39 Steps to Better Screenwriting. Paul Chitlik
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a recent Christmas party. The other guest, a relative by marriage and a man I respect, just couldn’t seem to get started on his idea for a script. He’s written tons of stuff. He has worked as an historian and NPR radio host. He knows his ass from a hole in the ground. He’s just stuck.
He said that this happens even when writing an article, and he might spend all day thinking about the opening line. Once he gets that, he says the rest just spills out of him. But he’s been kicking around this idea in his head for years, and he can’t find the first sentence.
So I offered a way to start. I said I can’t write your first sentence, but I can certainly write your first word: “The.” Now, all you have to do is finish the sentence and you’re on your way.
Okay, it was a smart-ass answer to a gnawing problem that many writers have. But the only real answer is you have to have something on paper before you can call yourself a writer; and even if you start with the humblest of words like “the,” or even “a,” you have written something. You just have to find the next word, and then the next, and pretty soon you’ve got something. If it all looks just too big to tackle, well, cut it down to the basics and just write the seven points in seven sentences (see my book, REWRITE: A Step-by-Step Guide to Strengthen Structure, Characters, and Drama in Your Screenplay, for more information on the seven points). You can write seven sentences, can’t you? And from there you can write forty or so sentences with each describing a scene, and from there you can write a treatment that describes the story in detail, and then you can write the screenplay.
Step by step you build your screenplay. Yes, there are other things you should do, like write bios of the main characters, maybe work out a time line, figure out the sub-plots, think about what you really want to say with the story, etc. But that looks like a lot to approach all at once. If you can just write the first word, you start to climb that mountain step by step. Then you can eventually reach the joy time in every writer’s life when s/he can go from writing to having written.
Step 2
Eight Things to Remember When Writing Science Fiction
I’ve always written in whatever genre I wanted to write in at the time, so my career has caromed from reality TV to sitcoms to science fiction to kids’ movies to one-hour dramas and back again. With my experience in so many fields, people often ask me what the difference is between them. The answer is … very little. They all depend on human emotion and conflict, flaws and goals, victory and defeat. Even science fiction.
So, could I just leave it at that? That science fiction is the same as comedy or drama or commercials for Alpha Bits? (Yes, I was the one who wrote the Swirlpool ad. Sorry.) No. There are some things to keep in mind when you write science fiction (or sci-fi or speculative fiction or whatever you’d like to call it). There are no rules, but there are guidelines. Here are some of the things we used to tell prospective writers for The New Twilight Zone mixed in with a few additions of my own.
1 There has to be a reason your central character is involved in this. So you have to answer the same questions that you ask of any protagonist: Why him? Why now? Your hero has an issue. He’s going to have to deal with that one day. Why today? So, know your hero’s issue and know why it’s reached a crisis. Obviously, this goes for any type of screenwriting, too.
2 Get to the magic as soon as possible. In TZ, that meant the weirdness, the special condition, the situation that set this episode off from others. In a sci-fi film, it could be the setting, the time, the technology, whatever is the speculative part of the story.
3 Have the special rules of your world clearly defined in your mind and don’t violate them. You can have any rules you want to — people can become invisible, they can live on pills, they can fly at light speed — so long as you’re consistent. If there’s no gravity, things can’t fall. You can’t suddenly have something fall for no reason. But if something must fall, make it clear why the rules have been broken. Nothing is worse for a sci-fi devotee than an inconsistency in the rules you have set up.
4 Don’t let the technology overcome the story. Yes, tech stuff in sci-fi movies is great, but we go to see the human story. Of course, the light sabers are fun, but the original Star Wars is about a boy becoming a man, finding his inner strength and his place in the world. That’s why we went to see it so many times, though we did have fun with those light sabers.
5 Have an emotional relationship feature prominently. Humanize the science. Make it personal. Make sure your protagonist becomes involved in an important emotional relationship. It doesn’t have to be a romance; it could be father and son, brother and sister, two buddies. Whatever. It will make your script deeper and help bring in a wider audience.
6 Write your protagonist with flaws, especially one that he has to overcome in order to mend or cement the central emotional relationship and prevail in the final challenge.
7 Don’t forget humor. Some of the best moments of science fiction films are the funny ones. Even some of the best science fiction films are comedies. (Galaxy Quest is one of my favorites.)
8 Have conflict in every scene. Yes, you already know this. Yes, it applies to science fiction. Especially to technology. When it fails, it’s always a tense moment. Make it fail. Make your hero work hard to reach his/her goal.
Of course, most of this applies to any kind of screenwriting. That’s the idea. Good science fiction has to be good on the science and good on the fiction. Do that, and I’ll be lining up to get a ticket to see your film.
Step 3
An End, A Beginning, And A Middle
Yes, the words in the chapter title are out of order, but when you tell a story, does it have to be in a certain order? Most of the time, the answer to that is yes, at least for a movie. The story, though not the filming, almost always goes in chronological order. That’s because it’s easier to understand a film that way and easier to cut together. But what if there’s another way to tell a story?
Of course there is. When you tell a story to a friend, whether it’s about you or someone else, you often start at the end and then go back and fill in the details. As you tell it, you remember something else that happened earlier and tell that and then go back to the main story. You might skip ahead when your listener asks a question. You might then double back to the beginning to summarize where you are to remind the listener.
Film writers, directors, and editors do this all the time. Mostly, it’s called flashbacks. Woody Allen’s film, Blue Jasmine, is full of them, though many films are filled with exposition to get you to understand what’s going on with the main character. You can probably name a dozen films with flashbacks in them, which are sometimes used, as in Allen’s film, as a way to give context to what’s happening now in the story. So the beginning doesn’t come at the beginning, the middle doesn’t come at the middle, but the end still will usually come at the end.
Unless, of course, you’re Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary, Guillermo Arriaga, or Alejandro González Iñárritu. Or me. Tarantino and Avary took four stories and interwove them to make one movie that really surprised you — Pulp Fiction. Arriaga and Iñárritu wove three stories into 21 Grams, then used the same technique on Babel. These stories don’t necessarily jump back and forth in time like you would do when telling a friend a story, but they’re more like two or three people trying to tell their stories at the same time.
Is that a good thing? I didn’t used to think so. I thought Pulp Fiction was an ordinary movie made extraordinary by editing. I thought 21 Grams and Babel were less than ordinary movies made less than ordinary by editing. Then I ran into a problem with my own film, The Wedding Dress, which I shot in sequence and edited in chronological order. The story, in which a