THURSDAY'S SCRIPT TIP:

MAN WITH A PLAN

I don't know where the idea got started that screenwriters don't have to be organized - that it's a perfect job for people who miss deadlines or show up late for work or can't remember where they put their car keys. Writing is a job just like any other - only more so. Because we are self employed, you might think that means we don't really need to have good work skills... but being self employed means you are not only the employee, you're the boss, too. If you can't manage time well, or get to work on time and do a full day's work, there's no one to crack the whip and threaten to fire you. The kind of people who are good at being self employed are the kind of people who work hard even when the boss isn't watching. The kind of person who does extra work if it needs to be done. The kind of employee that shows up 5 minutes before his shift starts and is ready to put in a full day's work... Because if you aren't a hard worker and self-starter, you won't get anything done. Screenwriters need to have organizational skills.

First you need to be able to organize your thoughts. To be a screenwriter involves a strange contradiction - you need to have wild imaginative ideas, plus be good at structure. Creative and organized. My imagination is a wild bronco, running free... but I need to harness and saddle that bronco so that I can control the story and make sense of it. If my imagination keeps bucking me off or goes galloping off in the wrong direction I'm going to end up with a script that may be exciting but doesn't make any sense. 110 pages of random thoughts is not a story, it's a mess.

Screenplays are so structure oriented, and have to be built strong enough to hold up the entire rest of the film, that I wouldn't want to start writing a script without organizing my story ideas into a step outline that lists all of the major scenes needed to tell the story. An outline FOCUSES your story, organizing your imagination into a logical form that you can build a screenplay from. Another contradiction - our screenplays need to be creative but precise. The story from our imagination has to be put on the page with such precision that dozens of people (Agent, Reader, VP Development, VP Production, Director, Star) can read it and see the same story in THEIR imagination, so that when they put it on film the audience will see the same story in THEIR imaginations. That requires precision craftsmanship!

My theory is: the more I know about the story and characters ahead of time, the more my writing can be about the DETAILS of the character and story. So organization HELPS creativity rather than hinders it.

Organizational skills are also necessary for meeting deadlines. I've had assignments where I had to hand in a good first draft in five weeks, most only gave me three weeks, and a few years back I had to write a FILMABLE first draft in only two weeks (that was then sent out to talent! It not only had to be written fast, it had to be good enough to sign the cast!). Here's where your organizational skills and work ethic are put to the test - You have to be able to plan how any pages you need to write every day to make your deadline... then you need to actually write those pages every day. Even on days when you don't feel like working, you've got to get the work done (and done right). If you DON'T have a plan, if you just try to write when you feel inspired, or write as much or as little as you feel like writing, you may end up with only half your script finished on the day you need to turn in the whole script. There may be some built in wiggle room on a feature, but if you're working in television or writing a cable feature or MOW the deadline is the deadline - there's a crew waiting to film it and an air date. You have to be able to organize your time so that you can make deadlines or the whole project gets behind and HBO may be showing a test pattern at 9pm Friday night because the film wasn't ready yet!

I figure out how many pages I have to write a day (with one day off and one 'make-up day' every week) and start writing. I include a couple of days to make a final pass through the script - a quick rewrite to clean up any problems. Just because a script is a first draft doesn't mean you haven't already done some rewriting and polishing to make it presentable. Remember, this is your career. If you hand in something that looks unprofessional they will not treat you as a professional. A producer is used to reading polished scripts - specs that took writers a long time to write - and they expect that script you had to write in 2 weeks to look just as good. That's crazy, but it's true.

But even with specs your organizational skills matter. If you've got a full time job and you're writing in your spare time, you want to maximize the time you spend writing. You don't want to waste precious time getting organized every time you sit down to write. I have these bins in my office with the titles of proposed scripts. When I get an idea for a script, and start a bin. Then, whenever I have an idea for that script (dialogue, scene, character) I write it on a card and toss it in the bin. When the bin overflows it's time to write the script. I organize the notes in the bin, outline the script, then start writing it. Because I've thought through much of the story and have all of my notes in one place, I can usually finish a first draft in 4-6 weeks. Then I set it aside, work on something else, before rewriting it until it's worth showing to anyone. When I worked at the warehouse I averaged about 3 scripts a year using the "bin method". I never wrote a script that I didn't have a whole bin full of notes on. Most of the planning part of the script had been accomplished, so that I could spend my precious time focused on the writing part.

No matter how fast or slow you write, the only thing that matters is that you write... and finish what you write. Organizing your time, organizing your projects, and organizing yourself is the key to getting things on the page. If you don't have a plan, you're lost!

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