The Trials and Tribulations of Writing a Screenplay: Part One

VL’s RosyB has been uncharacteristically quiet these past few months (well, for her). Find out why in the first of a short set of articles on the trials and tribulations of writing a screenplay.

Photo by Leo Friel

It is a cold, bleak February day. The day is overcast. The sky heavy with imminent snow.  In one quiet avenue in Edinburgh, a blood-curdling scream rips through the sleepy suburban air.

“Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

A woman cartwheels across her bedroom in glee as she finds out she’s been accepted onto the She Writes  programme for “talented women screenwriters” (their words not mine.)

I hadn’t expected to get through. Yes, I’m a published writer, and confident with scripts through my background in theatre and plays, but, I had little experience of screenwriting and had been suffering from such a heavy cold during the interview I could barely see. All I could remember was a lot of shaking of heads and talk about extreme upward trajectories.

Interviewer: You do realise you will be on a major learning curve? Are you prepared for that?

Me: Learning learning, just give me some learning. I’ll learn my little socks off. Whatever it takes, I’m your woman. Did I mention how much I love learning …?

A few weeks later I found myself in a hotel in darkest Bracknell.

Now, I should probably just mention here that I had tried to write screenplays before.  I had done my time with the graphs and acronyms of  screenwriting manuals. I could waffle semi-impressively about three-act structure, beginnings middles and ends, the hero’s journey, not to mention Jungian archetypes in fairytales speaking to an underlying collective unconscious…I could have drawn you a fabulous screenplay structure with lots of letters of the alphabet dotted all over it. But writing one? Somehow I always managed to get stuck around the word “INT.”.

Is it screenwriting’s male-dominated status, I wonder, that leads to this compulsion to over-complicate everything with graphs and acronyms?

Now, before you all throw up your hands with this piece of male/female stereotyping, I want to make it clear I’m not saying ANYTHING about male or female brains or their innate capacity to understand mind-bendingly unnecessary pseudo-science. But whenever I’m faced with a screen-writing book, I am reminded of a whole other needlessly graph and acronym-laden genre – the pulling book.

Where female-orientated advice usually constitutes fiddling about with your hair and smiling to attract a mate, there is a whole sub-culture of male-orientated books and websites that have pulling into a complex science.  (I mean, why lower yourself to simple things like finding people you get on with when you can sit in your bedroom drawing up graphs about it instead?)

I have a character in my book obsessed with this stuff – who talks about SHBB6.5 (Super Hot Bunny Babes – 6.5 out of ten) and goes along to seminars by geeks who call themselves things like ManWolf to be lectured at on the finer points of “negging” and other such…umm…scientific terms…

Basically, get a bunch of guys together and they start to go a bit mad with the graphs.

The same applies to screenwriting.

The Script Factory’s Lucy Scher put forward her own basic scientific principles. WGF (Watch Good Films), RTBT (Read the Bloody Things) and WS (Write Stuff).

Obviously, I am simplifying (I don’t want to give away all Lucy’s secrets – she has a living to earn, after all) but it’s amazing how many aspiring screenwriters I’ve met since who don’t follow these basic rules – particularly the RTBT one.

For a whole weekend we WS (Watched Stuff), RS (Read Stuff) and WS (Wrote Stuff) – as well as a healthy chunk of LDS (Listening and Discussing Stuff). For the first time, I felt that screenplay writing could be inspiring and exciting.  That it could be creative. I was no longer bogged down in the acronyms, graphs, theories, paradigms, Jungian archetypes, fairy tales or the seven (or is it ten? Forty two?) plots. Instead we looked at…well, we looked at actual screenplays.  Who knew?

Reading screenplays is a fascinating business and, once you get your eye in, a lot of fun too.

My screenplay is a comedy, so I set myself the task of reading as many good comedy screenplays as I could.

Often, the screenplays are slightly different animals to the films, which is interesting in itself. The themes of Little Miss Sunshine almost blatantly jump off the script, yet, when watching the film I would have been hard-pressed to put them into words.

The characterisation is what struck me most about The Full Monty. The screenplay seemed quieter, perhaps grittier, than the film. I was struck by images such as Dave the “barrel-chested goliath”  holding an “incongruously dainty hoover” – indicating a more universal, political theme to do with masculinity, the working class, and disempowerment. Whereas, in the film, Dave’s weight worries seem more personal, more to do with insecurity and body image.

There’s Something About Mary, a film I had  almost entirely associated (unfairly) with one famously icky scene to do with vertical hair, is a riot of a screenplay: irreverent, clever and precocious. I adored it and returned to the film with fresh and enthusiastic eyes.

All of them teach you something different. For structure, dialogue and masterly transitions between parallel plots, read The Birdcage. For characterisation and sense of place: The Full Monty. For cheerfully going to the max and somehow still making it work: There’s Something About Mary. For sheer imagination and creativity: Raising Arizona. For…well just because I say so: A Fish Called Wanda.

It is surprising how many memorable physical scenes may be little more than a line or two in a screenplay. But it can be as surprising to see just how much detail there can be – Juno is a great example of a script that is precise about details, such as the hamburger phone that Juno uses to speak to her teenage friends or that startling litre of orange juice she is drinking in the opening credits – a symbol of childhood even whilst its function in the film has a far more adult purpose.

You start to get a nose for that sensitive line between too much and too little: between giving enough to encapsulate a character or a world, whilst leaving enough room for others to bring their own vision to the piece.

However, it has to be remembered, these are finished screenplays. As Richard Curtis famously remarked in the introduction to Four Weddings and a Funeral, it took a mere 17 drafts to get it to that point.

And you can’t write 17 drafts without rolling up your sleeves and getting going with draft 1.

So, with a host of brilliant scripts under your reading belt, it’s on to the next stage. WTBT: Write the Bloody Thing.

(And that’s what I’ll be talking about in Part Two.)

——

Rosy is one of nine women screenwriters selected for the She Writes Scheme, co-presented by The Script Factory and Birds Eye View. For She Writes, Rosy has been working on her feature screenplay “Sadomasochism for Accountants” adapted from her comedy novel of the same name and is being mentored by bestselling award-winning novelist and screenwriter, Deborah Moggach.

“Echoing PG Wodehouse, Tom Sharpe and even Douglas Adams, Sadomasochism for Accountants is a fine comic novel” (The Scotsman)

Links

The Script Factory

Birds Eye View

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