Reader Question: What are the biggest craft and attitude issues holding writers back?

A question from Lucy V:

What do you feel is the biggest a) craft issue and b) way of thinking that holds writers back?

There are so many challenges to writing a screenplay and I could mention several “issues” I see arising too often in the scripts I read and/or hear about from students or writers through my blog, but let me focus on just one:

How to write compelling, multifaceted characters that work in the story.

There’s actually three components to this critique:

* Compelling: Characters who have distinctive aspects to their persona that makes me interested in them. Characters who have something about their core essence that causes me to identify with them emotionally. Characters whose goals are meaningful enough so that I care about their fate. In sum, characters who compel me to want to read their story.

* Multifaceted: Characters whose actions and dialogue is enriched with deeper meaning through their intentions and subtext. Characters who surprise me with revelations about who they are inside their ‘self.’ Characters who don many ‘masks’ throughout a story depending upon what transpires from scene to scene. In sum, multifaceted characters who fascinate me because of their nuance and complexity.

* Work: Characters who have an identifiable narrative function. Characters who advance the plot in an organic, natural way. Characters whose presence in the story creates a meaningful experience for the reader. In sum, characters who work seamlessly in a story as key parts of the overall whole.

Writing character bios or interviewing characters is all well and good, but writers who fall short in terms of their approach to developing characters would benefit from thinking about their characters in terms of their respective narrative functions. There are five primary ones: Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, Trickster. The more I work with these archetypes, the more I’m convinced that they are not only excellent tools to enable a writer to dig deeper into their story’s characters and to help them create a tapestry of functional and interesting interrelationships, but also that they are a reflection of an innate character structure that exists in most movies.

Perhaps it’s because there are so many different books re screenplay structure or that most writers intuitively understand that stories have three big movements — beginning, middle, end — I don’t see as many problems in this regard in scripts. But you can nail a story’s structure and it will still fall flat if the characters don’t come alive and work in a reader’s imagination. So per the biggest craft “issue,” for now let’s say the need to create multifaceted, compelling characters that work.

Re a “way of thinking” that holds writers back: Again there are many issues that I hear about from students and GITS readers, but on the whole I would say that most of the scripts I read suffer from a lack of cinematic awareness. For a young writer, I could chalk this up to the simple fact that they haven’t been around long enough to watch thousands of movies, but that’s not even true as some of my college students amaze me at how broad their exposure to cinema is.

What I’m getting at is an attitude where thinks, “I just need to learn the craft of screenwriting to be able to write a great script.” On the contrary, I believe that it is hugely important for writers to immerse themselves in the world of film. And the best way to do that is simply by watching movies and reading screenplays.

If you’re exclusively interested in one genre, fine — watch every movie in that genre you can. Obtain the scripts of the movies that interested you most and read them. Break down the scripts in order to understand how they function in terms of plot and character structure.

Then watch movies from other genres because you never know when you will see something that you can use as inspiration someday in your writing.

We’re lucky. Movies have existed for a little over a century so it’s possible to screen films from every era. With NetFlix, we have access to movies from all genres. With outfits like Kino, we can obtain movies from all over the world. With DVD commentary tracks, we can learn tricks of the trade from master filmmakers. With online screenplay sites, we can literally download thousands of screenplays — for free.

In fact, I would argue that there has never been a better time in terms of resources available to immerse ourselves in the world of cinema.

You may learn how to write a screenplay through studying the craft, but if you are serious about becoming a screenwriter, I would urge you in the most emphatic way possible to saturate your soul with movies and feed your mind with screenplays. 

How about you? What craft issues and ways of thinking do you believe are the chief culprits in holding back writers?

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