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If I may use a sporting analogy to describe something in Screenwriting…

I’m not the worlds biggest football fan, in fact I only really have a vague passing interest in it, but from the football matches I have seen on the telly there seems to be a couple of stock phrases used to describe when a team is trying too hard to play really pretty football at the expense of actually beating the other team.”Trying to walk the ball into the back of the net” and “Looking to score the perfect goal” are two such phrases.

I.e. the team is trying to use all their creativity and technical ability to outplay the other team when they would be better off if they just ran as fast as they can towards the goal and smashed the ball at the goalkeeper.

The reason I mention this is because I think its a pretty good analogy to the way I approach writing my scripts and partly explains why I get bogged down in the rewriting process. Essentially, I am always looking to come up with the perfect structured story before I start writing. In the same way a footballer should be speculative and just blast the ball at the keeper every now and then, a writer should be speculative and just write something down even if he doesn’t quite know what the outcome will be.

Getting bogged down

In the past I’ve been very much of the attitude that to write effectively you need to pre-plan every beat of the script before you write it (the index card approach), but sometimes when you don’t have all the answers, sticking vehemently to this approach can just hold you back. You can find yourself in a position where although your intentions of having every beat worked out beforehand is a good one, you would actually be making way more progress if you just started writing down what you already had.

The common consensus is your screenplay is doomed if you don’t have the ending worked out for example, but if you have a really great opening half and no idea what the ending is, at what point should you give up on trying to pre-plan an ending and instead just write what you already have in the hope it spurs new ideas? If all you did was theorise about potential endings then you might find yourself bogged down and going around in circles for months, something I can attest to doing.

But at the same time, you really are better off if you know the ending before hand, so maybe you should hold off writing that little bit longer?

I guess what I am saying is you need to find the right balance between making progress regardless what crap you put down on the page, and being more considered in what you put down on the page; and that ultimately making progress should come out slightly ahead in the ratio.

First Drafts

For me this is mostly a problem I encounter in the rewriting process, I never really fall into this trap on first drafts because I have developed a way of doing first drafts that I really enjoy.

When I do the first draft I basically write a half page synopsis of my film and then I expand it into a longer synopsis simply by adding more details. I’ll expand the most vague areas further to make it a 4 page outline, and so on and so forth until it is a 10 page treatment, a 20 page treatment and eventually I get to the point where I am ready to just add slug lines and dialogue to turn it into a finished script.

I am very much mindful of theory and structure throughout this whole process, it is far from free-form writing, but none the less I work in a very organic way. All I am ever doing at any point is making what is already there a little bit more detailed and a little bit more focused. My synopsis and my 120 page screenplay are one and the same document just at different stages in their fluid life.

I love this method of working because it doesn’t feel like you are ever starting a script from a blank page, you are always building upon something, even if it started off from a simple 1 sentence log line which you expanded and expanded and expanded. Everyone has at least a few rough ideas of scenes and a general structure for the thing, just write this down and then you will be surprised how easy it is to expand it with more details.

At the same time doing it like this still forces you to get everything sorted before you start writing the full screenplay. I am still planning all my character arcs and story beats in the same way I would if I had a pile of index cards, its just I am doing that planning in a more organic, fluid document.

When it comes to planning the subsequent drafts however there is none of this organic growth, instead it becomes a much more mechanical, analytical job of making changes that slot into the already completed script. I get in the mindset of “You’ve done the whole ‘getting it down on the page’ draft, now you need to make sure all the structure, character arcs and everything else is water tight before you move forward again, otherwise you wont be making things better just different”.

Aiming to work out every nuance before you write is great (this is what you should aim for ideally), but ultimately making progress needs to come at some point and that might mean starting to write with only some of the changes planned out. I am trying to make each subsequent draft the final draft, the perfect version of my script, when in reality every draft is more or less a ‘get it down on the page’ draft. It’s just that each time you do this it becomes more focused and less crap.

I am trying to walk the ball into the back of the net.

An Example

In the past I’ve gotten really bogged down in rewriting my Romcom, never really finding a coherent plan of how I was going to overhaul it and being reluctant to start making any changes until I did. One change I had in mind for ages was to make the female character a lot more of a panic-stricken, always worrying about her school grades type character. She is good in school but the fear of ever failing terrifies her. I’ve yet to make this change though because I don’t yet have anything more than a vague idea how it would play out over the whole film.

I didn’t want to end up with a script that set stuff up in the first act but then didn’t carry it throughout the whole story (something I’ve been guilty of in the past); but after ages of trying to come up with the whole structure and very little progress being made, then I need to realise that making some progress is better than none at all.

I was always of the attitude that if I just kept theorising I would eventually come up with the answers, and waiting for those answers would be better in the long run than writing only half the solution straight away …I was trying to walk the ball into the back of the net.

However, these past few weeks I have been working on another film that needed rewriting and with that film I just started making what few changes I had in mind even if I didn’t have the ‘big picture’ worked out yet; Through the process of doing those few changes I came up with a few more changes and everything eventually snowballed into a new much different, improved draft. Had I just sat there planning my rewrites out without ever starting, waiting for the big picture to come to me I think I would have just been going around in circles for months.

A picture I came across on a software coding website that kinda sums up the trap.

On the flip side…

Taken to the extreme, writing your script with a total “I’m gunna just get something down on the page” attitude with no pre-planning or sense of goal is going to end in failure. I still believe whole heartedly in making notes before you make any changes and using screenwriting theory to best structure your work. If we go back to the sporting analogy, there is such a thing as “playing the long ball” where a team will just blast the ball up field and hope something happens from it. It’s finding that right balance between the two approaches that wins matches and writing is no different.

I guess as individual writers we need to learn to find the signals that tell us when we have passed the point of meaninful analysis and should now just jump straight in regardless. Quite often it might be a deadline that dictates this time allocation for you, but if not then you need to know when to write and when to stop and think, and knowing that only comes from experience.

Like I always say, learning to become a better writer is as much about learning how to get the best out of yourself as it is learning how to write more engaging scripts. If we go back to the sporting analogy one last time, people will talk about how good football managers know the exact right approach to get the best out of each individual player in a squad of very different personalities. You need to learn how to be a great coach to your own individual personality.