a recurring feature.
The quote of the day:
I don't like Clinton, but I'd rather be surrounded by genial venality
than smug, self-righteous, moral rectitude any day.
Running news:
5.3 miles yesterday morning.
5.3 miles this afternoon. I had a harder time regulating my heart rate than yesterday. I find running easier in the afternoon warmth rather than the morning cold, but it's much more effort to get my butt out the door in the afternoon.
I spent the day working on comments for other people's work, which was like doing work (analysis, at any rate), without actually doing any creative work of my own.
At least one hour today was spent going over the opening of Linda's new script, in which she wanted 5 or 6 scenes where I pointed out she needed 2. One of the problems with the way Linda works is that she gets attached to the first way she comes up with to do something--write a scene, arrange a story--and I have to shake her and say, No, that's not important, and moreover, you don't have time for that. Get to the story, woman, or I'm out getting popcorn (Len's favorite phrase to indicate loss of audience involvement).
Whenever she mentions how she arranged events the first time she tried to write this as a screenplay, I say (over and over again), Throw that out. It's not germane to the discussion at hand--the first time you wrote it as tragedy, this time it's a comedy, and you've also learned a thing or two in the past year. (At least, I hope she has.) If you tie yourself to the way you did it once, you're going to be like a truck spinning its wheels in the mud: you're not going to get anywhere, no matter how much noise you make.
Another problem (with Linda's current script) is that it's based on a real incident that happened to her. "It didn't happen that way." She did this all the time with the historical piece she wrote in Len's class: "It didn't happen that way." I don't care. We're here for the story, not for that documentary feel. And documentaries are lies anyhow--images rearranged to tell the story the documentary makers want you to hear.
You have to work out the story before you write any of it. Yes, things may change along the way--in fact, you should bet on it. But you should know the general direction you're heading in and how you want it to end, so that you know where you have to get to.
Evidently, one member of our little writing group spins general sorts of yarns and then doesn't work out any of the details of the story before writing because, as she insists, she writes "killer dialogue." She'll work it all out with the characters.
Uh, no. No, no, no.
(And this is not just because I've read her dialogue, which underwhelmed me.)
Screenplays are not dialogue; they are story. Every single thing in a screenplay can and should be changed to service the story. Dialogue isn't any more important than description; it's just another tool. But because characters are finally talking and coming to life, writers tend to hang on to dialogue way past its usefulness.
Nothing is sacred. If a scene, a bit, a character doesn't serve the story, axe it. If you like one statement a character makes particularly much, axe it. More than likely, it's just in there because you like the sound of it. This is called a "darling." Writers are encouraged to kill their darlings because in all likelihood they're flashy, self-congratulatory bits that detract from the story and stand out like sore thumbs.
I don't know why I'm saying this. Hearing advice like this never helped me as I've made progress as a writer--it took a long time for me to strike out a particularly witty piece of dialogue I'd written and understand that the overall writing was better for it. Just like I could never read those books on how to write a screenplay and get anything from them, until I started seeing the structure in movies and a big lightbulb went off, complete with the Homeric "Doh!" in the background.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com