Tweetstorm: Ed Zwick on Screenwriting

Back when Twitter was fun, screenwriters would sometimes string together a series of tweets - what came to be known as "tweetstorms." Advice, personal anecdotes, reflections on the craft. It was pretty awesome.

The only problem: Once the tweetstorm came ... it went.

So, I took to contacting the writers and asking if I could reprint their tweetstorm at Go Into The Story. That way, they'd at least be stored where folks could access them in the future.

Here's an example: In December 2021, writer-director Ed Zwick (Thirtysomething, The Last Samurai, Glory, Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire) shared a series of tweets about the craft of screenwriting. Reprinted here by permission.

There’s a lot to like here including this:

8.LET’S GET PERSONAL 
All good writing is personal. That doesn’t mean autobiographical. Whether a period piece or a sci-fi space opera, characters aren’t created, they pre-exist and must be found within you. Imagine yourself as a sinner or a saint and you’ll find their voices.

That reminds me of this from Joseph Campbell:

The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward — into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world… [Now] it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery.

Here is where the hero’s journey matches up with the writer’s journey. For just as a character’s outer journey in the physical world of space and time is “fundamentally” an inner journey into their psychological world of hopes and fears, so, too, ours as writers. As Zwick suggests, the characters in our stories “pre-exist and must be found within you.”

That is the key to writing personal stories. And that is the key to engendering an emotional connection between the audience and our story’s characters.

For more screenwriter tweetstorms, go here.