Off the top, I want to make it clear that I co-wrote my first feature film with the indomitable Nick Kirk, my co-producer, co-writer, and closest friend. We crafted the story together, and my charge was to sit down to spin out the specific scenes, dialogue, and story beats to paper. We wrote the recipe together; my task was to jump into the kitchen and assemble the ingredients. I don’t want to claim more credit than is due to me.

With that, I’d like to present some lessons and advice I gained through almost a year of working on my first feature screenplay, cobbled together into a kitschy “10 Things” list to make it more interesting to read.

1. Don’t stop, don’t look back.

Terrible writing, excellent rewriting. Maddening but true.

Similar to a little child that can’t grasp the concept of what a home equity loan is, I struggled to understand how to put a feature film together. I am accustomed to only writing cute little screenplays about 20 pages in length. I’m conditioned to be a sprinter, not a marathon runner. So once I had hit page 20 (around the inciting incident), the dastardly and incurable itch to go back to rework it emerged from the mucky waters of my insecurity. That would have undone me. I would today still be working on dialogue tweaks in scene 3 with the rest floating out in the aether somewhere.

The first 20 pages are the easiest and most enjoyable to write. That’s why you’re attracted to the story. It’s like the flirty part of a new relationship, the part that everyone likes. That bubbly feeling goes away, but it has to. There is real work to be done. Getting it to paper, in all of its dreadful deformity, is the hardest part.

My biggest hurtle is my terrible splelleing. Descend from thy sumptuous thrones ye guardians of perfect spelling and grammar. Yes, I know the difference between “it’s” and “its,” but that doesn’t mean I don’t consistently screw it up.

On that first draft I have to turn off spell check. I can’t worry about the formatting rules. It slows me down, and I can go back and fix all that on the next pass. That’s why I like to write my treatments in a program like OmmWriter. It lets you thrown down grubby word salad all mimsy without screaming every few seconds that you’ve made an error.

“Look at that mistake you worthless idiot! Children in Kindergarten spell better than you!” That’s what the parade of unwavering red squiggles feels like to me. They are constantly reminding me of my imperfections. Process over perfection on that first run. Afterwards, of course, I drearily clean it up five times, and, even then, it’s riddled with terrible mistakes that make me wonder if I’m fit to be a part of the human race. I send it off to a grown up to help scrub up that last layer of grimy formatting. Yeah, it’s embarrassing. It feels like turning in your homework to a teacher to be judged. I have to get over it.

2. Understand your flow.

After an eon of creating content, I have finally discovered what my best time to write is. That time in the day I hit the cool mountain stream called ‘flow’. It’s that feeling when all the neurons in your brain are connecting and your fingers dance on the letters like flames in a bonfire. You know that feeling, it’s probably akin to runner’s high, although I can’t pretend to know this as I personally believe runner’s high is a scam created by the morbidly obese executives at Nike to sell more shoes. Digression…

I can’t just hop into the flow. It kinda feels like that moment when I’m standing at the edge of the cliff preparing to jump into the water. I do a lot of hemming and hawing before I get up the gusto to leap. To have a productive day, I know that I need to get up early, get some exercise, eat a full breakfast, and read something well written before I can write anything decent. I must shut off the brain leeches like Twitter and email. Slay the iPhone beast by putting it in airplane mode. By my count, if I’m up at 5:00am, that lands me at around 9:30 or 10:00am when I get all Zen with my writing. From 10:00am-12:00pm, I’m astonishingly productive. It’s like the Muse and I agreed to meet up at that time. I need to do anything I can to avoid standing her up.

So, if I find myself thinking I’ll write late tonight when I get home, I know I’m being an idiot. I don’t think I’ve ever followed through with that dunce of a plan. Once you’ve done this, the next step is clear—don’t schedule crap during your peak creative time! Which leads to the next point.

3. Don’t schedule crap during your peak creative time.

I’m convinced that part of my temporal lobe must have a malfunction. I constantly try to put meetings or other distracting drivel on my calendar during the times I outlined above. I don’t know why; it’s just plain stupid. I’m so bad about this that I have to have other people help guard my calendar for that time. And what is the primary time thief they have to protect my time from?

Me.

Stuff happens, though, and, depending on when your flow time is, it may be very difficult to keep it free. But fight for that time as hard as you can. This was the only real reason our screenplay was finished, and I have many people to thank for helping me free up that time.

4. Outline, outline, outline.

If my plan had been to sit in front of a blank screen and presume that the screenplay would leap magnificently from my brain, prance across my fingers, and bound onto the screen, I would have thrown myself on a sharp, rusty object by now. For this story, I sat down with my co-writer/producer Nick, and we spent months piecing together the plot outline for the film. This was, without a doubt, the most arduous, time consuming part of the process. It was also, without a doubt, the best way to get it done. We did that cool notecards-on-the-board thing. I’ve seen it in movies, and I wanted to do it because it looked cool. Turns out, it’s extremely helpful.

From there we outlined every scene in Scrivener. Each note was a new scene. I wrote a paragraph describing what needed to happen. Maybe I put a scrap of dialogue here or a neat-o element there, but I mostly kept it bare bones. That ended up being a 40 page document that was, in its essence, the story.

By the time I sat down and opened Movie Magic Screenwriter (one of the most lurid, pretentious names for a piece of software I’ve ever come across), I was simply stippling out the scenes to make them dynamic.

5. Humor, Heart, Head.

A mentor of mine told me that every time he has to communicate, he makes sure that he includes these three elements. Humor – something to help you drop your guard or release the tension. Head – something intellectually stimulating or just plain awesome. Heart – something to move you emotionally.

I tried to apply this to every scene in the film. That was my measuring stick by which I judged each scene. It gave me yet another road map to work my way through the labyrinthine storyline.

Not every scene warrants all three, but, in my opinion, if you want the film to be enjoyable and entertaining, you’ll be on the lookout to put them in there. As a guiding compass, Nick and I studied the film Signs. Not only did it follow the plotting and emotional feeling we were after, it’s one of the best examples of this we’ve seen. Spielberg does this a bunch too, and he’s not an idiot. So if you’re making some avant garde, anti-plotted piece of “art” then I can’t help you. However, you probably don’t like any of the stuff I like anyway and won’t be reading this, so f*** it.

6. Humor doesn’t mean comedy.

This took me some time to figure out. Humor doesn’t have to be laugh out loud gags featuring shots to the groin. Humor is sprinkled throughout even the darkest of films. The Shawshank Redemption and Saving Private Ryan have humor stippled through their scenes. In fact, I think some of the funniest moments are in darker, intense films. You need that rhythm and release, a moment to break the tension and allow your audience to take a breath. Remember, we make entertainment. Nick always tells our proteges, “We make things that people watch while they eat popcorn on date night.”

Entertaining doesn’t mean bottom shelf. Accessible doesn’t mean stupid. But that’s wanting of its own separate post.

We want people to be moved, but they won’t stay around long enough if you bore them to tears. That is the storyteller’s greatest, and most unforgivable, sin. You bore people when you do the same thing over and over without a break. Find natural humor in the situations your characters are in. It humanizes them and makes them much more sympathetic.

7. Heart doesn’t mean sentimentalism.

I asked another mentor of mine what the difference between sentimentalism and honestly moving content was. He told me that you’re guilty of sentimentalism when you say, “Look how sympathetic and caring I am. Aren’t I just so sensitive.” You create empathy when you look at the fragility of the human condition and really explore it for the wretched beauty it is.

Risk making it personal. My rule of thumb: If I’m not moved writing it, then people won’t be moved watching it. Doesn’t mean if you cry at the keyboard it’ll be any good, but it’s a good place to start.

And don’t fake that crap; you can smell it a mile away. You should relate to situations that you’ve never been in by using things you’ve personally experienced to help make it feel real. That’s the job. But writing about being in reckless love when you’ve never been will have you drawing from clichéd sources. And that’s boring.

8. Your writing sucks; just deal with it.

I’ve covered this before, but if you are fully aware that what you are about to write will be total crap until you’ve either reworked it or killed it, you can actually get through it. It’s all about managing expectations. First drafts are slithery little demons that wish to drown you in your own self-pity. Get over it and keep going. Trust that you know you can do better, but that’s for later.

9. Deadlines and accountability.

It’s been said that if there were no deadlines there would be no published authors or finished screenplays. It’s completely true. I am a cunning and magnificent craftsman in the art of procrastination. People will someday build monuments and write sonnets exalting my ability to put the important (not urgent) things off till tomorrow. The only thing that forces me to get work done is a deadline. I must set one, and not just an arbitrary one, but one that has real consequences. Once we had meetings on the calendar with investors and studios, that junk got real. Every second was ticking me closer to those meetings. At that point there were two possible outcomes: I would hand over a finished screenplay with a smile; or I would blink at the investor in front of me, try to convince them I have a great screenplay, and promise to send it to them in a few weeks. “Oh, and make checks payable to Whitestone…all one word. I promise I’ll make it on time and on budget.”

Another great motivator is Nick, keeper of the important. If I promise him a version on Wednesday, he excitedly asks for that version on Wednesday. I wasn’t perfect at this, but I was finding myself pushing back deadlines and telling him, “Oh, I’ll get it to you after the weekend.” Then, on Monday, “This weekend was crazy, how about next Thursday?” That gets embarrassing real fast. If you give a hoot about building trust and respect you’ll become frustrated as it slowly slips through your hands like sand.

Now, before I give number ten, some words of warning are in order. I have gotten a lot of flak for this one, and it may be the ruin of us all at Whitestone. So, I would probably just ignore it…

10. Make it interesting.

Screenplays suck, so make it fun to read. I departed slightly from the normal format at times to make it more exciting to read. Some like it, some don’t. You risk people assuming you did this by accident and have no idea what you’re doing, but if the job is to communicate a good story the screenplay is where it starts.

There’s more, but it didn’t fit into a snappy title. Nobody wants to read

“44.5 Things I Sorta Figured Out, but Keep Screwing Up, While Writing My First Screenplay.”

In the end, the process is different for everyone. But I can tell you that reading crap like this while you’re putting off writing isn’t helpful. Don’t drown in the how-to porn and neglect to get around to actual work.

So if you’re reading this because you want motivation to write (you know who you are because you got that kinda guilty feeling in your gut right now), shut down the browser, open your writing program and get to it!

b

P.S. Drop any questions you have in that there questions box and I’ll be sure to answer them lickety split. They won’t be intelligent answers, but they will be answers nonetheless.