How to Get Ahead: Never Be in a Hurry to Send It, And Never Send an Outline

Someone important has agreed to read your stuff: Hallelujah! You want to take advantage of this opportunity, and you want to strike when the iron is hot. Of course, you had hoped to take one more pass at it to fix some glaring problems, but you can’t let an opportunity like this pass by!

Nope. Stop yourself. Don’t send it yet. Even if they said they want it right away. Even if they said they have a brief window of time to read it. When they say they want it right away, they really mean “I want it as soon as it’s perfect, however long that may take.” If they read it and they don’t absolutely love it, they won’t cut you any slack and say “But at least it got here on time, so that counts for something.”

Just about every opportunity in this business is a one-time opportunity. There are thousands of would-be writers out there, swarming around. If someone decides you don’t have the goods, they’re not going to check back in later to see if the goods have suddenly developed.

So make them wait for it. If they were willing to read it during this window of time, they might also be willing to read it during their next window of time, so you have to take that chance. Only ever send out work that seems great to you.

One more point: Never send them a numbered outline. You’re telling a story, not a series of disconnected beats. An outline automatically reads as “And then, and then, and then…” Force yourself to rewrite your outline as a prose treatment, and it will be more likely to read as “And so, and so and so…”, which is what you want.

Storyteller's Rulebook #187: Own It (But Don’t Let It Own You)

We finally got around to watching Whale Rider the other day, which was great, and one thought I had while watching it was how much the New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro and novelist Witi Ihimaera owned the material.  They were telling their land’s story, one that no outsider had.  The emotions were universal, but, to a non-Maori audience, all of the details were wonderfully exotic and unique.  There is real power in that authenticity.

I made a fundamental mistake when pitching my Alan Turing script around town.  They would all ask me how I found this story and I gave the wrong answer: “I randomly ran across it in a book, liked it, read a bunch more books, and decided to write it.”  They would look a little uncomfortable and ask me what my connection to the material was, and I would blithely blabber, “Funny you should ask: absolutely none!  He’s a gay British mathematician, and I’m not any of those things!”  I didn’t realize that I was killing my sale.

Instead, when you’re pitching, you need to play up your authenticity, establish your connection to the material.   Even if you don’t “own” any source material involved, you have to own it.  Be necessary.  Prove that you’re the one writer who is perfect for this material.  Assure them that, if they had been the one to have this idea, and they could have hired any writer in the world to write it, you’re the writer they would have hired. 

After all, as soon as they buy it from you, it is their idea, in every sense of the word, and you’re their employee.  You don’t want them to suddenly wonder, “Why did I hire this guy?”

But be aware that there’s a tipping point at which your connection to the material stops being an asset and starts being a liability.  It’s one thing to say, “I’m the perfect guy to write this, because I’m a gay British mathematician myself” (in fact, Turing’s most in-depth biographer was all three), but the fear is that you’ll then say, “And I’m gonna tell the real story, instead of all that phony Hollywood crap!”  Suddenly, all of the enthusiasm will drain out of producers’ faces. 

You have to own it without letting it own you.  You have to have a deep reservoir of unique real-world knowledge, but then you have use it or discard it as necessary in the service of a great story.  

Look at “The Americans”: creator Joe Weisberg sold that show based on his own experience as a CIA officer, and indeed the show offers many real-world aspects of spy work that you rarely see onscreen, such as the recruiting and handling of long-term assets, but it also exaggerates and re-writes the facts at will. The details are authentic, but the story is pure fiction. 

In this excellent AV Club interview, Weisberg makes it clear that the spy stuff was always restricted to being a metaphor for the family stuff, and never the other way around.  He uses all of his spy knowledge, but he doesn’t let it take over the show. In the end, he’s not even writing about spies, he’s just using his authentic tradecraft knowledge as a source of unique details to enrich a universal story of family strife. 

Storyteller's Rulebook #179: Be Happy to Start On the Ground Floor (UPDATED)

Here are two of the dangerous things a writer can think:

• “I like these creators, so that means I’m now good enough to write for them.”
• “I’m not impressed by those creators, therefore I’m already too good to write for them.”

As Ira Glass points out in this great interview, you can’t confuse your taste as a consumer with your ability as a creator.  At the beginning of your career, you’re not going to be good enough to write for any of the people you really respect.  And you’ll probably never be good enough to write for your very favorite creators.  This just makes sense: There’s a huge difference between liking the very best and being the very best.  Your taste will, and should, always exceed your talent.
Here’s one of my biggest regrets of my career: One day in film school, I casually mentioned to my mentor that I’d had an idea for a tween show.  He liked the idea and suggested that he set up a meeting with a producer he knew in that world.  But I then realized that I didn’t really care enough to develop the pitch that far: “Are you kidding?  I’m busy writing spec scripts for all the deep, complex, dark shows on TV, and now you want me to change gears and pitch for some kiddie network I’d never even watch?”

A lot of writers say that you should never write something you wouldn’t watch yourself.  On the surface, this seems to make sense, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: Do the writers of “Dora the Explorer” really love to watch “Dora the Explorer”?  The fact is that most unsophisticated kids’ shows are actually written by sophisticated adults…and that’s the way it should be.

Actually, it gets worse: when you first start out, not only are you not experienced enough to write for the shows you love, you’re not even experienced enough to know why you like them.

So many of of us in film school would say “I love ‘Sopranos’, ‘Mad Men’, and ‘Breaking Bad’ because those shows prove that you don’t need a sympathetic protagonist!”  We failed to perceive that while, yes, those shows chose to sacrifice some sympathy, they made up for it by generating more empathy: we don’t like Tony, Don, and Walt but we do love them.

I have nothing but respect for those shows, but I now realize that part of their design is to flatter the audience in a very cynical way: On the one hand, they say, “You’re a sophisticated audience that doesn’t need likable heroes”, but on the other hand, they work extra hard to subtly manipulate us into loving them.

Of course, I only figured that out later, once I’d tried to create some unsympathetic heroes of my own and discovered that everybody hated them.

I should have dropped everything else and written that kids’ show.  I should have started on the ground floor.  I should have tried to figure out how to get an audience to like a likable character (which is, believe it or not, very hard to do) before I tried to get people to love an unlikable character (which is even harder).

UPDATE: Two day after I posted this, the Onion AV Club ran a great interview with the supremely talented Graham Yost (“Band of Brothers”, “Justified”) where they talked about this:

• GY: Hey Dude was my first real “paid to write scripted television” experience. It was very low-budget. We were shooting on location at a real dude ranch in Tucson, so it looked pretty good for the paltry sum. We’d shoot an episode in three days so we were shooting 10 to 15 pages a day in the half-hour format. It was a great experience. The budget was a challenge, but the big challenge was just that we weren’t necessarily the best writers; we all became better. Lisa Melamed started on that show, and she’s gone on to a long career in television. That was the starting point for me, and we learned a lot by doing, and that was really cool. You could just see things to do and not do. 
• I got asked recently, I think it was by TV Guide, to write a short thing about Hey Dude. There’s a story I always tell: This producer from Knoxville, Tennessee—after I had this character give this long bit of exposition about how they ended up where they are—said, “You know, you could have just had her say, ‘I’ll tell you later.’” And I was like, “Oh my God. You’re absolutely right. I should have done that. That would have been so much better.” I still kind of overwrite, so I haven’t entirely learned the lesson.
• AVC: There are so many good TV writers who have come out of children’s TV. What do you think makes that a good proving ground or a good learning ground?
• GY: The thing that jumps to mind is that it’s the equivalent of writing a sonnet, which is that there are limitations, and you have to be creative within those limitations. So perhaps you come up with solutions that you wouldn’t have otherwise. If you could do anything you want, you might not have thought of [this]. I think that discipline is very helpful in television. It’s just also the volume. For me, I think we did 65 episodes of Hey Dude, and I wrote 13 of them. So one in five episodes I wrote, as well as doing a lot of rewriting. It was just a lot of work, and that discipline of just getting up and having to write. It was pretty wonderful.

Storyteller's Rulebook #136: Burn Through All Your Good Ideas

I can’t recommend highly enough this tribute that Louis C.K. gave to the late, great George Carlin, which basically describes the moment you realize that you’re nowhere near good enough to make it, but it’s too late to go back:  “I’d been doing this fifteen years but nobody gave a shit who I was and I didn’t either.  But what could I do?  After fifteen years, it would be like getting out of prison! How could you re-enter the workforce?”

The solution that he heard from Carlin turned his career around: Use up all of your “best” material as fast as you can and never think about it again. Take all those ideas that you’re cherishing and holding tight to your breast, the ones that might make you big someday, and just use them all up. Write them and send them out and forget about them.

Whenever I find myself saying “I can’t write that one yet, I’m not good enough,” I always try to remind myself that, If I’m not good enough, then my ideas probably aren’t good enough either, so it’s the always the perfect time to write whatever ideas I have.  And even if I do find that I’m tackling something overly ambitious, that’s great, because it will force me to get better quickly. 

The worst thing you can do is to slowly polish some idea for years and years, convinced that it will one day make you rich.  That will keep you looking backwards, not forward...and it will ruin the idea.  You don’t want to add any polish to your ideas, you want to do just the opposite: strip them down to their essence.  The more polish you apply, the more you’ll have to scrape off later. 

Precious material is death.  The only way to get better is to generate new material, and the only way to do that is to find out what’s buried underneath every old idea that you’re still hoarding.  What you’ll find is raw, uncomfortable, specific, personal, honest material.

Storyteller's Rulebook #135: Don't Take The Wrong Lesson From Their Success

We all know, here in ambitious-writer-land, that the wildly successful “Twilight” series of books and movies is “bad”, and it’s easy to get furious about that… but that’s a trap .  In fact, though you, as a person, may loathe the message that it sends out, there’s no reason for you, as a writer, to resent the success of that series.  

There’s a difference between “Wow, this person can’t write!” and “This person is writing for an audience that doesn’t include me.”  It’s very easy to read something that has an annoying tone, or a certain set of affectations, and say, “That’s just bad writing,” but there’s a chance that this writer has identified an audience who craves that tone, and those people will eat it up.   

(And for that audience, the fact that that tone annoys you, Mr. Snooty Reader, might actually be a big plus.  They love that these stories are for them and just for them.  If you don’t get it, then you can’t be in their club.) 

When the success of a series like “Twilight” infuriates you, the danger is that you’ll end up saying one of these three things:

• “Twilight” is poorly written, and yet it sells, therefore there’s no point is learning how to write well, since it’s all a crap shoot.
• OR: “Twilight” is poorly written, and yet it sells, so therefore all I have to do is write something that I think is much better than “Twilight” and I’ll sell even more copies than Stephanie Meyer did!  
• OR: “Twilight” is poorly written, and yet it sells, so I should stop writing for my audience and start writing for her audience instead, since they’re obviously less discerning.

None of these things are true.  Just as you have to work hard to learn to please your audience, Meyer had to work hard to learn to please her audience.  Pay no attention to lies in the press about “it came to me in a dream and I just started writing it down.”  Press agents love to claim that the writing of a book was effortless, because then the audience can believe that these are somehow real characters who simply spoke to the author from another world.  If the press agents admitted that writing was a lot of work, then audiences would start to realize that the author, like all authors, is trying very hard to manipulate their emotions.

Instead of the self-destructive statements above, it’s far more useful to say to yourself. 

• “Twilight” sells, despite the fact that it’s deeply annoying to me and seems to do everything wrong, because it focuses on pleasing a specific audience, rather than a platonic ideal.  Rather than worrying about what every audience should want, how can I focus more on what my audience does want (even if my audience is very different from Stephanie Meyer’s)?
• AND: Is there a way to push more pleasure-buttons in my own work without sacrificing the subtlety and nuance that my audience desires?  

Most importantly, do not convince yourself for a second that Stephanie Meyer herself thinks that “Twilight” is bad, and that she’s just cynically exploiting the low standards of the girls who love her books.  It never works that way.   Successful “bad” art, whether it’s Stephanie Meyer, or Thomas Kinkaid, or Michael Bay, or Seth McFarland, is always made by true believers, who are making their own favorite type of art for their own audience. 

Storyteller's Rulebook #134: A Bad Movie is Actually Kind of a Big Deal

So recently I’ve been eating my spinach, which is to say that I’ve been catching up with the ScriptNotes podcast by John August and Craig Mazin.  I feel I must listen because this is an opportunity to hear two big-money screenwriters give inside tips about how to survive the business, and I do appreciate that they’re taking the time to do that, but I have to force myself to do it because I find them both to be pretty obnoxious.

I’m not going to fall into the trap of casting aspersions on their produced credits, because I certainly understand that a writer has very little control over which jobs they get (In fact, John and Craig did a pretty good episode about that here) but I don’t have to, since my problem is with each guy’s online persona…. 

Craig ran the ridiculously smug blog “The Artful Writer” for many years, and he’s rather infamous for his disastrous interference in the 2007 writer’s strike.  John’s eponymous blog is occasionally fun, but the good is mixed in with a lot of blasé cluelessness, such as his piece about how you shouldn’t write any screenplays about people trying to get a million dollars anymore, because a million dollars is just chump change these days (to guys like John).  

And it’s that last one that points to the most infuriating element of the podcast.  Almost every week, for one reason or another, they launch into an attack against people who get upset by low-quality movies.  “Who cares?”, they demand to know, “Bad movies aren’t hurting anybody!”  These giddy tirades inevitably end with a pumped-up Craig yelling “SHUT UP!  SHUT UP!” while giggling. 

Can you spot the connection?  A bad movie isn’t a big deal…if a million dollars is chump change.  But for most moviegoers, neither of these things is true.  After a long week’s work, if you go to a movie by yourself on a Friday night, you’re dropping $10-$17 for the ticket.  If you bring your family, it shoots up to $60 or more.  For many American families, that’s their entire entertainment budget for the week, and even if it wasn’t, that’s the only “night out on the town” that they can carve out from a 50-hour work week.  

I hate to shock John, but for the average joe, a million dollars is actually a lot farther away now than it was thirty years ago. Wages haven’t kept up with the rate of inflation (but costs such as movie tickets have exceeded it).

So yes, if you use up several hours’ wages and the only entertainment time your family has on a bad movie that none of the moviemakers really cared about, that is kind of a big deal.  John and Craig are allowed to goof off all they want going to free screenings, so they don’t realize what they’re asking of the people who have to pay to see their movies.  Which, come to think of it, explains a lot.    

Storyteller's Rulebook #131: Write Down Your Bad Ideas

Yesterday, we were talking about the benefits of being highly critical of your own work.  But how do you keep writing if you’re no longer confident that you’re spinning gold?  Well that’s the million-dollar-spec-sale question.  The answer is: learn to love revising.  You have to get to the point where the whole point of the first draft is to anticipate the fun you’ll have revising it later.

The purpose of the first draft is just to create raw material.  You’re just mixing together a big bowl of sculptor’s clay.  Your second draft is a pile of lumps you’ve shaped out of that clay.  Your third draft is the first one that anyone but you would recognize.  Your fourth draft is where it begins to get beautiful.

And how do you keep making those drafts better?  Not by shutting out the world and dwelling on your inner muse.  By getting feedback!  You can only see one side of your own work.  In order to figure out the shape of it, you have to ask other people with different perspectives what they see.

The biggest mistake a writer can make is to think, “I’ve got a bad (or half-formed) idea in my head, so I’ll wait until it gets better before I start writing.”  The best possible advice for any writer is this: WRITE DOWN THE BAD IDEA!

This is what people mean when they say that writing is re-writing.  Perfect writing almost never begins with a perfect idea.  Even if you do have a perfect idea, you’ll probably blow it, because you’ll be paralyzed by fear of ruining perfection as you stumble through the actual writing process.  It’s much safer to start with a so-so idea and perfect it as you go along. 

When I’m stuck, I’ve been known to create documents with names like “ “THE DUMBEST VERSION” or “EVERYTHING THAT DOESN’T WORK ABOUT THIS IDEA”.  These titles liberate me to dump all the crap out of my head and into list form. Inevitably, as I savage myself, picking the flaws apart, I wind up pruning away most of the bad parts and leaving something good behind.

Bad scripts become good scripts all the time.  Good Will Hunting started out as a techno-thriller.  Can you imagine how terrible that would have been?  Whether you love or hate the final product of Titanic, you should check out Cameron’s published script.  

I love the movie (I know, I know, how tacky of me!) but the original script was terrible!  There’s twice as much Billy Zane Snidely Whiplash over-the-top villainy.  By the time you’re done reading, no matter how you felt beforehand, you’ll see the final product as a masterpiece of restraint.  

Storyteller’s Rulebook #88: Sturgeon + Zeno = You'll Never Be On Easy Street

Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap. Zeno’s Paradox states that it should be impossible to cross a room, because first you must cross it halfway, and before you can cross the remaining distance, you must cross half of that distance, and so on into infinity… So crossing an infinite number of half-distances should take forever. 

Anyone who has ever read a TV Guide or judged a talent contest knows that Sturgeon’s Law is true and immutable. Anyone who has ever crossed a room knows that Zeno’s Paradox is not. But just try to get a job in the film industry, and suddenly Zeno doesn’t look so dumb. Time after time, you get halfway there, only to find that you still have an infinite number of ‘halfway’s still to go.

Why? Because of Sturgeon’s Law. In any creative competition, you can only compete with your peers at your current level. The good news is that 90% of the peers at your level will always be crap. If you can prove that you’re not crap, then you get elevated to a new level, consisting solely of that “talented tenth”. So now everybody’s great, right? Nope, because this is a new group, and so Sturgeon’s Law kicks in again. 90% of this new group, when compared to each other, is also crap. You’d better start scrambling again, hoping to avoid the next decimation.

 

How many times does this happen? How many decimations? At what point do you “have it made”? I don’t know yet. The one thing I’ve learned is that you’re never anywhere near the end. Let’s follow a typical path:

1. 90% of those who start writing their first screenplay don’t finish it.
2. 90% of those who finish a screenplay, never write another.
3. 90% of those who write several screenplays, never risk taking the next step (in my case, film school, but there are other paths as well)
4. 90% of those who apply to film school, don’t get in.
5. 90% of those who graduate from film school, never even get representation. (But they all have to pay back every penny of their loans.)
6. 90% of those who do get representation, never sell any scripts.
7. 90% of those who do sell scripts, never see any of them turned into movies….

And so on into infinity? I don’t know, but I’ll let you know if I ever cross the room.

 

Wow. Depressing, right? I’m sure that no one is that shocked by steps 1-4, but you might not have known about steps 5-7. I sure didn’t. Before I arrived at my “elite” film school, I assumed that all of the graduates would be set for life. They sure didn’t let us know up front that their graduates have an 0.1% placement rate in the industry. Even after that sunk in, I still assumed that once you had reps you had it made… Nope.I cannot recommend highly enough this excellent ten-part series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) by Irwin Handleman about the ups and downs of his screenwriting career. It’s brutally honest and hilariously droll. Irwin has gotten past me to Step 8: seeing one of his scripts made and put on screen (transformed into an Usher vehicle called In the Mix). The result? He did not get any job security from that at all. Crap. I’m never going to be set for life, am I?

Storyteller’s Rulebook #84: Everybody’s Success Helps Everybody

Some of my black film school friends on facebook can’t help but get infuriated by the success of Tyler Perry. “This guy is selling crap to our audience! There’s no room left for us!” It’s tempting to feel that way, but if you ask me, this is absolutely, wildly, totally untrue.

If a rival of yours becomes crazy-successful, as bad as it feels, there’s no reason why that shouldn’t help you. If their work is better than yours, then they’re going to convince producers to go on a buying spree looking for similar product, regardless of quality. If their work is worse then yours, that’s even better for you. Bad work does not destroy the audience for good work. Just the opposite: it creates a vacuum.

Tyler Perry has disproven a lot of recent prejudices:

1. A movie can’t make big money if it’s targeted solely at black audiences: DISPROVED
2. Even if that audience existed, you couldn’t trust black filmmakers to write, direct or produce those movies successfully: DISPROVED
3. If they did somehow manage to do it, the studios could just buy them out, rather than work with them on their terms: DISPROVED

The fear, however, is that, along the way, he has created a new prejudice:

1. Black movies have to be broad, manipulative and conservative.

But if you’re the writer/director who can disprove that prejudice, then the existence of that prejudice helps you. Perry’s huge success has created a market, and then failed to satisfy a significant segment of that market. That creates a vacuum, just waiting for you to fill it. No funder will trust you to create an audience from scratch, but it’s much easier to convince them that you’re going to be “Tyler Perry meets Tarantino” (or “meets Woody Allen,” or “meets Tina Fey,” or whomever). Perry has created an audience for you to highjack.

Every success story helps all of us. The danger is not that people will see the other guy’s movie instead of your movie. The danger is that people will stop going to the movies. Anyone who gets people into theaters is creating a bigger audience for everybody. There is almost no limit to the potential demand for movie tickets. When people see good movies, then they want to see more good movies. When people see bad movies, they want to see a good movie next time instead. If you want to sell movies to people, then anyone who gets people into theaters is your friend.

The Story Project #5: They Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent

This is hard to believe, but ten years ago, comics fans were still convinced that the movies would never take them seriously. Then Sam Raimi hit the first two Spider-Man movies out of the park, and the scales fell from Hollywood’s eyes. They suddenly realized that, in the hands of skillful adapters (which proved to be the tricky part), comics could prove to be a theretofore little-touched treasure trove of high concept story material. Wa-hoo! It was land rush time! Now, of course, even an old school superhero fan like myself is sick to death of all the adaptations. They pumped out the well until it was dry and now they’re already insta-rebeooting franchises like Spider-Man and X-Men (along with Pirates and Bourne and many others). Gee, maybe they can get Tobey Maguire to come back and play the new Spider-Man’s dad! (or slightly-older brother.)

Why won’t they let the party end? Here’s one theory: Development people had always feared that the studio bosses were secretly illiterates who only pretended to read those dry stacks of scripts on their desk. Those fears seemed to be confirmed when they saw how much happier their bosses were about taking home stacks of graphic novels, which came pre-visualized and pre-set to maximum badass-itude. Once the comics well ran dry, they couldn’t force anyone to go back to reading dry prose, especially screenplays which are even duller than books, since they’re only blueprints. 

Things got so bad in Hollywood that many screenwriters, myself included, were advised to convert our screenplays into fake graphic novels that we could then adapt back into screenplays. The most infamous case of this was a “property” called “Cowboys and Aliens”, which pre-sold for big bucks, then put out one issue from a comic book company that existed just to generate material for adaptation. The project has been cited as an example of what’s wrong with the system so many times that I was a little shocked to see a trailer recently and realize (1) the movie finally got made, and (2) the trailer isn’t even half bad.

But comics were just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The biggest problem is simply that failure begets failure. Too many bad spec scripts were sold, which happened to coincide with a time in which a lot or adaptations were unexpectedly successful. These and many other forces combined to create the vague impression that original material was now a hard sell, and once that set in, the great unspoken embarrassment about making up a story from scratch reached out and seized everybody’s heart.

If you try pitching an original movie to a development person today, even if they love it, they know that they’ll be in for a hard slog if they try to pass it on up the ladder. They have to explain that they liked a story that nobody else has ever bought before. It’s so much easier to say “x number of fans can’t be wrong!” (Even in the case of Cowboys and Aliens, where x equaled zero) They’re not in the storytelling business anymore, they’re in the franchising business. They’re not creating commodities, that’s for chumps. They’re trading commodities, that’s less embarrassing.

Our president liked to tell a story on the campaign trail about an idealist showing up to help out with a local Chicago campaign only to have the boss ask him which political machine had sent him over. When he answered “nobody,” they responded “we don’t want nobody nobody sent.” They, too, didn’t want to create value, they just wanted to trade it back and forth. That’s become the American way. But there’s just one problem: Americans crave new stories. If we keep trying to tell original stories, the producers will eventually have to listen to us, even if they don’t want to, as long as we refuse to be embarrassed about what we’re doing.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #54: Just Listen To Yourself

The best damn karaoke bar in my city is a place called the Old Carriage Inn in Brooklyn. It’s an odd mix of ironic hipsters singing Meatloaf and retired cops crooning Sinatra. Nobody gets laughed at but anyone who puts in extra effort gets appreciated.

When you first visit a karaoke bar, you refuse to sing until you get really drunk, then you finally stumble up there and trip through a song, but if the crowd is kind then they give you some support and you wonder what you were scared of. Maybe you get hooked, like I did, and you keep going back. If you do, you start to notice something. For the most part, the stage is a parade of drunks who warble and laugh and nobody minds, but every so often that quiet guy from the back of the bar meekly takes the stage and does an amazing “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” All the background conversation drops away and spontaneous applause erupts at the end. You watch this and you start to think... “Gee, I’m glad they don’t boo me, but they don’t cheer me either. Maybe I should try to get a little better. I’d like to hear the conversation quiet down some night...”

And that’s when you’ve got a fateful decision to make. Because there are two ways to enjoy yourself onstage: you can just not listen to yourself, or you can stay within your range. Either method is perfectly valid. If you don’t care to sing in tune, that’s fine: nobody out there is paying attention anyway. And as long as you don’t listen to how you sound (which is actually very hard to hear if you’re not trying), then you don’t care either. It’s all part of your rock and roll fantasy, and that fantasy is all about image. You get to strut and shout, which is all you really wanted to do. But if you want the crowd to quiet down and listen, then first you have to start listening to yourself. Warning: you might not like what you hear, at first. Ouch! You’re blowing a lot of notes.

Now here’s some more bad news: you’re probably never going to hit those notes you’re missing. The surest way to get better is to limit your ambition. You have to figure out what your range is and pick only those songs that you can naturally sing. What a bummer. You used to have 50,000 songs to choose from, but now you’ve only got a few hundred.

And writing is the same way. There are two ways to enjoy writing. You can write any story about anybody doing anything, which might result in some polite applause, or you can know your range. Eventually, you come to admit, “I’m good at scaring people, but not so good at making them laugh…” or vice versa. Suddenly, those 200 ideas you had for your next story shrink down to 5. 

Maybe, once you’ve proven that you can win the crowd over, you can try to stretch yourself again, but if you’re trying to break in, it might be good to ask some of your readers what they think your strengths are and start focusing on those. If all you want to do is live the fantasy of being a writer, then it doesn’t matter—write a different genre every time. But if you want to get paid, then your best bet is do what you’re best at.

Storyteller's Rulebook #49: The Writer and the Naysayer Should Be Friends

There was a story that made the rounds of the writing blogs recently, thanks to some eager press agent, about a new novelist named James King. The hook was the “inspirational story” of how King was rejected by 54 agents before he found a publisher. Naturally, I’m happy for the guy, and more power to him, but these sorts of press releases always leave out one itsy-bitsy teensy-weensy impossibly-huge detail: Was he revising his manuscript the whole time or not?

It’s no accident that they neglect to ask that question. These stories seek to feed our fantasies that we, too, might be an undiscovered genius. The last thing they want to do is give the impression that art-making is a humbling, collaborative process.
 

Especially in stories that focus on great authors and their rejection slips, the implication is always that the rejecters were abject fools who failed to see the author’s inherent brilliance, but the author “stuck to his guns” and “refused to listen to the naysayers.” Finally, one brave agent and/or publisher saw the value that everybody else missed, proving that the author had been right all along. 

 

But isn’t there another possibility? I know that if I had a novel rejected by 10 agents, much less 54, I would start listening eagerly to the naysayers, pumping them for notes and rewriting my text to fit what they had to say. And I assume that that’s just what Mr. King did. Isn’t it possible that agent number 55 didn’t prove the previous 54 wrong? What if he proved them right? I’d bet that their rejections were the kick in the pants that King needed to fix his manuscript. 

 

Of course, you can’t listen to every note, but they quickly form a critical concensus. As Bob Gale says on the Back to the Future commentary: “If we got a note from only one person, we would assure each other that that was the only person who felt that way. But as soon as we got the same note from two people, we knew that there would be millions who felt that way.”

 

Updated: A year after I ran this piece, we got this excellent article by Kathryn Stockett about her many attempts to sell “The Help”, which was far more honest about the relationship between rejection and revision:

•  “By rejection number 45, I was truly neurotic. It was all I could think about—revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed The End.”

Storyteller's Rulebook: Beyond Good vs. Sucky

So it’s time I came clean: my movie watching time is just gone, man, gone. Through December I’m gonna be pretty damn busy. So how do I keep the blog going? With a lot more of what Lou Grant derisively called “think pieces”. If that doesn’t float your boat, come back in a few weeks. But otherwise...

So you’re finally ready to show off your manuscript. And… And… And… ...they like it! They say “It’s really good!” Your first inclination is to say “Great!” and hang up. Lock that praise away. Put it in the bank. Let it appreciate. But then you call back that other friend you gave it to and ask them what they thought. They hem and haw, but finally they come clean: “I thought it kind of sucked.” Now you want to hang up even quicker, and never call back.

But both conversations are just beginning. The good/bad report is somewhat useful to you. It’s nice to know what overall impression certain individuals are getting from your story at this stage, but it’s not exactly news you can use. And it doesn’t mean very much. Because every reader has different unconscious priorities. Those qualities that ring the “good” bell for them may not be appreciated at all by someone else, and vice versa. If someone is nice enough to read your stuff and let you know what they think, see if you can’t push them a little further and figure out what they really meant by “good” or “sucky”. By my count, there are at least 20 different qualities they may have in mind, divided up into five categories. Yes, folks, it’s time for another list:

Character:

Sympathy

Amount of personality

Uniqueness

Motivation

Depth

Story:

Hook

Size

Linearity

Reversals

Structure:

Beginning, Middle and End

Escalation

Set Up and Payoff

Tautness

Dialogue:

Bounce

Verisimilitude

Pithiness

Theme:

Something to Say

Morally Coherent

Reflects the Way the World Works

This week I’ll define the twenty parts and give some example of movies that succeed and/or failed to deliver on each.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #43: Do As They Did, Not As They Say

Getting good advice can be tricky. Most insider advice-givers, even if they’re trying to be helpful, will lie to your face about how to make it in the industry. They don’t want to tell you to do the things they did. Instead they tell you never to make the compromises they made. That’s terrible advice! Of course you need to make those same compromises. Those compromises are the secret of their success!

Are they deliberately trying to sabotage you? Not necessarily. Now that they have enough clout to make what they want to make, they’re trying to achieve something great and daring and totally uncompromised, but first they have to unlearn all the people-pleasing shortcuts they used earlier in their career. They genuinely think: “Oh, if only I had never learned those shortcuts, then I wouldn’t have to unlearn them now!” So they tell you to never stray from the one true path of art for art’s sake. Of course, if you follow that advice, you will never make it as far as they did.

Compromise is usually an artist’s friend-- and clout can be deadly. Most writers and directors benefit from a strong producer who can keep them from becoming self-indulgent. Only great artists can keep making strong work even after they no longer have to compromise—these are the artists that truly love their audiences. They aren’t just waiting to get the chance to show the folks at home the kind of story they should like. The great Claude Chabrol, who just passed away, never broke his contract with audiences— for 50 years, without ever straying far from the thriller genre that made him famous, he still managed to made films that were personal, political, and profound.

When someone tells you “Never make the compromises I made,” don’t let them sabotage you. Smile politely, and then ask “Okay, now tell me how you made those compromises, so that I’ll know not to make them myself.” Because that’s the stuff you need to hear. You want to do as they did, not as they say.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #39: Prospectors and Alchemists

One of the assignments I’m working on now is about hedge-fund guys, so I’ve been reading a lot of books about that world. I’ve noticed that they go through a very similar initiation ritual to writers (and probably similar to everybody else whose job requires that they seem clever).

Some stock picker will have a good year and so they’ll start a hedge fund with much fanfare. For about two seconds they’re the new golden boy. Then a few trades go south and they very quickly go from golden boy to toxic waste before they even know what hit them. What do they do now? They face a perilous choice. They got to where they are through intuition. They had a sixth sense for good ideas. They didn’t know where the ideas came from and neither did anyone else, so people began to suspect that maybe they were had magical powers, and invested some capital in them.

But the magic was an illusion. Nobody starts a hedge fund after a bad year, so when a good year finally hits, the preceding years of misses get wiped off your record and the myth of the instant success is created. But, statistically speaking, it’s likely that the next year will take you right back to misses, except now you’re putting real money at risk.

This is the situation George Soros faced in 1985. He had trusted his intuition and convinced some big money to follow him, but then he made a few bad bets and he couldn’t figure out what went wrong. Wasn’t he a genius? No, he realized, he wasn’t. He had been a good guesser, but guesses aren’t a reliable commodity that you can sell. He came to a horrible realization: he had to ignore his own intuition and rebuild his ideas from scratch. He had to take his good guesses apart and figure out why they had worked, in order to figure out why his bad guesses had flopped. He started keeping a diary of every idea that came into his head as a “real-time thought experiment” and picking apart every assumption.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been doing the same thing recently. In writing, as in finance, you can get in the door based on early promise, but then you’re expected to perform every time, and to do so you have to learn totally different habits, ignoring the instincts that got you there and replacing them with a repeatable structure. 

In film school, they teach you to ignore all doubts and listen to your inner wellspring of inspiration, where you go panning for flecks of gold. When you build up enough flecks, you enter the marketplace. But you quickly discover that flecks of gold don’t come quickly enough to make a living. You’re no longer a prospector. You’re now an alchemist. You’re not looking for gold wherever you find it, you’re expected to produce it on cue, and when you’re asked to re-write somebody else’s abandoned script, you frequently have to start with a hunk of lead.

Soros’s diary had a happy ending: his new process led him to make a huge bet against the dollar that yielded a profit of $230 million overnight, securing his fortune and his fame. He published the diary as a book called The Alchemy of Finance. He never went back to prospecting.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #38: How Do You Cope With Remake Fever?

So there’s a writer and he thinks he’s pretty good. He’s got great ideas for original stories—some horny kids get lost in a spooky forest, a father and daughter survive a shipwreck, that kind of stuff —but his producers don’t want to hear them. They only want two things: remakes and adaptations. Why not remake that Danish revenge thriller that came out a few years ago? People have forgotten the details, but they remember the name, so it’ll be easy to sell. The writer protests: you want to do remakes of stuff that’s not even twenty years old?? Why can’t we tell original stories for once? But, as usual, he loses the fight. He puts his originals back in the drawer for another year and goes to work on the pre-digested stuff, re-telling stories that people already know.

The writer, of course, was William Shakespeare, who found himself in the same position that screenwriters face today. Writers get sick of remakes and adaptations. Why can’t we create value instead of merely recycling it? But producers love pre-sold material. Unlike most of today’s rewriters, Shakespeare rose to the task. He achieved every rewriter’s dream—he did work so good that everybody forgot about the originals. (Who stages Thomas Kyd’s 1589 version of Hamlet today?)

He did this by overcoming a mental hurdle that stands in the way of most writers. There are two ways to evaluate your writing, but they often get confused with each other. You can judge what it’s about, or you can judge how well it’s written. But it’s very hard to keep these things separate. It’s hard to say, “this is beautifully written, but the idea doesn’t work.” Or, even worse: “This is a great story! Unfortunately it’s not well written.”

As a kid, I loved sci-fi and comics, so I wanted to write my own, but I was always disappointed by so-called “Creative Writing” classes. All they wanted me to write about was my happiest memory or my saddest day. Who cared about that stuff? I was there because I had ideas! Ideas about spaceships and evil computers! I dropped those classes.

I wish now that I’d stayed and learned how to write about my own life. But I also wish that they had re-named the classes, so that I wouldn’t have been so disappointed. These were, in fact, non-creative writing classes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They wanted us to write about our own life not because it was such interesting material, but because they wanted us to learn how to tell a true story well, before we took on the extra burden of making up stories from scratch. Sure, nobody cared about my saddest and happiest days ...yet. That was the whole point. I was supposed to learn how to make people care, which is a very valuable skill to have. I didn’t get that. I thought that the way to make people care was to pick more interesting subject matter.

Eventually, I would find classes where they let me write made-up stories, but I quickly discovered that having good ideas and writing well were two very different things. Luckily, Shakespeare was able to accept that. He only wrote four originals, as opposed to thirty-four remakes and/or adaptations. He may have been disappointed by this ratio, but he didn’t let it affect the quality of his work.

(Yes, folks, it’s unofficially become a psuedo-Shakespeare week, which psuedo-concludes tomorrow)

Storyteller’s Rulebook #33: Be Unhateable

Tomorrow, there'll be a movie, I promise! Garbo! In the meantime...

Last time, I talked about the beleagered readers who are so wary of reading your submission. This is why your first page has to be better than good. Better than great. It has to be unhateable. The goal of your first page is not to get them to like your script. It’s to get them to stop hating it. They just read a script that they despised, and now they’re angry at you. They’re saying, “I’m sick and tired of all the bullshit clichés and if I see one more I’ll scream!

How do you handle such a reader? Pleasantly surprise them. The heart of all great writing is this: setting up expectations, then reversing them, over and over. Show them you can do that on the very first page.

Your very first line, even if it’s a line spoken by a minor character, especially if it’s a minor character, need to reverse an expectation. As soon as your reader recognizes your opening situation, they’ll start to dread the clichéd version of what usually happens in these situations. Why not shock them by avoiding that, right from the first line?

There’s been some sort of disaster, the hero hasn’t arrived on the scene yet, so the first line is: COP: “Let’s move it along folks, nothing to see here.” We’re never going to see that cop again, so this isn’t poor characterization, per se, but guess what? The reader hates the script now. The name “COP” set up an expectation in their mind, and then that cop said the most clichéd thing he could say, which failed to reverse that expectation. So now they assume that everyone else in your script will also let them down.

What if it had said something like this: COP: “Damn, you people are rude. We’re just trying to do our-- Hey you! I mean it-- I know your mom!” Or maybe, if it’s a bigger city: COP: “What do you guys want? You want a severed finger that you can take home as a souvenir? No? Then quit your mouth-breathing and get your noses back behind the tape.” (Note how I needed to know more about the cop and the setting in order to write a more specific line. Getting specific means doing more homework.) Let the reader know that they’re in good hands. Unlike in the last script they read, your characters won’t just say what the reader expects them to say.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #32: Imagine You're On An Airplane...

You board a airplane. You’ve brought a good book that you’re dying to read. Then the person sitting next to you turns to you and starts spontaneously telling you about their week, in great detail. Uh oh. You’ve just sat down next to the scariest beast of them all: the unwelcome storyteller.

Well I’ve got some bad news for you. If you ever submit a manuscript, you become the unwelcome storyteller, and the reader is the person who would really rather read their book. Why can’t the reader be someone who’s excited to read your manuscript? Well, maybe they were, 50 submissions ago, but now they feel hurt and betrayed by the mountain of half-ass stuff they’ve had to read and they really, really don’t want to have to read one more story. They would rather do anything than read manuscript #51, but there you are, yakking their ear off.

So try to remember what it feels like to be stuck next to an unwelcome storyteller. When the person next to you on a plane starts talking, do you just assume that they’ve got a good story to tell? You don’t. Do you automatically care about whatever they have to say? Certainly not. Could you ever possibly care? Yes, but only if they’ve got a great story to tell. How quickly do you want their story to become interesting? Right away! Do you want them to start with a lot of background about where they were born and what childhood traumas they had? No, you hope that they skip over all that and instead tell you a focused story about one unique and interesting thing they did.

If you could describe the ideal airplane conversation, what would it be like? You’d probably want them to have a fascinating job and tell you clever stories about the fun and fascinating adventures they’ve had doing that job. (And yes, you want them to be good at that job, don’t you? That makes the stories a lot more interesting.)

Whenever the person next to me on a plane starts talking, I smile impassively and try to suppress my fears. I know that there’s a 90% chance that this will turn out to be an insufferable bore who makes my flight seem ten times longer than usual. But occasionally, just occasionally, I have a great conversation. There’s that slim 10% chance that this person will be clever and fascinating, and I’ll tell everyone after I land that I just heard a great story on the plane.