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At last – definitive evidence that the world is not real. That I am, in all likelihood, enduring some kind of coma; having my psyche toyed-with by whichever part of my subconscious laughs at holocaust jokes and enjoys 80s US sitcoms.

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To begin, there is no way in hell I can stop this post being self-promotional, self-congratulatory or any one of a thousand negative terms prefixed with “self-”. I can, however, apologise in advance and – should you find yourself thinking “You arrogant, twazzok” while reading the following, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. So, in advance: “Sorry”.

On a barely-related note, I am pleasantly surprised to report that the word twazzok already appears in the spellcheck dictionary.

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The First Sign of the Coming Apocalypse
Let’s wind back the clock to Thursday August 19th. It’s after one in the morning (so, technically, it’s the 20th). However, that’s just the time in the UK, not the time on the Pacific seaboard of the US, which was the only place that mattered at the time. In a little under an hour, the Scriptapalooza 2010 screenwriting competition was to announce its winners – and some sod was going to walk away with $10 000, a host of screenwriting software and a golden ticket to a career in Hollywood. Lucky bastard.

I didn’t know who that bastard was just yet – the list wasn’t up – but I was convinced, despite being among the finalists, that it wasn’t going to be me.

Having recently completed a new polish of my contending screenplay, Juice, I had skillfully dissected the plot, characters, text, dialogue and premise to compile a comprehensive list of why I was naught but a hack and a charlatan – the only way I could even have reached the finals, was by some freak clerical error. Possibly comprising a harried Scriptapalooza clerk colliding with Steven Spielberg while both were carrying large stacks of screenplays, all with lose-leaf title pages.

It was still an hour before the announcement – but Galaxy Quest had just finished and I had nothing more to do, so I decided to check anyway. Emails first. Nothing. Twitter. Nope. Then for the main Scriptapalooza website… Winners announced.

Crap. Definitely not me. They’d have emailed or something.

Well, I might as well see who did win. You know; get the inevitable bitterness out of the way now so I can wake-up tomorrow and maybe feel happy for the guy/girl who beat me. What’s the prat’s name then…?

Andrew James Carter. Who won with something called “Juice“. What a bastard. How, the fuck, did that talentless cock win?! And what a stupid title for a… hold on a minute… …That stupid, talentless cock-prat-bastard is me!

It was one o’clock in the morning. It was a fabled “break”. It was $10 000. Long story short: my neighbours are now petitioning to have me evicted.

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And then…
Well, there’s been interest and contacts and other such things. I’m not sure how much I should say at this point – nothing has been decided yet, nothing has been signed, etc.. So I’ll err on the side of caution and say absolutely nothing. What I will say, is that it’s definitely very exciting and I’d definitely recommend everyone who’s thinking of entering competitions to do just that (particularly Scriptapalooza, #plug #plug).

What’s weird is that I don’t feel different. I thought I would – on those few occasions when I allowed myself the ludicrous fantasy that I might actually win – but when the adrenaline wore off, I was just me again. No superpowers. Nothing. I’ve still got a day job, I’ve still got bills to pay and food to cook, I still find excuses to avoid writing.

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But there are differences…
People’s attitudes towards me have changed – and I’m not just talking about my scarily large number of new followers on Twitter. To my friends (the real ones – not you hand-wavy, possibly-imaginary, charming Internet-types), what was a quaint little hobby has now been elevated to potential-career status. The occasional query about this script, that script or writing in general has, over the last week, evolved into impromptu lunch-time casting sessions and a plethora of light-hearted jokes (most revolving around the cruel jinx: “don’t forget me when you’re famous” or the annoyingly accurate: “drinks are on you then?”).

I’ve also probably sent more emails in the last two weeks than any spam-bot on any dodgy server in the world. On several occasions, I’ve gone to bed after midnight, feeling very satisfied at a good evening’s work – only realise that, at no point in the evening, did I actually do any “writing”.

One of the more enjoyable non-directly-career-defining things arising from this was that I’ve actually given an interview (albeit via email)! The delightful Lisa Marks – who’s also interviewed the likes of Cameron Diaz, Steve Carrel, Gerrard Butler and, most recently, Drew Barrymore (possibly on the very same day as me) – has produced two articles (one about my writing, one just about me) which actually make me sound like a human being. I suspect witchcraft.

On a less enjoyable note, I got slightly lambasted on facebook once Scriptapalooza posted my logline. A few people remarked that it sounded unoriginal – as if you can tell from a few sentences (but you’re welcome to make up your own mind via my Portfolio). Those guys are welcome to their opinion. But in case others are inclined to listen to their laments and mistake it for advice…

Originality alone is not the mark of a good screenplay. In order to sell, a script must be well-written; have engaging, identifiable characters; balance pacing, dialogue and story arcs; yes, it must stand apart, be different; but, most of all, it must be commercial. One of the most well-known Hollywood cliches is “Give me something exactly the same as everything that’s gone before… but different.”

With Juice, I aimed to do just that. Whether I succeeded or not – that’s for each individual to decide for themselves.

But please don’t judge me – or anyone, for that matter – without knowing the material on which you’re judging them.

I’d also like to thank Andrew Tibbs for his excellently worded facebook defence on my behalf.

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So what Next?
Well… I don’t know, as yet. There are various irons in various things, most of which certainly look like fires, but at the moment I’m forcing myself to stay relatively calm. Things are afoot. Doors are opening. But I’m not going to start closing them or stepping through any – not until I’ve seen more of this strange, door-infested room into which I have somehow fallen.

Don’t worry – I’ll soon start with the “self-” prefixes again, once there’s something solid to report.

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And Finally
There are many things required to win a competition – particularly in screenwriting. Sure, an ability to write helps. There’s characterisation, dialogue, story structure – all of which can be perfected with the right investment of time. But most of all – there’s luck. Shear, bloody, dumb luck.

What people like in a screenplay is so subjective as to make some part of any competition a lottery. I’m not going to shoot myself in the foot and say that just any script can win – you’ve still got to be good (though I’m still not ruling out that Spielberg-collision in my case) – but I’m also not going to claim I’m any better than the other 29 finalists – if not the semi-finalists and quarter-finalists as well. In fact – mentioning no names – the same version of Juice which won Scriptapalooza crashed out of another competition after only the second round.

So to all other writers-aspirant, I say: keep entering, keep pushing – above all else, keep writing. Take any and each rejection on the chin – and then dust yourself off and try again. Don’t give in to bitterness or self-doubt when rejection happens – because it always happens – instead, resolve to make yourself even better, so that next time, maybe next time…

To quote an immortal line from a film I revisited oh-so-very recently – “Never give up. Never surrender.”

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Never read as you write.

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Picture the scene. You’re writing – fingers dancing across the keyboard like two five-legged, polka-inclined spiders. This is brilliant. You’re actually writing. Fantastic. I wonder if it’s any good? I think I’ll just skip back to the start of this paragraph and-

STOP. RIGHT. THERE. You’re about to make a huge mistake. And it’s a mistake oh-so-many writers make. It may, in fact, be a mistake some writers never stop making. And it’s also a mistake many non-writers make when writing. It’s why people don’t like writing and why so many people take ages to write the smallest paragraph. Never – ever - read as you write.

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Let Loose the Spiders
Remember that big list of things that Writers need to be able to do? Remember how “Writing” and “Editing” were two different items on that list? Right. Well that’s because they’re two different things. Two very different things. You can edit, or you can write. You cannot do both at once and you cannot flit between them like an indecisive flittery-thing with some monstrous, red pen.

Writing is all about focus. It’s about that subconscious conduit of instinct from inspiration to your fingertips. And nothing – nothing at all – should be allowed to get in the way of that.

Trying to edit while you write is like trying to jump-rope while tossing pancakes. Regardless of the fact that it’s a superhuman feat of coordination – you just don’t have that many hands! Yes, you could spend hours writing a sentence and then re-writing it and then polishing and crafting until you’re left with a beautiful, multi-faceted micro-poem. And then you’ll move onto the next sentence and this time it’ll take you even longer because, while crafting and poetising, you’ll also have to make sure it flows from the previous sentence.

Instead – just write. Just start typing (or penning, if you’re feeling old-fashioned). Let those headless spiders beat out whatever rhythm your subconscious dictates. Let it flow.

Editing is a different beast. And that beast can be slaughtered later – just as soon as your pen becomes truly mightier than your rusty claymore.

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The Science Part
There is one very simple reason why you shouldn’t write and edit at the same time. I knew their had to be (instinct, remember?), but for a long time I just couldn’t figure it out. Ultimately, it was the science part of my brain which provided the answer.

I did wonder, for a time, whether it was simply a gender issue. The brains of men and women work differently and it’s a scientific fact that men just can’t multitask. We can work on task A, but if we want to switch to task B we have to perform something of a mental gear-change and – most importantly – we have to stop task A. Women, on the other hand, can happily AB or BA to their heart’s content. So, is that the solution? Is it just that my inferior man-brain rebels at any concurrent attempt to both write and edit?

Nope.

It’s because of what writing is. And this is where the science helped me out, because science often deals with opposites and inverses and when looking at writing from a scientific perspective, everything became oh-so-ironically clear. What is writing?

Simple – Writing is the opposite of Reading.

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Well, duh?
Pick up a book you know well. Open it randomly. Now read a sentence. Now stop and do something else – make a cup of tea, feed the cat or check what’s on TV tonight. Now read another sentence. Now do something else. Repeat until you finish the paragraph…

Finished? Good. Now tell me… What was that paragraph about?

Did you, by any chance, stop and think for a moment? Perhaps perform some sort of mental “Ummm…”, perchance? Of course you didn’t – because you almost certainly didn’t actually pick up the book or do anything I told you. But if you had, there would most certainly have been ummmm-age afoot.

It’s all about flow. The second you break it, you’re not doing what you set out to do. Reading is more than plucking sentences from a page and inserting them into your brain via your eyes. And, as it’s inverse, writing is more than spewing forth words from your fingertips. When you speak, you don’t randomly jump between topics – no matter how disjointed a conversationalist you might be, there will always be flow.

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Floooowwwww
And that’s exactly what you do – let it flow. When you set out to write, do just that – write. Start typing until your subconscious tells you to stop. Don’t think about whether it’s perfect – in fact, don’t think about what you’ve just written at all. Editing can come later. Will come later. If you’re too busy worrying that your last sentence was word-slurry then you can be certain that your next sentence will be, in actual fact, a slurry of words.

It’s good that you’re in search of perfection, but that comes later. If you never start on the next paragraph because this one isn’t “good enough” then you’ll never have anything to perfect. The sentences are not the story. The prose is not the story. The scene description is not the story. The semi-amusing spider/hand analogy is not the blog-entry.

I guarantee that what you write will not be perfect. But that isn’t the point – the point is to write.

So write. And then you can perfect what you have written.

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< How to Write… Anything (2)

How to Write… Anything (4) >

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You already know Why. You just don’t know that you know. You know?

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At the risk of going a little “Obi-Wan” I’m going to talk a little bit about trusting your instincts – because that’s what a large amount of writing is; instinct. Writers often talk about problems with Act 2. They scream with frustration as they know how the story ends and they know how the story begins… but, for some reason, they don’t know how to get from one to the other. And there’s nothing wrong with this – it’s part of the great, bastardly monolith that is Writer’s Block – but it all stems from instinct.

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Blocked
The Writer’s Block in this instance is a combination of two effects. The first is a failure of imagination – and I don’t mean to imply that the Writer’s imagination is lacking, simply that it – for whatever reason – is currently understaffed or wandering around the wrong part of whimsyland. Whatever the cause, the Writer’s imagination is unable to find a solution. Or, at least, a working solution.

And that’s the second part – instinct. The imagination is probably spewing out all kinds of inspired possibilities – and instinct is kicking them all away again. They don’t work. It might be a fantastic idea – but it doesn’t work in this story. But why? Odds are, should you be in a position to ask this of the Writer, you’ll do one of two things – receive no answer or solve the problem.

If you’ll excuse the tautology – writer’s operate instinctively on instinct. That is to say – most of the time, we don’t even realise that our Writer’s Instinct is guiding our hands across the keyboard. It just happens. This, unfortunately, means it’s all the harder to unstick ourselves when we find the story crushed beneath the dreaded Block – because we can’t quite say how we got their in the first place.

And that’s not a bad thing. Everything we’ve learned. Every mistake we have made. Every online-writing-guide we happen to have read. All of it. It all gets stored away in our subconscious and our instinct mines that rich vein of guidelines and unwritten-rules to help that story flow directly from the inspiration-center of the brain to our fingertips without any of our pesky higher-brain-function getting in the way.

It’s the same for anything. Anything in the world. Do you have to calculate gravity and air-resistance when you throw a ball? Of course not, your subconscious draws on experience, memory and instinct and – should you have enough – then you send the stumps flying (that’s a cricket metaphor, for the uninitiated). Do you think Roger Federer thinks about the angle of his racket? Or the sweep of his arm? The strength of the shot? No. All he thinks is – “I want to put the ball there.” – and then instinct does the rest. It’s the same with writing.

That is… until it isn’t.

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Unblocked
Quite often – almost always, in fact – the best cure for Writer’s Block is to stop writing for a while and do something else. Let the brain recharge and let the subconscious draft in some part-time support staff to cope with the workload. Find a Zen activity at times like this – something that you don’t actually have to think about like cleaning the house or jogging. In effect – turn your brain off and then turn it back on again. Full system restart.

However, when this doesn’t work – and there will be times (horrible, horrible times) when this happens – there are other ways out. Which brings us back to – yet again – the all-important “Why?”.

We rarely ask this of our subconscious. We’re so used to it having everything well-under-control that when something goes wrong, we don’t even think to blame the little imp that sits at the back of our brain, yanking at the controls. So now we’re standing at the foothills of the Writer’s Block and our instinct is coming up blank – as far as our conscious mind is concerned – because every spark of inspiration is being instantly quashed by that naughty little imp.

But there’s a reason said quashing is afoot. As I’ve said, those bits of inspiration don’t work. They don’t fit the story. They don’t fit the characters. They’re just so horribly wrong that they don’t even make it to the conscious mind. We, as the saying goes, draw a blank. So, where’s your way out?

Simple – ask Why?

Generate any old solution, no matter how random. Then ask yourself – Why doesn’t it fit the story? Why doesn’t it fit the characters? Why shouldn’t her hat be that colour? Your answers are probably somewhat generic at this point – “Because there aren’t antimatter-teleporters in 12th century France,” for example. That much depends on the randomness of your initial random solution. Well, don’t stop now. Keep going.

Every time you reject an idea. Make sure you know Why you rejected it. And not just the cursory “lack of antimatter-teleporter invention” problem – keep asking Why until you get to the very heart of the issue-

Character A wouldn’t do something like that. Okay – WHY wouldn’t Character A do something like that?

Keep going. Keep going. And sooner-or-later, you’ll find a Why that you can’t answer. Why wouldn’t Character A take the action which the story requires of her? Could it be that she’s missing some back-story? Could it be that her motives are unclear? That’s your problem. That’s where instinct stalled. And that’s where you find your solution. Give her a motive. Or change her character. Or take the choice out of her hands. Or… well, anything.

In effect, you’ve performed the very same exercise as your subconscious – generating solutions and dismissing them because they don’t fit. But where your subconscious cannot answer a “Why” where no answer exists, your conscious mind can create that answer. And there’s your solution.

So, what are you waiting for? You’re the creative one. It’s your story. Create, damn you!

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Growing Your Instinct
Now, that’s all very well. But that’s a solution for seasoned Writers. What about those who have yet to acheive that coveted capital “W”? Well, sadly there’s no hard-and-fast rule here. Instinct is something which grows with use, so you’re best-off using it as much as possible. As for how you use it when you haven’t really got it yet…? Well, that’s the sort of question to make ears bleed, but that’s not to say there aren’t answers.

Step one – Write. Then write again, but do it better this time. Then figure out what made the difference. I know that’s an infuriatingly vague piece of advice, but that’s all there is in this area. When dealing with instinct, everything because so subjective to the person that it’s hard to give any real help. It’s up to you.

Learn how to analyze your own work – which will, admittedly, require you to get other people to analyze it as well, just to make sure that your analysis was right in the first place. The important thing here is to keep breaking things down into “Why?”s:

That bit doesn’t work? Okay – why doesn’t that bit work? Because that character isn’t believable. Okay – why isn’t that character believable? Create an annoying four-year-old in your mind and keep answering it’s incessant “Why”ing until the only answer you have left is “Because.”

Step two – Read. Then do exactly the same as above from the other direction. Figure out why certain things resonated with you. Then figure out why they didn’t resonate with other people. Watch bad films and read bad books and then figure out why they were bad films and why they were bad books. You hated this film, but everyone else seems to like it. Well, everyone develops their instinct for liking and disliking differently – so figure out what it was that made you hate the film and then figure out why everyone else didn’t seem to mind (or even notice).

Analyse. Compare. Explain. Expound. Etcetera. Keep asking Why.

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And it’s the same for Everyone
Every time you answer one of those “why” questions, you’re building a little more framework for your instinct. And, here’s the good news, it’ll never be complete. Think that doesn’t sound all that ‘good’? Take a second to think of your favorite writer. Well their framework will never be complete either. You never finish learning – but, then, it’s not about finishing, is it?

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How to Write… Anything (3) >

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