Here’s the answer to your anxiety of the blank screen: go back to lesson 1: All Writing Is Rewriting. Don’t try to write the whole screenplay in one go, write it in incremental steps.  You rewrite as you go along.

Start with the cool idea. Don’t worry about making it artful, just worry about making it clear.

Here’s a cool idea: a man’s wife is murdered, and he is accused of the crime.

So, you write that down. Nothing else, just that. And maybe that’s your work for the day.

And just keep that file open on your desktop. Call it MURDER GUY or something.

Don’t worry about making it a big hit screenplay yet, just worry about getting ideas down on paper.

Ideas come to you over the days: the man accused of the crime is a surgeon. The actual man responsible for the crime has a prosthetic arm. There’s a spectacular bus crash. There’s a showdown at a dam. There’s a chase through a hotel laundry. So forth.

You write down all those ideas as they occur to you. In no particular order. Maybe you’ll use all of them, maybe you won’t. Carry a little notebook in your pocket so you can jot them down as they occur to you. I ride my bike around Santa Monica in order to think and can often be seen stopped in the middle of a parking lot, jotting little things down in my little trustynotebook.

And the cool thing about computers is they don’t care what order you write stuff down in, they’ll let you painlessly organize it later.

Okay. So you’ve got your cool idea for a movie, and you know who your protagonist is and what he wants. Congratulations! You’ve completed the most important part of writing a screenplay.

Now: who will be working against your protagonist? Well, there’s the guy who really killed the doctor’s wife, and there’s a US marshal who is out to get the doctor whether he’s innocent or not, and there’s the guy who hired the guy who killed the doctor’s wife, and there’s everybody else in the world who thinks the doctor is guilty and should be in jail. That’s a formidable array of adversaries and you’re well on the way to writing a big hit blockbuster.

Okay. So you’ve got a protagonist with a very strong want and a set of strong antagonists to oppose him. Here is where you sit down and rough out an outline.

Shouldn’t be more than a few lines. If you know who your protagonist is and what he wants, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out a basic three-act structure for his story.

(In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve chosen for my outline model The Fugitive, Jeb Stuart and David Twohy’s masterful 1993 thriller.)

So let’s say that Act I is the doctor’s wife’s murder, the doctor’s trial and incarceration and his miraculous escape from that. That’s some freakin’ first act! You take a wealthy, successful man, kill his wife, take away all his money, his reputation, his freedom and damn near his life, all in the first 40 minutes of the movie. This is what we in the business call a “reversal of fortune,” and it’s one of the story tricks that help make hit movies.

Okay, so you just write down:

ACT I: Dr. Kimble’s wife is murdered, he is accused, arrested, tried, convicted, sent to prison, but somehow escapes.

So, all of Act I’s energy flows in one direction: Making Dr. Kimble a fugitive of justice. We could call this little 40-minute movie “Dr. Kimble Becomes A Fugitive.”

Now then, if you’ve seen The Fugitive recently, you know what happens next. Dr. Kimble runs for a few minutes, but then he realizes that he cannot run forever, and in fact, he has something he absolutely must do that will require him going back to his life and sneaking around. What must he do? He actually announces it at the end of Act I: “Find That Man!” he remembers telling someone, and so he, and the narrative, literally do a 180 and head in the opposite direction, and all of Act II, the next 40 minutes of the movie, are another expertly paced little narrative called “Dr. Kimble Finds The One-Armed Man.” Every scene is about Dr. Kimble’s pursuit of the One-Armed Man, every roadblock is there to stand in his way of Finding The One-Armed Man.

But all you need to write down for now is: ACT I: Dr. Kimble Becomes A Fugitive, ACT II: Dr. Kimble Finds The One-Armed Man.

What’s left? What’s left is Dr. Kimble Finds The Man Responsible For His Wife’s Death. And all of Act III of The Fugitive, every single scene, is dedicated to Dr. Kimble’s step-by-step figuring out who is The Man Responsible For His Wife’s Death.

So that’s just three sentences, but it is, honest to God, the bulk of the work of writing a screenplay. The problem, of course, is knowing what those three sentences are. Once you do, everything else can begin to fall into place.

Once you have those three sentences, then you can start filling in your empty spaces. Don’t open your screenwriting program, you’re not there quite yet. Just concentrate on the next step. Take your time, there’s no rush. Keep jotting things down as they occur to you.

The next step is figuring out your broad strokes. How do you begin to figure out your broad strokes? You go back to your beginning: who your protagonist and what does he want?

Who is responsible for Dr. Kimble’s wife’s murder? Well, Dr. Kimble is a wealthy surgeon — it’s probably someone in the medical profession. Who would stand to lose so much that they would sanction a murder to keep their secret? Probably someone in the pharmaceutical business. How is Dr. Kimble going to find the one-armed man? Well, he’s a doctor, he would understand something about the manufacture and distribution of prosthetic limbs, or at least he would know how to gain access to hospital records.

You see? By simply knowing who your protagonist is and what he wants, everything else begins to fall into place. Who is the US marshal pursuing Dr. Kimble? Well, if Dr. Kimble is single-minded in his goal, so should the US marshal. If Dr. Kimble is filled with moral outrage regarding his wife’s death, well, let’s make the marshal morally abstentious — make it that he literally doesn’t care if the doctor is guilty or not. That makes him a formidable adversary and will most likely win the actor who plays the character an Oscar.

Everything the protagonist does, everyone he meets, everyone who’s against him, everyone who helps him, should be, in some way, related to who he is and what he wants. This relationship can be literal, consonant, assonant, thematic or opposite, but the more you link every possible thing in the script to the protagonist and his goal the stronger your script will eventually be.

But we’re still not ready yet. What you need to do first is build your three-sentence act description into a three-page outline, a document that will give you a rough idea of the order of your scenes. This document should be very loose and informal — don’t worry about sentence structure or wording or anything like that, no one is ever going to see this document except you.

Break each act down into smaller sequences:

ACT I: Dr. Kimble’s wife is murdered, Dr. Kimble is brought in for questioning, Dr. Kimble is suspected of murder, Dr. Kimble is arrested, Dr. Kimble is tried, Dr. Kimble is convicted, Dr. Kimble is sentenced, Dr. Kimble is put on a bus and sent to prison, the bus is involved in a spectacular crash with a train, Dr. Kimble escapes and becomes a fugitive.

There, that’s ten narrative beats, that’s a goodly number for an act. It’s still just the broad strokes. And you do that for the other two acts as well. And you can try to work in the the cool beat ideas you’ve had. The bus crash — hey, maybe that’s how Dr. Kimble gets out of having to go to prison. The showdown at the dam, maybe that’s the scene when Dr. Kimble first meets his chief antagonist. The chase through the laundry, maybe that’s the final struggle between Dr. Kimble and his adversary. So forth.

The point of all this is that you don’t want to sit down and sweat through forty pages of screenplay and then suddenly realize you’ve painted yourself into a corner. Because if you sit down and sweat out forty pages of screenplay before you realize you’ve painted yourself into a corner, the temptation will be to try to come up with some absurd piece of dramaturgy that will miraculously allow you to move on and not have to go back and fix the first forty pages of your screenplay. The end result will be that, instead of spending a little time at the beginning of the process thinking out your outline, you will find yourself at the end of the process with a screenplay that doesn’t work.

You’re still not ready to start yet. Next, The Treatment.

The “guy” Mr. Katzenberg refers to is, of course, The Protagonist. The reason for Mr. Katzenberg’s mounting anxiety and anger toward my presentation is that I am wasting his time. I am describing the movie we’re making in every way but the way that matters. Because structurally, the only thing that matters in a screenplay is What The Protagonist Wants. There is nothing else.

(Mr. Katzenberg repeats his question to me many times during my work with him, so many times that I finally write it down on a postcard and stick it up over my desk. And if you are an untested screenwriter reading this journal, I advise you to do the same.)

Simply put, What The Protagonist Wants is the reason the movie is happening. Charles Foster Kane wants love on his own terms, Sheriff Brody wants to rid Amity Island of the shark, Henry Hill wants to be a gangster, Michael Corleone wants to distance himself from his family, Roy Neary wants to meet the aliens, Indiana Jones wants to recover the Ark of the Covenant, Luke Skywalker wants to get the hell off Tatooine. The movie is nothing more or less than the protagonist pursuing his goal and the things that get in his way. The stronger the protagonist’s drive, the better the story will be. The more formidable his opposition, the better the story will be.

And that is all a screenplay is. The Protagonist pursues his goal, and forces get in his way. And either the Protagonist gets what he wants or he does not, and sometimes, during the pursuit of the goal, the Protagonist’s goal changes. So Michael Corleone starts off wanting to distance himself from his family and ends up becoming the family patriarch. Luke Skywalker starts off wanting only to get off Tatooine and ends up saving the galaxy. And in some of the best movies, the protagonist’s goal changes so much that, by the end of the story, we are left with a profound, exhilarating sense of life as it is lived.

Is it formula? It is not. It is storytelling. This is how it works. There are millions of possible variations to this idea, but this is how it works. When a movie gets boring, it’s because the moviemakers have strayed too far from the protagonist’s pursuit of his goal. If a movie is uninvolving from the get-go, it’s because the screenwriter has failed to invest his protagonist with sufficient enough ardor in pursuit of his goal. Or worse yet, he has failed to give his protagonist a goal at all. The antagonists are unfocused, the protagonist gets off on a tangent, the big musical number (or action sequence) stops the show but does not raise the stakes.

Somewhere in the back pages of this journal I referred to screenplay structure as a boat. You’re building a boat. If you follow the rules, your boat will float. If you are proficient in your skills, your boat will sail. If you are remarkably talented, your boat will zoom across the water, win the race, impress everyone and bring you millions of dollars. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your boat will sink. And if you are an “artist” with some brilliant “new idea” about what a “boat” is, you will have a work of art that is not a boat.

Why does it have to be this way? Why is this rule so ironclad? Why does it work? I don’t know why it works. I’ve learned through practice and experience that it does and that’s good enough for me.

Let’s go back to that meeting again about the movie with the talking ants. Mr. Katzenberg asks me “What Does The Guy Want?!”

What do I do? This is what I do: I stammer and look at my notes and say “well, he wants to change society,” or “he wants to find a better way to live” or “he can’t help but think that somewhere there is a better world.” All these, it turns out, are the wrong answers. The protagonist’s goal cannot be vague, ideological or symbolic. It must be concrete and physically attainable. John Connor may ultimately fight for freedom, but his goal in Terminator 2 is to get his mom out of the hospital and destroy the evil robot from the future.

Why must the protagonist’s goal be physically attainable? Because movies are made of pictures. A movie is not a novel, it can’t get inside a character’s mind very efficiently. What movies do best is record physical activity: the man runs, the car leaps off the bridge, the dinosaur attacks, the man and woman kiss, the building explodes, the spaceship glides silently across the vast reaches of nothingness. Serious movies about characters thinking deep thoughts are not going to capture a very big audience, but the dumbest movie in the world about people outrunning orange fireballs and large metal objects flying through the air will capture an enormous audience.

This is not to say that a movie cannot be about serious things. Ingmar Bergman made some of the greatest movies ever made about very serious things indeed, but his movies work because, beneath his experiments in formalism, he has a remarkably strong, even old-fashioned, sense of drama.

And if you can find a movie about subjects more serious than the ones in The Godfather, let me know.

The protagonist’s pursuit of his goal can be drawn clumsily or with great subtlety and sophistication. It can be boldly stated from the first scene (“All my life I wanted to be a gangster”) or it can remain mysterious and unsettling to the end (I’m looking at you, Daniel Plainview). It can be done so elliptically as to confound (remind me to tell you about the structure of 2001 some time) or it can be hammered home with a big iron mallet (“Let My People Go”).

Can there be a movie with a passive protagonist, where the protagonist doesn’t want anything in particular, and things just kind of happen to him? Yes. I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s one out there somewhere.

Oh wait, I’ve thought of one that comes close: Bambi. I can’t tell you why a movie with no plot and a passive protagonist can be such a classic narrative and a crushingly emotional experience, but Walt Disney (Walt Disney!) pulled it off somehow.

(I often imagine Walt Disney finally becoming unfrozen one day and showing up at the studio that bears his name, and everyone there is so glad to see him and they ask the master if he has any great new ideas for movies and he says “Yeah, how about a 2 1/2 hour plotless movie that celebrates the art of symphonic music and a 61-minute cartoon about a baby elephant who learns how to fly while he’s in the middle of an 8-minute-long alcohol-induced hallucination?”)

(Perhaps we could say that Bambi wants To Learn. He wants to learn the names of things, how to behave, how to be safe, how to have fun, so forth, and in the end he learns a few lessons he would have rather not learned, and finally, through experience, achieves Wisdom. Boy, that movie blows me away.)

Even The Dude wants something — to solve the mystery of the missing girl. It takes him 90 minutes to arrive at this desire, but he finally gets there. And I would say that if there is one solid reason why a movie as brilliant as The Big Lebowski failed at the box office, The Dude’s lack of ambition would be it.

Can there be movies with multiple protagonists? Yes there can. As a rule, they don’t do as well as movies with single protagonists. Pulp Fiction would be the exception to this rule. Hannah and Her Sisters is another one.

The key to analyzing a movie’s structure is to identify the protagonist (not always as easy as it appears to be) and then trace that character’s path through the narrative. The protagonist’s path through the narrative is the meaning of the movie. I can’t think of an exception to this rule.

When I get done writing the ant movie, I sit down and watch all my favorite movies again. Now that I have the key to analyzing structure, somehow they’ve all become different movies. Things that once seemed weird or mysterious or confounding now seem obvious and baldly stated. Narratives that were once gorgeous and sweeping now seem as dry and clinical as a schematic. For a period of time, all movies are ruined by this process, I’m not seeing a movie anymore but a structure with pictures hung on it, but finally I am able to absorb this idea into my gut and enjoy these movies again, not just for their screenplays but for the moviemakers executions of their screenplays. If you have an interest in writing movies, I suggest you submit to this process.

There are many many books out there about screenwriting that have all these terms, dozens of them it seems, for all these different beats that every successful screenplay supposedly has, and I’ve tried reading a few but I can’t make any sense of them. On the other hand, I found Robert McKee’s Story to be hugely illuminating and useful. McKee gets a lot of stick from the screenwriting community and I’m not quite sure why. What Story did for me was not promote formula but identify tools. There are names for all the different parts of stories just like there are names for all the different parts of a boat, and up until reading the book I was just kind of fumbling around in my toolbox grabbing hold of whatever felt right, sticking my boats together in whatever way pleased me, whereas after reading Story I was able to look at my work and see where I had built well, where I had patched over a hole with a bit of shiny metal, where I had forgotten to attach a tiller, et cetera.

Also, I found David Mamet’s On Directing Film extremely helpful.

The bad news: the storytelling impulse is something you are born with. If you don’t have the urge and drive to tell stories, there’s not much you can do to get it.

The good news: every other part of the writing game is a skill and can be learned.

(When I was in college I fancied myself a short story writer, but my short stories were constantly being criticized by my professor for their lack of basic grammar. I dangled participles, split infinitives, misspelled key words, mixed tenses and had run-on sentences. I couldn’t keep all the rules straight — I didn’t have a head for them. However, my professor consistently praised my ear for realistic dialogue — I understood the way people talk. So instead of applying myself, learning about sentence structure and becoming better, I started writing stories that consisted almost entirely of long dialogue passages: “John met Mary at the restaurant. He sat down. He said…” and then the rest of the story would be what he and she said. My grades went up and I abandoned short stories for plays, where I wouldn’t need to remember all those goddamn rules.)

First thing you need to understand: all writing is rewriting.

Isn’t that a relief? You don’t need to “make stuff up,” you just have to be able to recognize good writing and have a mind for understanding how it works. If you have that talent, the rest is just putting other people’s writing into your own words, as your third-grade teacher used to say.

This means two things:

1. There is nothing new under the sun. Any idea you have for a story, it’s been done, a thousand times over, whether you know it or not. This should not be an impediment. One thing to do when you get an idea for a story is to read a whole big stack of stories similar to yours and see how those writers solved their narrative problems. Then you can copy them. Feel no guilt about this: those writers did the same thing when they were writing their stories. There’s the old quote: steal from one writer and it’s plagiarism, steal from everybody and it’s research. When I get a writing assignment I sit down and watch every movie I can find in the genre I’m looking at and note patterns, tropes, key moments, character beats, anything that makes the movie enjoyable. Then I sit down andwatch a bunch of movies in a completely different genre and note how the two genres connect and contrast, and think about how I can steal traits of one genre and apply them to another. This is what will keep my screenplay from being rote formula.

2. You must be able to look at your own writing as though it is someone else’s. You cannot become too attached to your work. You cannot fall in love with a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence, a line of dialogue or even a word merely because it happened to turn out nice. The fountain of creativity is unceasing, you cannot worry for one moment that you will “run out of ideas.” This means that the writer you will be rewriting the most is yourself. You must learn to love this aspect of creation — not just the initial spark, which is the fun part, but the heavy lifting of merciless revision and improvement, which is work. If you don’t love rewriting your own work, you’re dead in the water.

Let’s say you have the simplest possible idea for a movie: a good guy fights a bad guy, and wins. There! You’ve just written a hit movie! Now all you need to do is mercilessly re-write that idea until it’s a screenplay, and you can have the respect and admiration of Hollywood a great deal of money some money.

First, let’s take a look at that “good guy.” Probably, this “good guy” is your protagonist. Then we ask the question, yes, What Does The Protagonist Want? The answer, it may surprise you to learn, is not “to beat the bad guy.” “To beat the bad guy” is meaningless, the protagonist must have a reason for beating the bad guy. To Preserve His Honor, To Protect His Family, To Save The Farm, To Impress The Girl, To Save The World, any of these will do, it really does not matter. All that matters is that the Protagonist want the thing he or she wants with a passion sufficient to make the audience want that thing too.

(In Pee Wee’s Big Adventure the protagonist wants only To Recover His Stolen Bicycle. A bicycle may not seem like much of a maguffin to hang a narrative on, but all that matters is that the protagonist wants it badly enough, and in the case of Pee Wee he wants it badly enough that he cannot think of anything else. If that does not seem like high art, De Sica’s classic of Italian neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves, has the exact same premise, employed to greatly different ends. In this way, we could say that Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is a re-write of Bicycle Thieves, although it was, understandably, not marketed as such.)

Now then: here’s where “stakes” comes in. The general rule is, the higher the stakes, the bigger the hit. If a good guy fights a bad guy in the privacy of his own home with nobody watching, that would be a “small movie.” If he fights the bad guy for the sake of protecting his family, that has the potential of being a a bigger movie, if he fights the bad guy for the sake of preserving his community or nation it could be a huge movie.

(And if he fights the bad guy to save the world or the galaxy, you have the potential of having the biggest movie of all, although this is also a tricky area, because “To Save The Galaxy” is a vague, uninteresting thing for a protagonist to want — a protagonist may fight for a nation, but who could possibly care about an entire galaxy? The two protagonists who leap to mind charged with saving the world/galaxy are Luke Skywalker and James Bond, and I would argue that “To Save The World/Galaxy” are secondary goals for them — Luke’s primary goal is To Win The Love of Leia and Bond’s goal is To Get Back to Drinking and Screwing.)

So let’s say our protagonist (good guy) has to fight an antagonist (bad guy) in order To Preserve His Community. This has the potential to become a huge, huge movie.

Now: what would raise the stakes for this protagonist? Well, we have to decide who our protagonist is. Is he a fine, upstanding, strong, utterly capable man, skilled in martial arts and a keen strategist? Maybe, but then the movie won’t be very interesting. No, what would make the story better is if the good guy who has to fight the bad guy is The Least Qualified Person In The Entire Community.

(Back in the day, many people urged me to see Under Siege, which they said was a better-than-average variation on Die Hard. Imagine my sadness when it is revealed that the lowly cook who must defend the battleship from terrorists is, actually, the World’s Foremost Terrorist Fighter.)

Okay, so The Least Qualified Person In The Entire Community must fight the bad guy. And, conversely, the bad guy must be not merely “bad,” but bad in a way that directly imposes upon the protagonist’s weaknesses. That’s good. Now then, what would raise the stakes even higher? Well, what if the entire community hates the protagonist?

Okay, time to give the protagonist a job. Let’s make him a sheriff in a dusty down in the Old West. But let’s make him the new sheriff, the sheriff from Back East who doesn’t understand The Way Things Work in this community. So not only is there a bad guy threatening the community, the community hates this sheriff’s guts. So now the protagonist not only has to deal with the bad guy, he’s got to deal with the community who hates his guts. The stronger the forces arrayed against the protagonist, the higher the stakes, the bigger the movie.

Now we’re cooking with gas. There’s this sheriff, and everyone in town hates him because he’s the new guy, and then this bad guy comes to town. How bad is this bad guy? He’s really bad — he’s a psychopath, killing townsfolk off like crazy. He doesn’t even seem to be after anything, he’s just a stone killer. And the town panics, and they bring in an expert and a gunslinger to fight the bad guy and the expert is a snob and the gunslinger is a creep and nobody is listening to the sheriff, not even his own family, who are worried that maybe the townsfolk are right, that the sheriff is not qualified to deal with this bad guy.

What is this sheriff going to do? There’s an evil out there he can’t begin to understand, there are these experts and gunslingers who make him feel like an idiot, the townspeople dislike him, and even his own family is looking at him sideways. What the hell is he going to do?

(This is the “second-act low point.”)

What the sheriff must do, it seems to me, is figure out a way to befriend the gunslinger, get him to work together with the expert, and then the three of them go out into the desert to fight the bad guy.

Great! Now you’ve got a hit western. Except for one thing: it sounds a little cliched. It could work but it sounds a little cliched. People will feel they’ve seen this movie before. It needs one more rewrite.

Hey — what if the bad guy is a shark?

Yes. We make the bad guy a giant shark, and we don’t set the story in the Old West, we set it in the present day, and we set it in the exact opposite of a dusty western town — we set it on an island on the East Coast. Yes — a giant shark comes to town, and you know what? We’ll make the sheriff a man who is afraid of water! Everyone in town hates him because he’s not “one of them,” and this shark comes along and nobody listens to the Sheriff because he’s not One of Them, and the Expert is some snooty Rich Kid with a degree in Sharkology, and the Gunslinger is a crusty old Shark Hunter who’s really creepy. And the Hugely Underqualified Sheriff and the Expert and the Shark Hunter have to work together to go out into the ocean to kill this shark, because Nobody Else Will Do It.

So, there’s one example of how to write a big hit movie: take acliche from one genre and give it that one brilliant twist that makes it into another genre and makes an audience see it from a different point of view.

Now, I understand that Peter Benchley, when writing Jaws, did not start with “A Good Guy Fights A Bad Guy, And Wins.” He started with a “cool premise,” ie: What If A Giant Shark Showed Up Off The Coast Of Martha’s Vineyard? And that is, in fact, where most stories begin, with a “cool premise.” What If An Evil Robot Came From The Future To Kill Somebody, What If Aliens Were The Guiding Force In Evolution, What If A Man Fell In Love With A Teenage Girl. And we can get to that in a bit, but this for now is a good place to start.