Screenwriting 101: all writing is rewriting

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.