The discipline and courage of screenwriting

A Tweet today from @carnojoe aka Joe Carnahan:

Start writing ‘Death Wish’ this week. Have the entire thing outlined but that means bupkis if the script starts steering it someplace else.

Another example of what I’ve been saying since about Day 1 of this blog: Professional screenwriters work out the story before they type FADE IN. Well, almost all. Certainly every TV writer.

You break the story in prep.

This is perhaps the single biggest mistake aspiring screenwriters make, not spending enough time with the story before moving into page-writing. And it’s not just about wrangling the story into an outline, it’s also about immersing oneself in that story universe so that the writer knows it and its characters intimately. There is a certain kind of creativity that can only occur between the writer and their story through an intense connectivity to it.

Now as Carnahan says, once you type FADE IN and start writing those pages, the script can start “steering” the story “someplace else.” In this vein, be sure to read Neil Simon’s quote from the upcoming How I Write A Script post later today about how his characters “started to want to drift off where they wanted to go,” away from what he had outlined.

We should be so lucky!

When our characters come to life like that, it can be disconcerting, even scary to have to follow them as they veer away from what we had planned. But follow them we must because, after all, it’s their story.

Besides it doesn’t mean that your outline is somehow wrong, rather that the characters only came to life because you spent the amount of time you did engaged with the story during prep. The script may end up diverging hugely from your outline. Or the characters may simply take a short detour before returning to what you had envisioned.

But when writing a screenplay, we need to have the discipline to figure out the story in prep, resulting in some variation of an outline, and the courage to follow the script wherever it takes us after we type FADE IN.

For more on this subject, check out the next post on outlining.

And good luck to Joe Carnahan, fresh off the success of The Grey, now venturing into Death Wish.

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