Over the years, I’ve consumed a lot of material on how to write a screenplay. Below is a curated collection of the notes I’ve taken, including screenwriting books, podcasts (a quick plug for Scriptnotes, my favorite of them all), and of course the stalwart Robert McKee.
If you want an entertaining and practical dive into the how-to’s of screenwriting, your best bet is Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat [Amazon]. It’s a fast read, and the information is immediately useful.
My favorite book of the bunch is John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story [Amazon]. His blend of theory, psychology, and practical advice lit the most proverbial lightbulbs for me. And I’m only halfway through.
And if you’re more visual, watch Michael Tucker’s Lessons from the Screenplay [YouTube]. They’re plain fun to watch and help you appreciate the tremendous depth and insight and execution that goes into great films.
NOTES NOTES NOTES NOTES NOTES
The Anatomy of Story, John Truby
- Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both.
- A story tracks what a person wants, what he’ll do to get it, and what costs he’ll have to pay along the way.
- So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.
- Classic short stories usually track a few events that lead the character to gain a single important insight.
- Nine out of ten writers fail at the premise
- Example premise for Huck Finn: “believably showing a simple and not entirely admirable boy gaining great moral insight.”
- Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life
- That’s the difference between a premise, which all stories have, and a designing principle—which only good stories have. The premise is concrete; it’s what actually happens. The designing principle is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way. Stated in one line: Designing principle = story process + original execution
- Tootsie:
- Premise: When an actor can’t get work, he disguises himself as a woman and gets a role in a TV series, only to fall in love with one of the female members of the cast.
- Designing Principle: Force a male chauvinist to live as a woman.
- One way of coming up with a designing principle is to use a journey or similar traveling metaphor. Huck Finn’s raft trip down the Mississippi River with Jim, Marlow’s boat trip up the river into the “heart of darkness,” Leopold Bloom’s travels through Dublin in Ulysses,
- Sometimes a single symbol can serve as the designing principle, as with the red letter A in The Scarlet Letter, the island in The Tempest, the whale in Moby-Dick, or the mountain in The Magic Mountain.
- KEY POINT: Always tell a story about your best character. “Best” doesn’t mean “nicest.” It means “the most fascinating, challenging, and complex,” even if that character isn’t particularly likable.
- If you can’t find a character you love implied in the story idea, move on to another idea. If you find him but he is not currently the main character, change the premise right now so that he is.
- To figure out the central conflict, ask yourself “Who fights whom over what?” and answer the question in one succinct line.
- Is this single story line unique enough to interest a lot of people besides me? This is the question of popularity, of commercial appeal. You must be ruthless in answering it.
- From the very beginning of the story, your hero has one or more great weaknesses that are holding him back. Something is missing within him that is so profound, it is ruining his life
- KEY POINT: Your hero should not be aware of his need at the beginning of the story.
- A true opponent not only wants to prevent the hero from achieving his desire but is competing with the hero for the same goal.
- This technique of starting at the end and going back to the beginning is one we will use again and again as we figure out character, plot, and theme. It’s one of the best techniques in fiction writing because it guarantees that your hero and your story are always heading toward the true endpoint of the structural journey, which is the self-revelation.
- You want to give your opponent a special ability to attack your hero’s greatest weakness, and to do so incessantly while he tries to win the goal.
- The relationship between the hero and the opponent is the single most important relationship in the story. In working out the struggle between these two characters, the larger issues and themes of the story unfold.
- The subplot character, like the ally and the opponent, provides another opportunity to define the hero through comparison and advance the plot. The ally helps the hero reach the main goal. The subplot character tracks a line parallel to the hero, with a different result.
- The central concept of love stories is quite profound. Love stories say that a person does not become a true individual by being alone. A person becomes a unique and authentic individual only by entering into a community of two.
- The buddy strategy allows you essentially to cut the hero into two parts, showing two different approaches to life and two sets of talents. These two characters are “married” into a team in such a way that the audience can see their differences but also see how these differences actually help them work well together
- One of the most important elements of the buddy web has to do with the fundamental conflict between the friends. There is a snag in the relationship that keeps interfering. This allows an ongoing opposition between the two leads in a traveling story where most of the other opponents are strangers who quickly come and go.
Save the Cat by Black Snyder
- And yet, so the rules tell us and human nature dictates, we don’t want to see anyone, even the most underdog character, succeed for too long. And eventually, the hero must learn that magic isn’t everything, it’s better to be just like us —us members of the audience —because in the end we know this will never happen to us. Thus a lesson must be in the offing; a good moral must be included at the end.
- Look at Point Break starring Patrick Swayze, then look at Fast and Furious. Yes, it’s the same movie almost beat for beat. But one is about surfing, the other is about hot cars.
- There’s the “good girl tempted” archetype – pure of heart, cute as a bug: Betty Grable, Doris Day, Meg Ryan (in her day), Reese Witherspoon. This is the female counterpart of the young man on the rise.
- The rule of thumb in all these cases is to stick to the basics no matter what. Tell me a story about a guy who…
- I can identify with.
- I can learn from.
- I have compelling reason to follow.
- I believe deserves to win and…
- Has stakes that are primal and ring true for me.
- Not to get too self-protective, but a strong structure guarantees your writing credit. More than any other element, the bones of a screenplay, as constructed in the story beats of your script, will be proof to those who decide who gets credit at the Writers Guild of America (WGA) that the work is primarily yours.
- The hero cannot be lured, tricked, or drift into Act Two. The hero must make the decision himself. That’s what makes him a hero anyway —being proactive.
- When you, the development exec, ask for “more set pieces,” this is where I put them. In the fun and games.
- a movie’s midpoint is either an “up” where the hero seemingly peaks (though it is a false peak) or a “down” when the world collapses all around the hero (though it is a false collapse), and it can only get better from here on out
- At the All Is Lost moment, stick in something, anything that involves a death. It works every time. Whether it’s integral to the story or just something symbolic, hint at something dead here. It could be anything. A flower in a flower pot. A goldfish. News that a beloved aunt has passed away.
- And its logline —an ugly duckling FBI agent goes undercover as a contestant to catch a killer at the American Miss pageant —certainly satisfies the four elements from Chapter One: irony, compelling picture, audience and cost, and a killer title.
- Thus, she has reached a classic All Is Lost moment: She is worse off than when this movie started!
- You must take time to frame the hero’s situation in a way that makes us root for him, no matter who he is or what he does.
- The Covenant of the Arc is the screenwriting law that says: Every single character in your movie must change in the course of your story. The only characters who don’t change are the bad guys. But the hero and his friends change a lot.
- In many a well-told movie, the hero and the bad guy are very often two halves of the same person struggling for supremacy, and for that reason are almost equal in power and ability. How many movies can you name that have a hero and a bad guy who are two halves of the same persona? Think about Batman (Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson), Die Hard (Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman), and even Pretty Woman (Richard Gere and Jason Alexander).
- Make sure every character has “A Limp and an Eyepatch.” Every character has to have a unique way of speaking, but also something memorable that will stick him in the reader’s mind.
- Four Quadrant – Men Over 25, Men Under 25, Women Over 25, Women Under 25
- Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis – aka, Acts One, Two, and Three
Robert McKee on screenwriting and life
- Novels are the best format for inner conflict
- Theater are the best format for p2p conflict, dialogue
- Film is at its best in showing man’s conflict with the world, the external
- Can tell right away what skill a writer has by how they handle exposition
- Spielberg: brilliant craftsmanship, nothing to say
- TV is the most creative medium today
- Generally the screenplay gets better and better and better through filming and acting and production but that’s not talked about, only when it gets worse
- Sometimes novels or memoirs usually get published by a 23 yo but they’re just there to annoy the good writers who take 10 years to master their craft and write something of quality
- Many years ago the worst thing that could happen was you’d die. So stories were about how to survive. There are far worse things today. People in living hells. People could at least understand the plague. Who can understand banking? Parenting?
- Need a MINIMUM of 3 major reversals in any story. eg, Raiders of Lost Ark
How to write a movie in 21 days, Viki King
- Can you find a line of dialogue on page 3 that introduces a central question? Every scene after this builds on that central question
- One thing that happens in storytelling is that we tend to start telling the story from far away. For instance, we tell it in hearsay scenes (the funeral) rather than by depicting the action (car crash). We tell it in minor characters (the girlfriend) rather than through the character it really happened to (the drunk driver).
- By page 10, you’ll need to tell us what the story is. Keep setting up more and more information so that we know what the hero wants
- We should enter a scene at the last best moment; that is, if you want character A to slap character B, don’t have A pull up in the car, enter the building, ride up in the elevator, and so forth. Just CUT TO the slap.
- The event that happens on page 30 throws your character a curve. He is forced to respond or react. He might make a plan. He decides on a goal to pursue because of what’s happened.
- See if you can identify the page 45 scene. This is usually a small scene with symbolic overtones. (If it’s a young girl growing up, we see the teddy bear abandoned face down on the window seat next to the cosmetics.) This scene gives us a clue to the resolution.
- By page 75 it looks like all is lost; there’s even a scene where your hero is just about to give up. But then something happens that changes everything: an event that gives him a chance at a goal he didn’t even know he had.
- On page 90, an event occurs that “educates” the hero. He’s going to be getting something more than or something different from what he set out to get.
- Page 45 is the symbolic growth scene. It is a taste of where your hero will get to. Page 60 is where he commits wholeheartedly to his dream. In Gone With the Wind Scarlett holds the carrots up to the sky and says, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.” And she spends the second half of the movie holding to that commitment.
- Have your character complete this statement now: “As God is my witness, I will _____ _____ _____.”
- For the first half of Act II, (pages 30 to 60), your hero is saying, “I want it. I want it.” And the stakes against him are obstacles that seem to say, “you can’t have it.”
- Inner Movie Axiom: In order to have a dream become a reality, it must be given up as a dream.
- From pages 75 to 90 you’ll move very fast. Your hero got up the mountain, and now he’s shooting the rapids on the other side.
- Answer these questions:
- Does your hero get what he wanted?
- What last thing does he have to give up to get it?
- How is he different in the end than he was in the beginning?
- Remember your first scene of the movie—see if the last scene can be an answer to that scene. We call this bookends.
- Remember the good feeling you get when you watch a movie and it starts to pay off at the end? It’s exciting; when the Raiders finally found the lost ark and looked inside; when Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman are finally at the airport in Casablanca. Be dramatic here. Give us some beautiful closing moments.
From Brandon Sanderson’s lecture notes, The Hero’s Journey
1. Object-at-rest: the Hero is at home, doing nothing much.
2. Call #1: the Hero is summoned. He usually refuses.
3. Call #2: the Hero is summoned. He can no longer refuse.
4. Journey Begins: what it says on the tin.
5. Loss of Mentor: crap is now real.
6. Descent into Underworld: crap is now realer.
7. Confront the Evil Within Themselves: crap is now THE REALEST.
8. Apotheosis/Everything Comes Together: often using skills learned between steps 4 and 5, the Hero succeeds in his goal.
9. Return Home (Upgraded): in the falling action, the Hero comes home having defeated the Bad Guy—but, more notably, having defeated the Bad Guy in himself.
Random notes:
- Craig Mazin: In character descriptions, describe their wardrobe, hair, and makeup
- What is each character terrified of? That’s their inner struggle and how they need to transform
- to paraphrase Alex Macquarrie’s tweet, it’s all about FEAR – who creates it, who avoids it, who confronts and overcomes it
- Great scenes often include dialogue where characters ask a lot of questions. Questions propel action, demand a reply. It also alerts the audience because they think they’re being asked the question
- Great scenes often rotate around one word or one phrase. For example, from Remains of the Day, the scene where Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson keep talking about a “book”, batting the word back and forth to each other