Inside Aaron Sorkin’s writing process

I love to see articles like this: They elevate people’s awareness of screenwriters and give us a glimpse into a writer’s creative process. In this case, The Hollywood Reporter and Aaron Sorkin. Some excerpts:

There are index cards everywhere in Aaron Sorkin’s office. Index cards for scenes from films going back to 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War.

The writer of The West Wing and The Social Network likes to use those cards, tacked to a large corkboard, to keep track of key elements. Social Network’s pivotal scenes are still up there, with notes that read, “Mark and Erica in bar,” “Mark walks back to dormitory” and “Mark begins drinking, blogging, hacking.”

Reticent to take the cards down even after a project ends, he quips that he keeps them “just in case I need to go back and do a rewrite.”

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“Part of what makes Sorkin is not just the tonnage of words but the fact that you’re watching a person navigate the jungle of their self-doubt, the jungle of their thought process,” Social Network director David Fincher says.

Navigating that jungle became the driving force behind Sorkin’s 162-page script for the film about the founding of Facebook.

“We started at 100 miles an hour in the middle of a conversation, and that makes the audience have to run to catch up,” Sorkin says of the film’s talky opening sequence. “The worst crime you can commit with an audience is telling them something they already know. We were always running ahead.”

For Social Network, Sorkin was on set every day. “I’m not writing something that’s meant to be read; I’m writing something that’s meant to be performed,” he says. “Just having written a screenplay is no more satisfying to me than if a songwriter handed out pieces of sheet music.”

Despite the accolades earned since his play A Few Good Men was brought to the big screen in 1992, Sorkin admits: “Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.”

Hm. Aaron Sorkin. John August. Hell, I’ve been in dozens of writing offices and you almost always see walls covered with 3x5 inch index cards. So if you haven’t used those them, perhaps now’s a good time to start. Just like Sorkin, you jot down scene ideas, then you can sort and re-sort them into sequences, acts, and eventually the entire plot.

And how about this:

“The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.”

Oh, yeah. That’s going to be an On Writing post. 

For more of the feature on Sorkin, go here.

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