by Rich Wilson (c) 2001-2003 All rights reserved
Several years ago I examined the whole realm of software aimed at film and video scriptwriters, and wrote an overview article for a magazine. Later, I published it on this website. I believe that article is still worth reading, because most of its conclusions have not changed. This essay revisits the topic without getting into specific products, with the goal of helping you decide just how much technology you want to introduce into your own writing process. I've boiled the topic down to seven basic truths. "But Rich, why seven?" It's purely arbitrary. Stop fussing and read.
If you've been reading casually so far, you might have the idea that I find screenwriting software useless. Quite the contrary - some of it is really great. The point is that you should have realistic expectations of what it can do for you. As with any software, you should determine the need, then find the product that best fits the need, at the best value for your budget.
Basic Truth #1 is listed first because the first step in deciding which screenwriting software product to buy, or whether to buy any at all, is to know yourself. Sometimes people dabble for years before realizing that they really don't like screenwriting, or that they prefer some genre other than the one they've been trying to write.
You may run across books that say you can write a screenplay in three weeks. You may hear apocryphal stories about famous movies being written in a single weekend. You may hear over-hyped stories about young filmmakers running out of the house in the morning with a camera, and coming home for dinner with a masterpiece feature film already in the can. If your imagination is caught up with such things, then you are in for a letdown.
The truth is that screenwriting is hard, and it takes a lot of time. Of course some people are faster writers than others. And any established Hollywood rewrite expert certainly ought to be able to knock out a script on a tight deadline. But if you are an established Hollywood writer, you don't need most of this advice anyway. Sometimes software can help accelerate your typing, or your brainstorming, or your organizing, but none of it can make you think any faster. Thinking is undoubtedly the slowest part of screenwriting.
Most people should expect to spend months developing the seed of an idea into a fully-formed feature-length script. It could take years if you have a "day job" and lots of obligations. But there is no race. Some beginning screenwriters feel compelled to compete in this area and to claim that they write faster than others. This is foolishness. The amount of time it takes is irrelevant. All that matters is what ends up on the page, and whether it is good or not. In a published interview with John Brady, Paddy Chayevsky figured that his average screenplay took two years. Chayevsky often had multiple projects going at one time, of course -- but one should take comfort in seeing a writer of that stature acknowledge the need for painstaking effort and the passage of time.
Okay, so writing one screenplay takes a long time. Did I mention that you should write more than one, and that you should not expect your first screenplay to get produced? Oh, right, you've heard the story about the young tyro who whipped up a single script, won a contest, and next thing you know he's got an agent and meetings with studios. Again - that is not something to focus on, because it is nearly impossible to emulate. Ask around, or read enough interviews with established screenwriters, and you'll discover that those who did not come in from other media (novels, plays, etc.) usually had to write several spec screenplays before any of them sold.
The topic is commitment. If you're reading this page, you've got some idea that you want to write screenplays. Here are some questions to help you examine your reasons for that, and if you're lucky, the answers may help you with a lot more than just choosing software.
How good a writer are you? Do you have a good foundation for a writing career? Do you know the strengths and weaknesses in your writing ability? Do have the courage to criticize your own work in order to improve it? And after you've critiqued your work candidly, if you still think it is good, do you have the psychic strength to believe in it and yourself, if the film industry responds to your work with disinterest or outright rejection?
Do you know why you want to write? Do you have a particular reason for wanting to write movies, as opposed to some other medium? Do you think you will be better at writing film than writing in another form? For that matter, have you even tried writing in any other medium? Do you have the mistaken fantasy that screenwriting is a quick ticket to Easy Street - or are you writing screenplays because visual stories play out in your mind, and you want to see them made real, no matter how hard it may be to achieve that?
Do you have a taste for certain types of movies? Have you identified the genre of film that best suits your temperament and writing skills? What kinds of audiences do you want to reach? Do you know what you want to say to them through your work?
I'm going to stop there -- but you should keep going. Ask those questions of yourself that I couldn't begin to imagine, and don't stop until you are clear about your desire to pursue this field. Because you will need that clarity to deal with Basic Truth #1.
Accept Basic Truth #1, and you will begin with the goal of writing multiple screenplays. You will not mind if your first one does not blow the doors off Hollywood. You will understand that, like most skills in life, screenwriting takes practice. Think about it: you wouldn't expect to make the Olympics the first time you put on skis, or the first time you pick up a tennis racket. The great athletes practice, not just before they make it big as professionals, but continuously throughout their careers. Writers should do the same, if they ever hope to see their visions on the screen.
Basic Truth #2 When I started to write this, I was going to say that software cannot make you a better writer. But I realized that this is not 100% true. In fact, there is software available that can help you avoid run-on sentences, keep your descriptions in the active voice, check your spelling, and address other fundamental writing errors that you might make. But there are limits to its effectiveness.
I first used Grammatik, which is now part of WordPerfect, as a standalone product years ago. I was well-educated and already working as a professional writer. But to my surprise, Grammatik caught a few bad habits that I had fallen into. For instance, I was writing in the passive voice far more than I realized. The program caught it, and reported it.
But here's the problem. What if you don't know what the passive voice is, or why screenwriters should avoid it? No program can give you a writing education on the spot. Nor can it do the trickiest thing, which is to identify situations in which the passive voice is not only acceptable, but perhaps even preferable! You need a foundation of knowledge and judgment, to make the best use of such a tool.
(Side note: some comments about passive voice are available on this website, on the "Writing for Audio" page at http://www.online-communicator.com/writaud.html.)
Basic Truth #3 is the final step in defining whether you are really ready to take on the challenges of screenwriting. If you don't like movies, you shouldn't even think about entering the business. And your affection for movies should not stop you from being analytical. The ideal is to allow yourself to be a fan of movies in general, while still being able to step back and analyze why you like or dislike particular ones.
The other day I was watching a popular crime-suspense movie at home, on videotape, with my family. All was well until we hit a courtroom scene in which several legal procedures were ignored or wrongly portrayed, making the scene seem gratuitous and poorly-researched. Since we are fans of TV shows like Law & Order, we all commented on this. But the action kept moving, so we sat back and kept watching. Suddenly, as Emeril would say, BAM! we were off on a new direction with a whole new - and more interesting - direction in the story.
I looked at the VCR counter and saw that we were about 28 minutes into the film. If you have done your homework, you know what conclusions I drew. First, the film was following a traditional three-act structure, with the kind of plot timing typical of many mainstream movies, which is taught by some - not all - screenwriting gurus. Secondly, I could now see that one reason the courtroom scene had been treated fast and superficially was to avoid dragging out the first Act. The scene's actions were not as important as its result. While I still felt it could have been improved, I understood why it was so short - because the "real" story hadn't begun yet, and we needed to get there quickly.
Act breaks are not always so blatant as this one was, and in some movies they're hard to pin down at all. But the point is that it is only by watching films, or by reading scripts, that you can see how other writers are working with the medium, and with story structure. I just happened to be at home with a VCR timer staring me in the face, but I know many writers who go to films in theaters and instinctively check their watches when they sense a turning point.
And it's not all about structure, of course. You listen to dialogue. You feel emotion and then ask yourself whether that emotion resulted mostly from the effect of the acting, the writing, the music, the camera, and so on. Something I love to do is to listen very carefully every time I hear a good line of dramatic dialogue being delivered very slowly. I think to myself about the writer, and how the writer has to build in the emotional depth to those words, to allow an actor to take all that time with it.
Then there's directing, camera and editing. In another film I saw recently, the opening scene is covered from a dozen camera angles, quickly intercut with even more shots of unrelated action nearby. I do not know whether all this detail was in the script, or added by the director, but it made the film start with a rich, deep texture. Someday I hope to see the screenplay and find out if the writer deserved credit for imagining that texture and describing it on the page, even if briefly. Of course, scene description can only be learned by seeing the actual screenplays. But as noted here, you can get ideas for the potential richness of scene descriptions just by watching films.
A parallel that comes to mind is Tiger Woods. I hope that most people reading this know who he is, but just in case - he's a young man considered by many to be the best golfer on the planet as of this writing. Yes, he started young, and he practiced out there on the golf courses for endless hours.
But Woods also watches films - of old golf matches! So he has seen how famous golfers of the past worked their way out of difficult positions in a sand trap or behind a tree. As a result, he combines his own great skill with the knowledge of others' methods. If this guy can make his golf game better by watching films of old golf matches, you sure as heck ought to be able to improve your screenwriting skill by watching movies - and they can be about anything!
Which reminds me. There are different schools of thought about whether you should see all genres of film, or just the genres that you intend to write. I agree with the first viewpoint, but I think it is more important that the potential screenwriter see a lot of movies, no matter what kind. With a few exceptions, a movie is the end result of a process that begins with a screenplay. So try to look for the screenplay within every movie you ever see.
Basic Truth #4: Many beginning writers think that screenwriting should be as free and unrestricted as any other form of personal expression. In some ways, it is. But unlike painting, poetry, and many other creative pursuits, screenwriting is not an end in itself. You may write a screenplay in solitude, but its purpose is to become the focus of many other people's creative input. The end of your job, when you "finish" a script, is just the beginning of the making of a movie. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other people will participate in it, and most of them are as interested in creative expression as you are.
Also unlike those other art forms, filmmaking is crazily expensive and time-consuming. Because of the greater complexity and higher financial risks, film producers have to be very careful about choosing a screenplay for production. Once they make a commitment to it, red ink starts flowing. The up-front expenses will not turn into profits for at least a year or two, maybe more - or never. Meanwhile, the producer has lost all that time, and missed the chance to make some other movie that might have turned out better, or made more money. That is the scary world of being a film producer.
These remarks all address a fundamental rule that any writer should keep in mind at all times: know your audience. Understand where they are coming from, what their needs are, and how they will feel about your work. Although producers are often seen as the screenwriter's adversaries, that is a mistake. They are your potential collaborators. More importantly, they are the first audience that you must reach and impress, before your story can ever reach a larger audience of people in theaters. And they will expect your script to follow the page formatting conventions that other screenplays follow, with only a slight allowance for individual quirks or stylistic liberties.
There is much discussion about the notion that Hollywood also enforces conventions or "rules" of story structure and character type. I won't take sides on that, but other articles will discuss software that's intended to help with all these tasks.
Basic Truth #5: I believe this is inarguable. People have been telling each other stories, and making a living at it, for centuries. The first dramatic forms similar to film go back to Greek theater. Many, if not most, screenwriters still use some of the dramatic concepts first articulated by Aristotle.
Okay, jump ahead two thousand years. People started making motion pictures and pretty soon even the silliest melodramas of the silent film era were based on "photoplays." Somebody had to write them, and you know there weren't any computers then.
Another 70-80 years of film history passed. Many thousands of films were made, and thousands of great actors and directors and writers were born and died, all before professional screenplays ever started coming off personal computers in any quantity. And that was less than twenty years ago.
So let's keep this in perspective. If you have nothing more than a typewriter and some skill, you can write a screenplay and sell it.
It's time-consuming to edit and retype such a script, but it can be done. Some writers don't type at all. In a TV interview with Larry King, Chris Rock described how he wrote his film Down to Earth longhand, on paper, and hired somebody else to type it up. There are also professional writers who dictate their scripts, and have professional typists transcribe the tapes.
The point here is to boil down the question of necessity and to remove it from the discussion. Do not let software, or your desire for it, become an obstacle to doing the work.
Software can be really useful in various ways, most of them related to speed and convenience. But when I read messages on the Internet from people who are trying to find ways to steal pirated copies of commercial software, I shake my head and wonder why somebody would break the law to acquire something that they can do without. You need food, but you don't need software. I've already described ways of creating a screenplay without the use of software, but I can't think of any ways to live without eating. So, let's keep this in perspective.
Elsewhere, we'll look at the things programs can do, and you can decide if the level of convenience is something that you want badly enough to pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, go without it. Software is intellectual property - exactly as your screenplays are - and it deserves at least as much respect and as much protection as you think your work deserves.
Basic Truth #6 is a true statement about software, but it's also almost a joke, because we can all see that plenty of decision makers in Hollywood (and other film production centers) have no taste either. In other words, if a person with spotty judgment and bad taste can make it, however briefly, to a six or seven-figure salary, approving films whose budgets may range into eight or nine figures, then how can we expect a lowly piece of software to provide what that person lacks? Answer: we can't.
There are programs on the market that will, when asked, provide hints as to what you might want to do next with a particular scene or storyline or character. But only you can decide whether those suggestions are worth following. The software makes you the boss, and you have to be ready for that responsibility.
Other software may ask you questions, and you fill in the blanks. Sometimes it will ask you why you made a particular decision about plot or character or whatever, the goal being to help you clarify your thoughts. But if you don't have good reasons for those decisions - if you were just muddling along - you will not be able to make very good use of such software. Again, the software's level of potential usefulness depends on you.
Basic Truth #7: This may be the single most helpful piece of advice I can give you. Personally, I write because I have a creative urge and I want to have a relationship with an audience, however distant and invisible they may be. Other folks don't have a message, but write purely in hopes of making a big living at it. Well, whatever our goals, all of us need to sell these scripts in order to achieve them.
And no matter what you hear, read, or see in a review, advertisement or whatever, believe me when I tell you that once you have completed a good script, the process of selling it can involve a thousand different factors, but none of them will be the brand or type of software you used while writing.
You might have used software in the writing process, but the process should be invisible in the end product. Maybe it will come up in conversation with a potential buyer - but probably not. The story counts, above all. The marketability matters. The expense of production, and all that. Those things are intrinsic to the work itself, but aside from that, you still have to get the screenplay into the hands of a decision-maker who likes it enough to say Yes. It becomes a whole different ball game.
I have not heard or read of situations where a producer ever turned down a really great script, a property that could have made money and provided creative satisfaction, based on the screenwriter's choice of software. Conversely, I also have never heard of a really bad script getting purchased simply because the producer was a fan of the software used in its writing.
So if you find that any particular tool works for you, and you can afford it, then don't be afraid to use it. When you are ready to sell the script, it has to be able to stand on its own. In most cases you will not be presenting it in a meeting. It will start making the rounds without you, especially if you have an agent who works hard. You may not have any idea who is reading it, or whether they agree with your choice of programs.
All that matters at that point is whether you can write well, and as I hope this article makes clear, there's no way around that. The software between your ears is infinitely more important and powerful than any software on your computer. I believe that will be true for as long as you or I live, and probably forever.
This document is provided as a public service, and may not be reproduced without permission. (c) 2001-2003 by Rich Wilson, Rich Wilson Creative Services, and The Online Communicator website