Advice to a young screenwriter

After you've learned how NOT to shoot yourself in the foot by writing like a screenwriter, not like a prose/fiction writer, you will be read and not rejected unread. Rejected unread!? Yep. As a screenplay judge, I've done this all the time. I routinely eliminate half the contest entries after reading no more than several pages because this is all it takes for me to see that the writer is not writing a spec screenplay in the accepted, contemporary style. After all, I have a very high stack of scripts to read -- why waste time with someone who doesn't even know what they are supposed to be doing? Now granted, it's very easy to be misled about proper spec screenplay format. There are outdated books on library shelves. There are published SHOOTING scripts, which have a very different standard. If you don't know what you are doing and go to the library or bookstore, you may think you are helping yourself when, in fact, you are getting inappropriate information. But the "right" information is there, too -- in any good recent screenwriting book, on the net, many places. This is not rocket science. But it can be confusing, especially since the standards of the spec script, which is what beginners write, are different from the shooting scripts that get published.

What next, after learning how not to shoot yourself in the foot?

I recommend the next thing you do is master the principles of beginning-middle-end storytelling. Sometimes called dramatic or screenplay structure. But here again, it's easy to get confused.

Here's the problem. These principles have been around since Aristotle. In his Poetics, the basics were formulated and not all that much has changed since then in fundamental storytelling terms. There's a good little book called "Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters" that's worth your time.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of wannabe screenwriters are out there, creating a huge cottage industry of "how to write a screenplay" books, courses, seminars, gurus. It's a very, very competitive field. But nobody ever got rich by saying, Study Aristotle. To be noticed in a competitive marketplace, a player has to look different, unique, and special. So what has happened is this: the same basic information has been repackaged and renamed to make it look different and original. Yet when you analyze all the "different" screenplay theories out there, they reduce to semantic arguments.

It's a bit like money. Is a dollar 100 pennies or 20 nickels or 10 dimes or 4 quarters? Screenwriting gurus argue all day and night at this level. Does a screenplay have 3 acts or 4 acts or 7 acts or 12 acts? All of these alternatives are different ways of describing the same thing! A dollar is a dollar. And a story with a beginning, a middle and an end is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I personally prefer "three act" terminology because three terms are used: beginning, middle, end. But there are other ways to describe the structure.

The point is, it's all about beginning, middle, end storytelling -- this is your focus, and don't let the semantic arguments in the cottage industry fool you or distract you. They want your money, after all. They want you to believe they have some kind of a secret. It's Aristotle who has the secret and always has.

When you study beginning, middle, end storytelling, focus first on the twists that define the borders -- when the beginning becomes the middle and when the middle becomes the end. Very definite story events happen then. Realize that the middle is at least half the total story, and it too has an important twist in its middle, the midpoint, where another important story event happens. So you can begin to structure your story by concentrating on three major twists -- the end of the beginning or "set up" of the story; the midpoint twist; and the end of the middle of the story, which also is the "low point" in the story journey of the main character.

Different approaches break down the structure even more. All of these are worth looking at it. Some will make more sense to you than others. That's fine. Just remember, it's about story movement and story build, within a framework of beginning-middle-end storytelling. Remember it's the protagonist, the main character, whose actions and responses define this story movement.

Perhaps the best way to learn this paradigm, which is what it is, is to watch tons of movies in the frame of mind of "reverse engineering." In my screenwriting books, I treat dozens of films this way, breaking them down into their beginning-middle-end structures. Once you study and see how this works in actual movies, every film you watch thereafter becomes a learning experience. You learn to watch films as an exercise in reverse engineering. Sort of ruins it in a way, it's harder to use movies as an escape from life's troubles, but every film does make you a more knowledgeable film storyteller.

I tell my students that beginning-middle-end story structure is the most important and useful tool they will learn in my class. I mean it. One can apply it to any kind of writing.