‘You can have both.’ McKee: Story

Another wonderfully inspiring and informing weekend is over. Thursday-Saturday I attended Robert McKee’s Story seminar, and it wasn’t only a lesson on how to write a good story – the 75-year-old had a few life lessons to pass on too!

It was a lot more intense than I first thought to sit through 10 hours of lectures three days in a row – but oh-so worth it. I met a lot of interesting and lovely people that I hope I can keep in touch with, and learn even more from in the future, as well as the many insights and tricks of the trade I learnt from McKee himself.

I also got to enjoy the sun in Regent’s Park an early morning before the seminar.

I’m not going to attempt to recap or reformulate anything McKee talked about, when it comes to story, or writing a screenplay. I won’t be able to sum it up, or say much about it, in any way that’ll be particularly useful. What I can do, however, is tell you to go buy his book or attend the seminar yourself! I’d absolutely recommend both, for any writer who’d like to know more about storytelling. And I would also like to write a little about one of these life lessons that McKee was kind enough to share with his audience on Saturday:

I didn’t understand much at first when McKee started talking about ‘the ultimate contradiction in life – the human dilemma’. McKee said that it is a question about how you can keep who you are constant and unchanging, when you have to constantly change and adapt to survive. He used the terms ‘inner life’ and ‘outer life’ to describe the two – who you are on the inside, and how you have to change as a result of the pressures of the outer world. He discussed this in relation to the film Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), and the character Rick, who in the end chooses what he realises is best for both his inner and outer life. He has love, as a constant inside, but also chooses what is best for his survival, politically and morally. He lets go of the woman he loves, physically, which lets him grow as a moral human being.

Rick realised, in the end, that ‘Love is not conditional on the presence of the beloved. Love transcends romance. When love is real, the beloved is always present.’ What Robert McKee then said to his audience, was that we too, can have both: ‘A full inner life, and a fulfilling outer life.’

And I really hope he is right.

Until next time x

 

Aiming away from the amateur

Hey all, and happy holidays!

I have to tell you about some of the Christmas presents I got this year, because I got the probably best gift an aspiring screenwriter can get.

I got Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the principles of Screenwriting, signed. That’s pretty good in itself, but, I also got a ticket to his seminar in London in May 2016! I’m thrilled, and fairly sure the seminar will benefit me tremendously. Before the seminar I’m going to reread Story (more than once, be sure!) and take in as much I can about screenwriting, as I think the more knowledge and enthusiasm you’ve got, the more that seminar will pay off. Knowing I’m going it feels like an extra kick, a reminder I have to work for what I want. The last months, since giving temporarily up on my screenplay, I’ve been a little down. I haven’t worked on anything new. Mostly, I haven’t had the time for it, but I’ve also not been prioritising it. Now I’ll both make time and prioritise.

I’ve started one of the other books I got; Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle (also signed, by both him and McKee who’s written the foreword), and it made me feel less bad about giving up on that screenplay. Like I wrote here on the blog, I was going to finish it in a month, and I was  super enthusiastic about what I thought was a great plan. Since then I’ve learnt I wasn’t prepared enough, and also that I was being overambitious. What Pressfield writes about confirmed this for me. He emphasises that the professional is patient, and I’ve merely been an amateur.

“Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for it’s completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash.” (Pressfield, 2002, 75.)

This is exactly what I did, and I was ashamed about it. But now I know I just have to become a little more professional, and a little more determined, and I’ll make it. As soon as I’ve got the essays I need to write over Christmas out of the way, I’ll have another look at that screenplay. And I’ll finish it.

Until next time x

Stuck in the middle of Act II

Yep. I’m stuck. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll work my way through it, I won’t stop. But the last few days I’ve been meddling around at about page 60 of my screenplay, not knowing precisely what to do. As you can see from the picture above, I’ve got a sticky-note system up on my wall, with plot points, scenes and other things to include in my screenplay. But you can also see that only half of it is really colourful. The first half. I’m not quite sure what to do about that last half of it.

To stay on my schedule I should be close to page 80 today, but still I’m stuck on just over 60. It’s frustrating, because I know so very well where I want my screenplay to go, but it still doesn’t work. My initial plan doesn’t seem to be the right one. So today I’ve decided I need to sit back, look through what I’ve got, and where I must go from there in order to end up where I want to be. I have to rearrange my plot points. Kick some characters out, some conflicts, and add something new. I might have to remove an element to my story, a sub-plot, that I really liked planning and writing. It hurts a bit, it’s annoying, but I’ve got do to what’s necessary in order to complete this screenplay. I’m determined to make it work one way or another.

So that’s my bad excuse for not writing much on the blog lately, and also why I’m only writing about my screenplay. It’s pretty much the only thing I’ve got on my mind lately, just like in the quote Syd Field picked for his chapter on finding the Mid-Point (again in picture above) – this ‘crisis’ is affecting my whole life. I’m sure as soon as I get rid of this middle-point headache I’ll have something more interesting to share.

Please bear with me until next time x

Trying not to be a perfectionist

And the scriptwriting goes ever on… I’m on day 11 of actually writing, and progressing nicely. I’ve set myself the goal of writing 4 pages a day, which means I’ll be done by the end of the month with plenty of time to keep planning and changing my mind about things as I go along, and without writing like crazy.

At least that’s what I thought when I started writing. Yes – I am at 44 pages and in that sense on schedule, but not because I’ve written 4 pages every day. Some days I haven’t had the chance to sit down to write, or I haven’t prioritized enough time to write. That means I’ll have to write more than those 4 pages the next day, which means I have to spend more time writing, or write faster. I’m not good at either of those things, so some days I’ve been so annoyed at myself that I’ve forced myself to just write out some crap – not thinking nearly enough about writing a screenplay. But at least I’ve written something, is what I tell myself. For now it is all about writing a first draft, crafting the story, finding the necessary obstacles and challenges to put my characters through. Next time around I’ll make it good, fix what I’ve done wrong, create beautiful and suspenseful scenes, remove the ones that don’t work, put more of myself into it. I don’t think I have a choice but to do it in that order.

Hemingway knows what’s up.

The reason why it has to be this way, is that I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and that really doesn’t benefit me when writing something as long as a full length screenplay. If I start to edit it now, concentrate too much on making everything perfect, I won’t get anywhere. Perfectionism will probably be good when I finish this first draft and can start on the rewriting, but for now it just makes me feel bad about what I’ve written so far. I know half of it is crap, I know it was unnecessary to introduce yet another character, to add that lame joke, and I know pretty much all of my transitions are horrible. I just have to leave it for now.

But apart from forcing myself not to rewrite all the bad parts, I enjoy the writing. It’s in a way satisfying to see the page numbers go up, and it’s thrilling to develop and create the story as I go along. I have my main plot points and some scenes laid out on a sort of time-line of the script already, and I have an ending in mind. The fun part is when my brain sparks as I write something, and I come up with another twist, an interesting way to get to the next plot point, to fit that one scene in to the story. And since I started writing, I’ve already changed some things about how I want to end it. I hope the changes are for the better. We’ll see when I let loose the perfectionist.

Until next time x

The first look at Iru, Tiruda – planet Ruelth

I finally started actually writing my screenplay yesterday! I’m so happy to have started it, and figured out that if I just get a little writing done every day, I should manage to finish it by the end of the month. Of course I’m anticipating that I’ll have days with no time to write, but I think, as long as I don’t hit any massive problems along the way, I should be able to make it. If nothing else I’m determined to do it, and it’s after all not the end of the world if I get a few days into September before the first draft is finished.

Seeing this is in my celtx document is kind of satisfying…

I’m not going to reveal a lot about the screenplay, but I’ll let you in on a few things. I’ve already mentioned it’s set in an alien world, which has been one of the main reasons why planning took such a long time. Another thing I’ve spent a lot of time on is naming people and places. I’ve named about a dozen cities that has no relevance and probably won’t be mentioned, but because I’ve drawn my little map to make it easier visualising where the story is actually set, I needed to fill the rest of the map too. It’s not like I remember half of the names now, but I needed to feel they were right for the story as I wrote them down. And now, if I need them, they’re all there. There’s probably a lot of my preparatory writing, my research and planning, that I won’t need or that will be discarded as I write. But a lot of it will be good to have a look at if I get stuck when I’m writing, or when I’m unsure of something.

I also have this thing where I need to feel like I’m there in order to write. When I’m writing, I’m in the story. Yesterday I was in Iru, the capital city of the Tiruda area of the planet Ruelth. I was crossing a bridge between two skyscrapers, I could see the setting sun, and I could smell the bougainvillea clinging to the side of the building. Today I’ll go to the outskirts of the city, see the endless forests and perhaps go for a swim in a river or a hidden lake. We’ll see what I get up to.

The beautiful bougainvillea flowers had to be included in the screenplay.

It’s pretty exciting, really, discovering these places through writing about them. I hope that I can share a bit more of my process with you as I go along, and that one day you’ll get to properly discover this world, too.

Until next time x

The slow process of screenwriting

Hello! Because I wrote on the blog earlier that my goal for the summer is to write a full-length screenplay, I thought I’d update you on the process. So far, I’ve disappointed myself a little. I’ve not started the actual writing yet. I have around eleven correctly formatted pages from when I wrote a ten-pager for a Uni assignment (I got a 1^st on it!!! Wooo!!!), but other than that it’s just been planning, and not a lot of it. Besides, a lot has changed about my idea since I wrote those pages. Also it turns out that when I’ve got all the time in the world to do something, I don’t do it. There’s really not been that much time because I’ve been travelling a bit, and working a lot the last few weeks, but now I’ve decided to start properly, and by the end of August I hope I’ll be nearly finished. I think I will give myself the rest of the month to finish planning, and then I’ll have to start writing if I am to finish it in time.

(This book is currently – and probably forever – my bible, and coffee is what keeps me going…)

The problem with planning my screenplay is that there’s so much to figure out, so many logistics, and so much back-story to write. The main reason for this is that most of it is not set in a world we know, but an alien world, on a made up planet. This means I have to write pages and pages about the geography, infrastructure, climate, society, politics, religion and so on. In addition to this of course there are several in-depth character biographies, and this even before I’m entirely sure of how to manoeuvre the story from beginning to end. Not that I’m even entirely sure how it ends, either.

I’m also the kind of person who likes to have drawings and maps and those kinds of things in front of me when I’m planning, which is admittedly made difficult because I’m not that good at drawing… I still have a few sketches in front of me, and a lot more pictures in my mind of how I imagine things looks like. And then it’s the real problem of writing this in such a way that someone some day making it into an actual film, makes it look like I want it to.

I think the reason why it’s taking me such a long time to get started is that however important and necessary the planning is, I’d rather just be writing and see where it takes me. I usually don’t have much of a plan when I write things, but then again I’ve not written a lot of long texts. I actually think my longest piece of writing is from my rather embarrassing fanfiction-days, and at around 9000 words. But let’s not mention that again, ever.

Anyway, I’m going to put a lot of effort into planning and preparing for the actual writing from now on. This is not to say that I won’t procrastinate a lot, and drink unnecessary amounts of coffee, but at least there will be some progress. I’ll write an update on it in a few weeks time.

Until next time x

PS: If you’re a writer and have written either a long screenplay, novel or something similar, how did you motivate yourself to do enough planning and research before the actual writing? And what did you focus on planning?