Do You Want to Write a Screenplay?

Every year more than 40,000 screenplays are registered with the Writers Guild of America.  Only 1 out of 100 screenplays are sold; fewer than 1 out of 13 screenplays are made.  The following tips may help you overcome those odds.

First, know how to write.  Because the first reader of your work will look for any reason to reject it and to move to the next screenplay in his/her large pile, if you write well, the reader may place your work with those under deliberation.  Writing well is more than spelling words correctly and using grammar and mechanics properly; writing well includes creating emotive characters, an engrossing dialogue, and a sound plot.

Second, analyze movies and screenplays.  You do not need to enroll in a film school to write a screenplay, but you do need to know the elements of a successful one.  Analyze movies that received critical acclaim--dividing each into scenes, describing the characters, and outlining the plots.  Divide your favorite movies into five- or ten-minute segments to study action and pace.  The protagonist should intrigue you soon after the opening scene.  Ten minutes into Tootsie (1982), we realize that Dustin Hoffman's Michael Dorsey is an ambitious but difficult New York actor.  The rising action should be clear to you within 20 minutes.  In Groundhog Day (1993), Bill Murray's Phil Connors wakes at 6 a.m. on February 2 for the second time.  Be attentive to details.  In Chinatown (1974), a drama about corruption in Los Angeles' water department, the director, Roman Polanski, included the sound of dripping or rushing water in almost every scene.

Public libraries, film schools, screenwriters' websites, and the Writers Guild have screenplays, especially of popular movies.  Actively read as many as you can--focusing on characters, dialogue, plot and format.

Third, format your screenplay in accordance with Hollywood standards.  Purchase software to help you standardize your work, preventing hours of frustration.  Use it to create margins, headers, capitalizations and indentations.

Fourth, captivate your reader early.  Studios, producers, directors, agents, managers, and some actors employ readers to critique screenplays so that only the best reach important desks.  Most readers will decide within the first 10 pages whether or not a screenplay is acceptable.  It is the only way they are able to critique their piles of 10 to 20 screenplays every night.  Because he/she is the first--and thus most important--gatekeeper your screenplay must impress, you must gain the reader's attention early so that he/she continues to turn the pages.

Fifth, limit the length of your screenplay from 100 to 120 pages.  The first thing a reader will do is turn to the last page of your screenplay to see how long it is.  Try not to evoke a premature groan from the reader.  Furthermore, theater owners prefer two-hour movies that they can screen six times per day rather than four times.  Each page of your screenplay will equate to a minute of dramatic time.

Sixth, register your work.  Protect your unique intellectual property by filing for a copyright and by registering your work with the Writers Guild of America.  Do such after you complete your first draft.

Seventh, know the market.  Finishing your screenplay is only half the battle, and it is the easiest half because it is the part most within your control.  It is important to know who is buying what and who is producing what.  Most studios and production companies will not read your screenplay unless a reputable agent, manager or attorney submits it.  Smaller companies may read it if they deal in the genre.  To ensure you are not sending your tragedy to a producer of comedies, peruse the most recent versions of industry registers.

Eighth, create a network.  The majority of business in Hollywood is conducted via networks.  But if you are not living in Los Angeles, you can make helpful contacts by submitting your work to reputable screenwriting competitions, joining a local screenwriters' association, and attending conferences.  There are publications and websites that list contests and their submission requirements.  Many large cities have local screenwriters' associations that host guest speakers from Hollywood, and some of those cities have film festivals with lectures open to the public.  You also may want to attend a conference.  Most offer panel discussions and seminars on a variety of topics.

Ninth, continue to write.  Rarely is a screenwriter's first screenplay produced.  Frequently it takes several screenplays before a screenwriter becomes proficient in characterization and plot development.  Most agents recommend that an inexperienced writer not seek representation until he/she has at least three complete screenplays to submit.  Thus, it is important to continue to write, generating as many works as you can.

My Initial Experience as an Academic Writer

I always have been a rebel, neither a leader nor a follower.  My rebelliousness affected every aspect of my adolescence to the extent that I nearly was dismissed from a prestigious boarding school in Virginia.  I was not a serious student.  I did not consider education important, until my father, tired from my lack of effort, cut his financial line, forcing me to support myself.  While working in a restaurant, I realized the importance of education, and I enrolled in several courses at Greenville Technical College.

At that time I viewed academic writing as a trap, a continuous line moving slowly across a page and exposing everything I did not know.  I resented and resisted my vulnerability as a writer.  I was aware that I was leaving a trail of errors when I wrote, and I thought of little else when I wrote.  In high school, for every two hundred and fifty words I had written, I had made ten to thirty errors that my teachers regarded as serious mistakes.  In college, inhibited by my fear of error, I either continually tried to begin an essay or, after I had begun, agonizingly produced only a few lines per hour.  The importance of creating an error-free essay was great to the extent that I regarded good writing as correct writing and nothing more.

There were two reasons I was obsessed with correctness.  First, I quickly realized my professors had little tolerance for the kinds of errors I was making.  Second, I deemed it urgent to meet my professors' criteria for success in their courses.  That sense of urgency actually hindered my development as a writer, for I simply focused on my professors' prescriptive comments without consideration of the reasons I had made the mistakes.

When I began to consider the reasons, I discovered that the issue of error was more complex and troublesome.  I could not trace my errors to a particular source, namely my preference of vernacular English over Standard English.  Instead I discovered many interactive influences: my introversion, which made me reluctant to express myself; my encounter with academic language, which contrasted with the speech of my friends and peers; and my engagement in different media, which blend variant forms of English.

The writing that emerged from my experience revealed the different pressures, codes and confusions that I had considered to be English.  The vernacular and standard forms mixed, as though I had half-learned the two systems.  As a result my essays contained hypercorrections, idiosyncratic schemes of spelling and punctuation, evasive circumlocutions, and syntactic derailments--all of which obscured meaning, if any remained after I had struggled simply to write something, anything.

Confusion seemed to paralyze me at this level.  Writers at all levels seek out, either consciously or unconsciously, the fundamental patterns that govern the languages they are learning.  Relatively few writers achieve the status of master wordsmith.  What separates intermediate writers from advanced writers is their experience.  Intermediate writers resign themselves to their confusion--substituting makeshift strategies, private systems, or protective tactics for genuine mastery of writing in any form.  They lose confidence in the very faculties that serve all writers: the ability to distinguish essential and redundant features of a language and the ability to draw analogies between what they know and what they are learning.

There is no quick or easy way to overcome such inabilities.  The absence of errors does not guarantee good writing, but the numerous errors that characterize essays by intermediate writers reflect more difficulty with written English than the term error implies.  Convincing a student that he has no problems will perpetuate his confusion and will deny him the freedom to decide when, where and how to use which language (vernacular and/or standard).  To such a student, error keeps him not only from writing something in Standard English but also from having something to write.

There is another reason professors cannot ignore the phenomenon of error at the intermediate level.  Although speakers and listeners, writers and readers engage in a cooperative effort to understand each other, they also are in a conflict over the amount of effort each will expend on the other.  In other words, the speaker or writer wants to communicate with as little energy as possible, and the listener or reader wants to understand with as little energy as possible.  In a speech situation, a speaker has ways to encourage or to press for more energy than a listener initially may want to expend.  The speaker can make, for examples, gestures or grimaces; the listener, on the other hand, can withhold her nods until she has received the information she wants from the speaker.

Nothing like that occurs in a writing situation.  The writer solely depends upon his words on a page to maintain the reader's attention.  Anything that facilitates the transfer of meaning is important in such a tight economy of energy.  Errors, however, are unprofitable intrusions upon the consciousness of the reader.  They demand energy without any return, shifting the reader's attention from where she is going (meaning) to how she is getting there (fitfully).

All codes are such via rules of procedure or conduct.  It is not necessarily the logic of the regularities that makes them obligatory; rather, it is the fact that, logical or not, they have become habitual to those who communicate within the code.  The truth is that even slight departures from a code cost the writer something, in whatever medium he is communicating, and considering the bargain he has with his reader, he usually cannot afford many of them.

That is not to say, of course, that the boundaries of error do not shift.  English has been changing for centuries, enriching itself with every language and dialect it has been encountering.  Ironically, the inconsistencies with which I struggled still exist because English speakers have been yielding to those ways of communicating.