have standing desks wherever I go so I can write standing up, which enables me to pace around and charge back and forth, move my arms. It’s a physical process, not just an intellectual one. I cross things out and I write bigger or darker depending on the emotion. If I’m in the park, I’ll pace around. I must look really peculiar to people, so I try to find a place where I’m relatively alone, and certainly where I won’t hear another human voice.

Leslie Dixon: In order to do the job really well, you must spend prolonged periods of time in total isolation. You must. I loved it for the first few years where I had total control of my time without anybody telling me what to do. But I still haven’t figured out how to strike a balance between spending enough time by myself to produce a better grade of work versus not becoming a hermit.

Amy Holden Jones: The temperament that made me enjoy editing makes me enjoy writing, that solitary work where you get to refine over and over until you get it the way you want it. As a screenwriter, you need to be comfortable with that solitude for long periods of time, unless you work in television where it’s a more social environment.

Tom Schulman: You need to create solitude so that you can hear the voices, and you need a willingness to live in the world of the story for long periods of time, forcing yourself into the world of the characters so that you can believe they exist. Many spouses of writers understandably complain that we’re not living in the present.

Robin Swicord: A friend once gave me and fellow writers a personality test, and we all turned out to be introverts, which I don’t think is a coincidence. Something like 20 percent of the general population is introverted, but I think most writers probably fall into that category. They feel very comfortable with solitude. They are probably better in one-on-one situations rather than dealing with lots of people. I know that when I’m in a room full of people, I tend to fall back as an observer.

4. Being a Natural Observer

Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it.

—CONFUCIUS

In order to describe, you need to observe. Most of us go through life only half seeing what goes on around us. We have too much going on to bother with observing details in life and in human nature. As a result, most beginning writers tend to reference what they’ve just seen on television and at the movies, rather than drawing from what they’ve observed in the real world. Successful screenwriters naturally develop the habit of observing others, which gives them an ear for the way people talk and an eye for the way they behave. They’re aware of the most minute details of the world around them, silently making notes on everything, and seeing things vividly and selectively. Whether in coffee shops, airports, or restaurants, they cannot resist people-watching or eavesdropping on a conversation. In short, they pay attention.

Gerald DiPego: Many beginning writers don’t do enough observing or enough listening when they’re out and about in the world, on buses or in restaurants. Often, when I read a beginner’s script, I find that the writer is not referencing life but rather what I see in movies and television.

Jim Kouf: I don’t think the writer can leave it at the office. It’s your life. You’re constantly thinking, constantly listening to the conversation in the next booth, staring at the character with the eye patch, wondering what kind of character he is. It never leaves you.

Robin Swicord: Writers have the particular makeup of a person who looks at the world, observes human behavior, and finds themselves amused, intrigued, or emotionally moved by watching people.

Eric Roth: Everything is writing-related, you live with it 24 hours a day, so when you’re out in the world, you’re an observer of what people do and details of what’s around you. Unconsciously, you try to save them and hopefully use them in a work at a later time.

5. Being Collaborative

Our mind is like a parachute. It only works when it is open.

—ANONYMOUS

In no other form of writing—novels, plays, poems, or journalism—is the habit of collaboration as important as in screenwriting. It is so engrained in the way scripts become movies that without this attitude, no screenwriter, unless he’s a genius, can become successful. But as you’ll also see later on, collaboration can be a downside.

Ron Bass: By being a screenwriter, you are choosing to be in a medium that is genuinely collaborative, but one in which you do not have the final vote. The collaborative process is wonderful when it’s going well and terrible when it doesn’t. You may feel passionately about something, and you get overruled by producers and directors. Anytime you get fired, it kills you. Anytime you get a set of notes and you think you got it, you made it work for you and them, and it works great and you love it, and they hate it, you can be angry at them and feel insecure about yourself. Writing screenplays is such a collaborative medium that not caring if anyone else likes it makes no sense to me. If you cannot handle this and the additional bad feelings that come with those moments when you’re fired and another writer comes on and makes a total mess out of what you thought was wonderful, you should seriously consider another medium.

Gerald DiPego: It’s a whole skill you have to develop apart from writing. Call it compromise, negotiation, or debate. You spend a lot of time in development, trying to do your best to explain and defend the material against harmful ideas, but at the same time, you have to stay open to the good ideas. Some people shut down and say, “The hell with them! They’re all stupid.” That’s not going to work. Then again, you can’t sit there like a stenographer and accommodate them because that will kill the material.

Michael Schiffer: You have to collaborate and listen, but you can’t sell out your own work either. You try to navigate between their good and bad ideas and find a way to let them have what they feel they need without damaging what you feel is the emotional core and spirit of your piece. It’s like being on a boat trip, somebody wants to go to the left bank and somebody wants to go to the right bank. There’s no right or wrong. You have to allow people to go on the journey they want to go on if they are your partners. You try to respect the problems they are bringing up instead of thinking they’re all a bunch of idiots. If you have that attitude, you’re in big trouble because you’re the idiot who will be fired first.

CHAPTER 2
Desire

6. Having a Driving Reason to Write

Don’t write with sales or money in mind—it poisons the well at its source. If writing isn’t a joy, don’t do it. Life is short. Death is long.

—WILLIAM WHARTON

All the writers interviewed here have been writing for many years. They didn’t last or get to where they are today without having a driving and passionate desire to write. Every writer has a variety of r...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Fade In
• PART I: Passion The Urge to Screenwrite
• PART II: Creativity Summoning the Muse
• PART III: Discipline Applying the Seat of your Pants to the Seat of the Chair
• PART IV: Storycraft Weaving a Great Tale
• PART V: Marketing it’s not who you Know, it’s your Writing
• PART VI: The Four Ps Keeping the Dream Alive
• Epilogue: Fade Out
• Copyright Page