Chapter | eleven

Productivity: Writing Equals Ass on Chair (So Buy a Decent Chair)

They say being a parent is 90 percent just turning up, and the same is true of screenwriting. You can't do anything if you're not parked in that chair in front of the computer. Once you're parked in that chair, you can't write anything if you're staring out the window, catching up on your email, or trawling coupon sites for a good deal on artisanal cupcakes.

The Internet is a distraction, sure. But so is everything when you're trying to avoid writing. It's not because you're bored, and it's not because you don't dearly want to get this story written. It's because you're scared. That's understandable, but it's not a valid excuse. Snap out of it. Focus in. Harden up. It's time to get the work done.

The psychological process of writing the first draft follows a predictable arc.

At first it feels like love in the springtime – your concept's strong, your characters are speaking to you, Act 1 is rocketing along; look at you – you're a screenwriter, and it feels great! Then Act 2 arrives, and things get dark. You've lost track of your subplots; your protagonist is bouncing around aimlessly from plot point to plot point; and who are all these people in your script, and what do they want? By the time you finally arrive at “FADE OUT,” you've forgotten why you thought this was a good idea in the first place.

This struggle is demoralizing and draining. It's bad for your mental health, but most important, it makes it that much harder to face the rewrite process. This is what leads so many young writers to throw up their hands and send out their first draft (perhaps after a bare minimum of rewriting) while crossing their fingers and hoping against hope that somebody will notice their “hidden potential.” This rarely works because, well, screenwriting is rewriting. And insufficient rewriting is the number-one cause of shitty scripts.

Here's my suggestion: burn through that first draft as fast as you can. Just get it done. The faster you finish it, the faster you can get on with the real work – rewriting. So how do you finish the first draft as quickly as possible?

Well, you could pretend you're possessed by the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, go on a crazed coke- and meth-fueled bender and knock out your entire first draft in seventy-two hours. Sadly, for legal reasons, I can't recommend that you do that. But these tips might be the next best thing.

Write the easiest version of every scene.

Subtext is hard. Like, really hard. Trying to deal with unconscious or unarticulated desires on top of more overt character motivations is just confusing as hell. Yet teachers and screenwriting advice book authors are always telling us that our scenes should be built upon layers of subtext – that they must contain “inner goals” and “reversals of expectation” – or else they'll wither on the page. Who do those people think they are?

Okay, so they may have a point. All that stuff makes for better scenes. But sometimes, let's be honest, we don't know the characters and their motivations well enough to be layering those subtleties into the first draft. If we sat there trying to come up with the fanciest, most intricate and interesting version of each scene, we'd become totally paralyzed and write nothing.

Instead: write the easiest version of the scene. The scene still has to contain conflict, but make it the simplest version of that conflict. Can't think of a clever way for the protagonist to escape the villain's death-trap? Have him escape the dumb way. You'll have plenty of time to make it brilliant during the rewrite.

Dialog first, then action.

I don't know about you – perhaps I'm a little dimmer than most – but I find switching gears between action lines and dialog to be quite mentally taxing. Constantly jumping between terse descriptive prose and, say, a Southern vernacular speech pattern is hard on the brain (it's even worse if you have multiple characters in a scene who all speak in a different style). It wears you down over time, and it slows the pace of your writing.

The solution? When you come to a new scene, write the scene heading, and then write all the dialog first. Don't write in any action at all – go full Shakespeare on its ass. Then, when you've got the dialog hashed out for the entire scene, go back and fill in the blanks with action. Not only does this method eliminate brain strain from switching between writing styles, but it also allows you to clearly map out the arc and pacing of the scene.

This tip doesn't work for all genres. You'll find it's of limited use when scripting, say, an action film or a thriller. But for comedies, dramas, and other talky scripts, it's a godsend.

Strip your action lines down to the bone.

Adverbs and adjectives. Who needs them? I don't know if you've noticed, but our Anglo-Saxon linguistic forbears left us some really strong, powerful, all-round excellent verbs and nouns. They're so good, in fact, that we wielders of English can easily build elegant, multilayered sentences without resorting to elaborate clauses or two-dollar words. Take that, French.

But maybe you're not into the whole brevity thing. Maybe you like to labor over your action lines. In that case, my advice to you is: don't do it on the first draft. Just write the simplest form of every sentence. Remember, the heart of your story isn't your sentence structure; it's your protagonist's actions.

Go back and add the foreshadowing later.

We've all been there. You start writing that pivotal, emotional scene in Act 3, and you realize: this would have a much bigger emotional impact if these two characters had talked to each other about their past. Or if they'd been lovers. Or if their mentor had left them a postcard warning them about the situation, or what have you.

When you realize this – that you could enrich the scene you're currently writing by setting it up earlier in the script – your first instinct will be to dive back to an earlier act and start tinkering. Don't. Resist the urge. Instead, write the current scene as if that early foreshadowing is already in place. Then go back and add it in the rewrite.

If it helps, think of this trick as being a bit like the time travel in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure – Bill and Ted need the keys to the police station, so they trust that their future selves will remember to go back in time and leave the keys for them. And voilà – there they are! You can do this, too. Just make sure you don't forget to remember to go back in time … if you follow me.

But! Don't skimp on the emotional arc.

This is important. You can rush the first draft. You can write it as barebones as you like and trust that all the meaty stuff will come later in the rewrites. But the one thing your first draft must always contain is a strong arc for the protagonist. That's your guiding light – the backbone of your entire story. Without that, you're just typing sweet nothings into Final Draft.

Follow this advice and you'll have a finished first draft in no time. Congratulations! Now the real work begins.

We've all been there. It's 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night. Your friends are all in the next room playing poker, or carousing at the local bar, or murdering orcs online, or whatever it is normal humans do on a Friday night. “Join us,” they cry. “Come ante, carouse, and/or murder with us! Seriously, it's Friday night, girl. What's wrong with you?”

What's wrong with you is, of course, that you're a writer. You've got a deadline tomorrow, or you haven't made your daily target number of pages, or perhaps this is the only time of the day that you can find some time to yourself in which to write.

So you ignore your friends and stare at the computer screen instead. The cursor blinks. The hard drive spins. A vein bulges on your forehead as you stare at a new blank scene. You want to write. You need to write. But you cannot, for the life of you, get anything down on the page.

Why does this happen? Assuming it's not just sheer laziness, why does writing come so hard when you're in a bad mood or a distracted frame of mind?

Because you're worried that it's going to suck. After all, how can you do your best work under bad conditions? This stuff is coming straight from your brain, so if your brain's not right, surely the words won't be either?

Wrong. Let go of the concept of a magical state of mind, a wondrously inspired writing “zone” that you can slip into. It's a fantasy; it doesn't exist. When you're setting down your first draft, I don't care if you're blissfully, transcendentally inspired or staring hatefully at the screen while forcing out every word. It simply doesn't matter. Either way, it's probably going to suck.

Now, don't get me wrong. As you've learned, it's okay to suck because everybody's first draft sucks. Whether you're happy or frustrated at the time of writing, the first draft is still going to consist of whatever the first crap is that leaps into to your mind, and invariably it won't be very good.

In fact, you stand a better chance of writing usable first draft material when you are yelling at the screen and laboring over every word, because at least you're engaged and thinking. Compare to your happiest writing days when the words flow freely. Who knows what you're writing, and who cares if it's any good? It could be absolutely terrible, but you wouldn't know, you happy-writing bastard. In this way, cheerful, flowing writing is a little like religious ecstasy: it feels fantastic to you, but to everyone else you're just rolling around on the floor spouting gibberish.

So now you know – forced writing is good. Let go of the concept of “writer's block.” It's fiction – an imaginary excuse. Electricians don't get electrician's block, and lawyers don't get lawyer's block. You need to force yourself to write every single day, even when you don't want to.

How do you do that? Honestly, it varies from person to person. Some writers practice micro time management, structuring their work around half-hour writing “sprints.” Others use rewards; they'll allow themselves chocolate or booze or something else after reaching a certain number of pages or scenes for the day. Neither of these techniques works particularly well for me. I prefer to use guilt.

Here's how it works. Step one: in the morning, when I turn on the computer, the very first thing I do is open the file for the script I'm working on. Before I check my email or read my RSS feeds, that file gets opened. Step two: I'm not allowed to close that file or shut down my computer until I've written something in it.

Sounds simple, but it works. On days when I really don't feel like writing, that open file will sit there in my computer's dock, taunting me. Procrastinate as I might, I know I'm only delaying the inevitable. So eventually I'll click over to that file and type something, anything, just so I can close it and make the damn thing go away. But of course, once I've typed one sentence, it's easy to type another, and another, and suddenly I'm writing whether I like it or not.

Personal psychological manipulation. Days and days of unfun, unglamorous hard work. Sitting alone in a darkened room while your friends play Call of Duty next door. Welcome to the wonderful life of a screenwriter.

Now keep typing.

Hard drives – the spinning kind, at least – are pretty much designed to fail. If your computer is older than about three years, your hard drive and all the data on it are living on borrowed time. Cloud storage is free and insanely simple. If you aren't using it already, the joke's on you.

Dropbox (or other cloud services like it – SpiderOak is a good open-source alternative) can also be used as a free, idiot-proof file sync between different writing machines. If you've got a netbook as well as a primary computer, or a tablet and a primary computer (or maybe even all three, in which case you have a serious gadget-buying problem. Also? I'm jealous), you'll want to have the same Dropbox account active on all your devices. That way, when you start to get serious crotch-rash from sitting at your main computer for six hours straight, you can walk into the next room, pick up your secondary device and immediately continue from where you left off. Hey, I never said screenwriting was glamorous.

This trick is particularly useful if you work with a writing partner. Just create a mutual Dropbox account on each writer's machine. Et voilà, your script will always be in sync with your partner-in-crime's latest changes.

However, this system might break down if you and your writing partner have a habit of working on your script at the same time. In this case, I recommend something like Google Docs or Scripped.com. New iterations of Final Draft also have a function called “Collabowriter” that accomplishes this.

But if you're a real paranoid delusional nutjob (you're a writer, hello), you may worry about hard drive failure and loss of access to cloud storage. Hey, it could happen – the company might shut down overnight or something. You never know. Fear not – just buy a small, cheap, solid-state USB stick from a reliable brand like Kingston or SanDisk. Copy your data onto that stick once a week or thereabouts, and you can rest easy. I can't do anything about the black helicopters that are following you, though. They're your problem.

Hey, while we're on the subject of technology, I should probably talk about screenwriting software. There's really not much to say – all the major brands are well-known, and they all offer comparable features and stability. The only thing they're not comparable on is price, which is why, if you haven't already selected your software, you should probably choose Celtx.

You see, Celtx is free, as in it costs nothing and is available to everyone, everywhere. It's also built upon free (as in freedom), open-source software. That may mean nothing to you, but it's a noble attribute that makes Celtx worthy of your support. I won't bore you with the details here; Google “open source” if you want to learn more.

Celtx also makes more sense for more writers around the world than other competing programs. Online writing services like Scripped.com assume that you'll have constant, cheap access to the Internet, which just isn't the case for all international writers. Final Draft actually requires you to phone the United States just to activate the software you paid for. Their touted features include phone support (a U.S. number) and live chat support (available only during U.S. office hours). Celtx, on the other hand, is free and international, and it just works. I say try it out – if you find it's not for you, you haven't lost anything but time.

As any poker player will tell you, playing conservatively will get you absolutely nowhere. Sure, you'll muddle along for a little while, but eventually your stakes will dwindle away to nothing and you'll be asked to kindly leave the table. The only way to win big is to play big – by bluffing, pushing your luck, and generally taking calculated risks.

As a writer, you also have to take risks. Pop quiz, hot shot:

A friend of yours is a director. She calls you up and says she wants to hire you to write a film for her. She won't need you to start for another month, but hopefully by then she can get the funding and investment needed to pay you a proper fee. Do you:

A: Start writing the film immediately. Why not get a head start on it?

B: Kick back and do absolutely no writing for a month. You've got a guaranteed gig coming up – why strain yourself now? Start checking eBay daily for that new jet-ski you've been wanting.

C: Tell your friend, “Thanks for thinking of me. I'd love to do it. Give me a call in a month when the funding comes through.” Then hang up the phone and continue on with your life as if nothing has changed.

If you answered anything other than C, you're not going to last long in this business.

The unfortunate reality is that film and television are built entirely out of bullshit, promises, and bullshit promises. Here's a good rule of thumb: assume that maybe three-quarters of all job offers you get will not amount to anything. That means under 25 percent of your plans will actually play out the way you want them to.

And the funny thing is that it's never the ones you expect. That pitch meeting you had set up with Steven Spielberg? It'll get cancelled at the last minute. That sketchy friend-of-a-friend who drunkenly gave you his business card in the bar last week? He'll end up introducing you to your first agent.

When things are as random and nebulous as this, you can't get attached to any one project or idea. Never, ever pour all your energy and hopes into one script – and if you do, make sure you've got the next one lined up and ready to go. Never wait by the phone (or email) waiting for somebody to contact you – you could be using that time to work on another project with an equally good chance of succeeding.

Nobody has guaranteed work any more. It's gotten to the point where even seasoned television writers – even showrunners, for god's sake – will write spec scripts in their spare time, because they never know when they're going to need them.

Every spec script, project, and plan is a lottery ticket. No one ticket is more important than any other – the game's random, remember? And the more lottery tickets you're holding, the better your chances of winning the lottery.

You can increase your chances by teaching yourself to write for other media. If you write only feature films, now's the time to try your hand at a television pilot. If you already do TV, why not switch it up and try comic books? Pick your craziest, highest-concept idea, reach out to a hungry young artist on the Internet, and away you go.

If you know some stage actors, why not try writing a play? If flash fiction and short stories are more your thing, try converting an old, unused film idea into prose. And if you have any programming knowledge at all, you might even have a go at writing your own videogame. (Actually, with tools like RPG Maker, you might not even need the programming knowledge.)

All of these options are potentially valuable lottery tickets, because as well as being worthwhile pursuits in their own right, they also make for interesting writing samples. If you were a manager, who would you be more interested in meeting – someone who writes only romantic comedy features and nothing else, or someone with a portfolio that includes plays, graphic novels, and published fiction?

Of course, the elephant in the room here is time, or lack thereof. How the hell are you supposed to write eighty different side projects when it's hard enough to find time for one or two major ones?

I can't give you an easy answer to that question, because there isn't one. The best I can do is tell you to kiss goodbye to your free time, your evenings, and your weekends, and don't expect to see them again for a few years. Even so, finding energy and motivation to come home and keep working after you've just pulled a full shift at your day job can be extremely difficult. I personally get a lot of mileage out of caffeine and guilt, but you'll discover your own fuel in time.

One possible drastic adjustment is quitting your full-time job for a casual one, leaving you with some income but a lot more time in which to write. You're going to want two things in order to pull off this trick: decent health care (sorry, Americans) and an understanding partner. In fact, many professional writers will tell you that their career would never have survived without the support of their long-suffering partner or spouse. If you're lucky enough to have found a good one, remember to tell them that you're going to be rich and famous one day, and that you promise to thank them first in your Oscar acceptance speech.

Screenwriting Tip #105:

Are you planning on taking part in Script Frenzy, the annual community challenge to write a draft script in thirty days? If not, why the hell not? We could all use a little extra motivation.

Screenwriting Tip #107:

Don't let your health go when you're working on a script. Remaining hunched over a desk for twelve hours a day while slamming Doritos, energy drinks, and/or booze may help you get that draft finished, but try telling that to the paramedics as they're scissoring you out of your chair.