It takes a long journey to become a cinematic storyteller of professional quality, and you need all the help you can get along the way. What follows are nine points of advice to build and strengthen your skills as you develop as a writer.
1. Write
This may seem painfully obvious, but it is surprising how many wannabe writers there are who never make the effort to put pen to paper and develop their skills. Writers write. Period. If you do not write, you are not a writer.
You can read every screenwriting book from cover to cover, but all that knowledge will be useless if it is never put into practice. You can read a book on how to swim, but you will still not know how until you actually get into the water.
It takes years of practice for a beginner to nurture their skills to a professional level. You will have to churn out five to ten completed screenplays before you can be confident in your grasp of the craft. This means that a dedicated storyteller must be disciplined. Set aside a few hours every day to write. No distractions. No excuses. Do you think professional athletes got to where they are on nothing but talent? No. They achieved success through practice and discipline. They practiced every day since childhood, and continue to practice every day despite being the best in the world.
At first, there will be resistance. After all, writing is hard. Even professional screenwriters are tempted to put off working to watch TV or goof around on the internet. But if you really want to be a writer, you must push through the resistance. No pain, no gain. Though there may be days when you do not want to write, sit there until you write something. Eventually, it will become a habit. You will want to write every day at your scheduled time. You will not be able to think about doing anything else. You may even get upset whenever something keeps you from writing. This is when you know you really are a writer.
2. Read
Reading makes you a better writer. And I don't just mean read books on screenwriting. Read anything and everything: fiction, nonfiction, novels, plays, newspapers, magazines. Absorbing the words of others will build your vocabulary, improve your communication skills, and enrich your creative grasp on the English language. Novels, short stories, and stage plays will expand your conception of story possibilities beyond the narrow, often-cliched forms seen in the movie theater. Their freer uses of plot, theme, and character may help break you out of confined ways of thinking.
Expand your sphere of knowledge into as many areas as possible. Botany, economics, swing dancing... It could all be useful. A storyteller cannot believably portray a world without first knowing about that world. Study history, science, politics. Explore other cultures and learn about persons different than yourself. Each field of study is an endless source of material to exploit in your own work. Real world knowledge provides a way out of the stereotypes we see in hackneyed television and movies and into a story world rich with layers of meaning and truth. The more you know, the more you can draw upon and the greater your artistic range.
3. Become an active viewer of movies
Don't just watch movies. Watch them through the eyes of a storyteller. Analyze how the story has been put together. Identify the Story Spine and the act breaks. How are the scenes constructed? How does the storyteller distribute information to create curiosity, surprise, and suspense? It is often necessary to watch a film twice to see how it works. Watch it the first time is to experience the story as a viewer. Watch it again to focus on the craft. Remember what you experienced watching the film on the first time around and then try to figure out what the storyteller did you make you think and feel that way.
If you happen to be watching a bad movie, don't just zone out. Figure out why it is bad. Where did the storyteller go wrong? How could it be made it better? If you were hired to fix the script, what would you change?
4. Read the screenplays of films you admire
The screenplays for thousands of produced films are available online. Many have also been printed in book form available in stores and libraries. One of the best ways to develop your skills is by studying the work of successful professionals. In certain ways, this is preferable to watching the movie itself, because it will allow you to focus upon the way the story has been put together on the page without the distractions of performances, camera, editing, or cinematography. You can read and reread each scene at your own pace. Reading screenplays is especially helpful when it comes to learning how to write action and description. This is the part of screenwriting that the audience never sees, and reading it on the page will help you to understand how to communicate information in a clear, active, and efficient manner which allows readers to see the potential movie unfold in their minds.
5. Get hired as a script reader.
Since production companies, agencies, and management companies receive dozens of spec screenplay submissions every week, they hire readers (usually unpaid college interns) to comb through these piles and separate the good from the bad, from the ugly. I graduated from one of the country's top film schools, but this was not where I learned about story. My real training came from reading hundreds upon hundreds of unproduced screenplays (most of them terrible). Readers not only read scripts, but also write “coverage”-- a short one-to-two page analysis of each submission that gives the executives, agents, or whomever a quick overview without having to read the script themselves. The wonderful thing about writing coverage is, rather than simply generating a general opinion about whether a script is good or bad, written coverage forces the reader to really think about what specifically is good or bad about each script, what reasons it is good or bad, and make possible suggestions on how to fix the problems. Coverage is basically homework for your personal education in screencraft.
Most of what you read will be crap. You may be surprised that 90% or more of the scripts won't be very good. Out of the remainder, 9 out of 10 still will not be good enough to be produced. However, there is a bright side. Poor scripts give an unparalleled opportunity to sharpen your own critical skills. Being required to criticize, dismantle, and diagnose screenplays written by someone other than yourself develops an inside-out understanding of screencraft. You will learn the right way to write a script by seeing all the ways a script can go wrong. You will recognize what readers like to see in a script by being a reader yourself. As you gain the capability to connect symptoms with causes, many of the more abstract notions contained on this blog will become clear to understand now that you can see the concepts in action.
Paid reader jobs are hard to get, and most unpaid gigs require college enrolled to receive course credit in lieu of payment. However, there are always plenty of small companies, film festivals, and screenplay competitions that need volunteers to sift through submissions. There are also a number of online communities where developing screenwriters post their work for feedback. If you are really serious about developing your critical abilities, you can even practice this on your own. Find unproduced screenplays online, or scripts to movies you have not yet seen and write your own mock coverage. Just make sure you get the most of it by putting your analysis in writing. No education is complete without homework.
6. Watch documentaries
Including documentaries in your screening habits can make you a far better writer than watching narrative films alone. Cinematic stories are supposed to be imitations of reality, but if a writer only watches movies, the only thing the writer will learn to imitate is other movies. Documentaries are also narrative dramas, but they show the drama of real life. Documentaries present real people struggling with real conflicts in situations which can be far richer and more complex than those found in fictional narratives. Like reading, documentaries will expose you to subjects that will broaden your knowledge and open you mind to new storytelling possibilities. They can vastly improve your ability to create rich, identifiable characters by presenting the intimate thoughts and actions of real human beings in situations that, at times, can be far stranger than any fiction.
7. Read biographies and autobiographies
Biographies and autobiographies of public and historical figures can help a writer better understand what it takes to create interesting, well-rounded, fully human characters. Persons of fame (or infamy) are usually seen by the public in only one dimension. We know only the superficial details told to us by the media or word of mouth. A rock star is just his/her songs, photos, and performances. A politician is just the policies he/she supports. An actress is just the roles she has played. But biographical works allow us to see these people in multiple dimensions. We learn the backstory that made this person who they are. We find how they achieved what they have done, what drove them to do it, and the struggles they faced along the way. If the work is autobiographical, we are allowed to go even deeper into character, learning the intimate thoughts, emotions, needs, and fears behind the actions which made the person famous. A storyteller needs to understand his or her characters with the same level of intimacy. Discovering the complex tangle of psychological impulses behind public personas will help writers understand what must go into creating characters who are equally fascinating.
8. Make an effort to understand human psychology
A writer cannot create believable human behavior on screen without first understanding it in real life. Most people cannot understand why other people do what they do. Some of us don't even understand ourselves. Stiff, flat, unnatural characters are the result of a writer who lacks the ability to empathize -- that is, to see the world through the eyes of persons different from themselves. A great storyteller should be able to take the viewpoint of any character at any time; regardless of gender, race, culture, age, or sexual orientation. He or she must be able to occupy dozens of different minds at a time, each with their own unique way of seeing the world.
A basic understanding of human psychology can help a writer empathize with any type of person. It can give the ability to predict how any given person will react in any given situation. It can explain how the experiences, traumas, wants, needs, and fears found in a person's past make them who they are today and continue to influence their actions in the future. Stories, after all, are about people. They explore humanity. That makes storytellers anthropologists. We have to study our subjects to know what makes them tick.
9. Write more.
Writing is not easy. It is not glamorous. It is arduous labor. The amount of time and dedication it takes to become a success guarantees that only the strong will survive. This is why the first and foremost quality any writer must have is a genuine LOVE of writing. A real writer does not write for money (though money is nice). Nor does he or she write for fame (few ever attain it). A real writer writes because he or she wants to write. Needs to write. There are ideas deep down inside the writer that he or she must communicate to the world. A real writer couldn't possibly imagine him/herself doing anything else.
It is this passion alone that will get you through the growing pains of the long years it takes to grow from beginner to pro. You have to want it.
Scribble on.
