This Argument Really Does Have A Right Answer

Speaking with zero authority on the matter, I don’t think well in outline or treatment mode because that’s not the way I explore the story. My first draft is crappy and I have to stop and start a lot, but writing that first draft is how I find out what the story is about and who the characters are. Then come the major revisions based on what I’ve learned.

I don’t think those of us who plunge right in should be called “non-outliners”, that’s being defined by a negative. Maybe we should be called “Plungers” — yeah, and we could get matching bowling shirts…

I’ve always created extensive notes before writing. Seems I was creating treatments because the notes seem to hit the same 5 points and function the same.

Nice to get the terminology straight at least.

I agree that many writers forgo the outlining process out of sheer laziness. The irony is that to write a screenplay of quality this way requires a lot of effort, because you have to know that most of the scenes you write will be destroyed. Taking the wrecking ball to your words is a difficult thing. As soon as you start writing in screenplay format the words begin to root themselves to the page. Tearing out whole scene sequences, characters, and subplots is akin to tearing out the foundation of a house that you’ve started. An outline/blueprint seems far more malleable.

In an industry where writers are expected to finish a first draft in 8 to 12 weeks, keeping the building up and tearing down to a minimum is a must. An outline seems to be the best defense against that.

I too will agree that outlining/creating a treatment/preplanning as much as possible can be helpful in terms of creating a tight story and saving time overall when you’re writing under deadline.

I just wanted to add, however, a semantic distinction I make (and obviously anyone can feel free to ignore if they like). To me, my treatment is a document that incoporates your basic five points, melding story, theme, character, etc. An outline, however, is an almost scene-by-scene breakdown of plot, and little more. I might throw in a few half-lines of dialogue, or a bit of underlying point, but overall it is just plot.

My $.02

In the very beginning of my screenwriting career, I never used an outline. In fact, 2 of my best scripts are products of “non-outlines”. I realize now, however, that I was very, very lucky. I too, used to think that writing without an outline was very freeing, you know, from my gut. Bull——. Not until I started working with my current co-screenwriter/co-director, did I learn the importance of outlining. And let’s face it. It’s really just semantics. If you’re not using an outline, your first draft is your outline. But what about those 2 scripts I mentioned that are my best that were written without an outline? I’m guessing that if I used an outline they’d be even better.

I just wanted to add that the very first movie I used an outline for was actually made into a feature film.

I find that outlines are written from the head (this happens, then this happens next). Any advice on how to create outlines that let you explore and live the characters and story in the same way that writing a screenplay does??

Writing an outline will help you with more than just structure and story. If you are outlining correctly, you should have detailed what and how your characters live their lives. What does he do for work? What does he do for fun? Does he have any friends, lovers, family? Does he eat/drink too much? Sex with animals, perhaps? Either way, that’s where you do your fleshing. Sometimes a little fact about your character won’t even make it into the screenplay but it will help you with idiosyncrasies that might make your character a bit more interesting.

No doubt that at the end of the day it’s whatever gets you there. That said, the outlining of a screenplay works for me. I will carry around notes and material for months until I think I have a grip on the key elements. I’m not one for treatments but if that’s just another word for outline then so be it. I found that I need to have a direction with the characters that are going to get me to that resolution. To address Adam’s question, I think the best way is to know those five points as deeply as you feel necessary before you dive into the outline. The screenplay starts to form based on the story you solidified with those five points.

Adam:

One thing I always do is include character profiles as part of my treatments. Each character might get a full page of description. Some of the description will make it into the screenplay. Some will be subtext. Some is just backstory in my head.

If the character becomes someone else, go back and rewrite their “bio” to reflect the new person.

Character = the individual you’ve described in prose. Characterization = the screenplay expression of the individual you’ve described in prose.

Ted, would you say that’s right?

I completely agree with Craig’s post. Outlining is an essential tool for story development.

Few of us are Mozarts who can compose an entire opera in our heads and then just write down what we hear, most of us are mere mortals who have to write things down, see how they look next to other things that are written down and revise as needed until we have a good sense of the whole - then we start writing the script.

Even those pros who claim to not write a treatment or outline say they never begin the script until they know who the characters are, what they want and how they get it and have a clear sense of how the story starts, where it goes and how it ends.

If that’s not outlining, I don’t know what is.

I don’t do a traditional outline, but I agree with Kevin that that just means the first draft is the outline.

I’m not against outlines; I’m just not very good at them. When I’ve tried to outline in the past, the story and the plot changes so much almost immediately that the outline becomes pretty useless.

I try not to get too intellectual about the process. I’m probably coasting on dumb luck here, but I couldn’t tell you what the theme is to anything I’ve written. I guess it’s worked so far. I’ve been told I’m really good with subtext, but I really don’t have a clue what that means. I just write characters that interest me and see how they react to whatever’s going on.

There’s a lot of rewriting involved, though.

I don’t know as it has to be an either/or debate. I usually start off with a short story then go to a chicken scrawled one or two page list of scene sequences. Sometimes jumping straight into a first draft works too though. Different stories demand different techniques for me.

John August has an outline from Big Fish on his blog and I look at that and think, “this resembles nothing I would create to help me form my story.” I think it’s important for all the plungers (you realize this makes you sound like you suck shit from a toilet, right?) to realize there isn’t a right way to outline. I read somewhere that PTA writes lists… which seems weird, but it works for him. I imagine Craig in some highly organized space with neatly labled folders and cubbies… but I could be wrong… the point is we all do it different and that’s okay.

I think about stuff for a really long time and at some point I start to journal about my characters and important story\plot elements, themes, etc. Then when I have the ending I go backwards and fill in the holes. I’ve never once felt hamstrung by all the work that goes into that. If anything, it’s made my process go faster. I recently finished a first draft (144 pages) in 6 weeks. And that’s while working full time in the car business (60-70 hour weeks), being a dad to a two year old and a husband to a pregnant wife. If I hadn’t done the work it would have taken me 6 months… or worse, I wouldn’t have known where I was going. That leads to quitting out of frustration. To the aspiring writer pre-planning is key. We have plenty of hurdles in front of us as it is, we don’t need the self-created ones that come from a bad work ethic.

-3

I just realized that I’m kind of a liar. I do sort of outline—after draft 0 I do a little outline of that and work on the structure.

I like your dumb luck technique Michael. For me it’s all about sub-text. I think a lot of films suffer from this syndrome where the film is consumed by a labyrinthian (is that a word?) journey through meaningless plot points. The result for the viewer is like finishing a jigsaw puzzle, which may be an entertaining way to pass the time, but is at bottom pointless.

…for the record, I meant to type “differently”, but my brain moved on before the final two key strokes had been made…

Outlining is not king — it’s GOD! All the creative decisions can be made in treatment form. Plunge and toil and frolic and ponder all you want… in the outline! So when you go into draft you know precisely where you’re heading. I don’t even write scripts anymore… I write an outline and type the screenplay.

craig

disagree. you certainly can write without an outline (or treatment). it’s just inefficient. if you do this, the 1st draft becomes your outline - that is if you finish the draft. likely you’ll find so many structural problems that you quit halfway (after struggling mightily to fix said problems [i’m talking months of mulling over possible solutions, writing them out, junking them, etc]). this process can also result in the 2nd, 3rd (or 10th) draft becoming the outline (in which case the next subsequent draft becomes the 1st draft). ouch

chances are such a writer would finally pound out a draft and send it out, only to get kicked in the balls by the coverage - serves them right

from a good outline i can deliver a draft in a couple days (never have but i’m sure i could). anyway, the flaws should be discovered during the outline process, not in the middle of 1st draft when you’re treading water. resulting beauty of an outline will be so easy to work from the draft will practically write itself

any writer that claims they can produce a good story without an outline, just off the top of their head, is full of shit (or they are the mozart of screenwriting)

so. i disagree. a script can be written without an outline. how hard could it be? i wrote this post without an outline and it’s fucking brilliant

amadeus

C -

I think it would be wildly entertaining… okay that’s hyperbole, but it would be great if you’d do an essay on the importance of each of the five things one must know “in order to have any sense of what to execute.”

What do you think? Want to talk at length on theme, characters, plot, key sequeneces and temporal structure?

When you take a trip you have a destination. If it’s a long one, you have an idea where you’re spending a night or two along the way. You use a map. An outline. One page or 20 pages. Leave room to make detours and discover along the way, even change your itinerary but to start out without a map is foolish, lazy or merely pretentious. I prefer shorter outlines to longer ones - I’d rather get to the script.

“ORGANIC” WRITING sheesh.

Ya know Craig, I swear, sometimes I think “organic” writing is something authors like to talk about in radio interviews for the sake of p.r., (“organic” food is good, “organic” writing must be good, more “natural”), and to keep a shroud of mystery pulled over what they do.

Some people actually do write “organically”, letting “the characters tell their own story” (oh, my, how humble, how nice, letting characters do whatever they want without forcing them to do things they don’t want to, none of us like to be forced to do things, only those bad, mean, “formulistic” writers force characters to do things they don’t want to).

What a bunch of crap.

Characters, imo, are most definitely NOT people. They’re dramatic constructs built to do a job.

Tell ya what, combine “organic” writing, with “character driven”, and what you get isn’t a story, it’s a freak show.

I’ve seen this time after time.

Writers, that claim at least, that all you have to do is “just come up with good characters” and then “let them tell their own story”.

Bullshit.

There’s more to writing a good story than that, a lot more.

Just turning characters lose in a box, and then watching them bounce off each other and the sides of the box, until you hit your page length, is, imo, a fabulous recipe for a shitty story.

Yet, when you hear all too many authors talking about their work to Leonard Lopate on N.P.R. or whatever, you’d swear that that’s what “good writers do”.

Well I’ve read some of those stories, and in every case noticed one of two things occur - either:

1) The story sucks. Or more accurately there is no story. There’s no beginning, no middle, no end, the characters don’t change, their situation doesn’t change, it’s literally like walking through a freak show at a circus. Here’s the bearded lady, here’s the two headed man, next the wolf-boy… ya get a peek at each freak, and exit the tent - THE END.

With a story like that there is no story, the “story” is completely dependent on the freaks for any entertainment value or insights. If you’ve got great freaks, you’ve got a great freak show, but do you have a story to tell?

2) The writer was talking out of his or her butt. I’ve been writing long enough now to be able to see structure. And with all to many of these stories I just do not buy the idea that all they did was “come up with great characters” and “let them tell their own story”.

Baloney.

Characters, especially well written true to life characters, ARE NOT WRITERS. Characters, especially well written true to life characters, don’t give a damn about pace, dynamics, theme, sub-text, misdirection, or any other writerly aspects to a story, they don’t care about those things, and are completely unaware of them. All the characters really care about is getting past and surviving the obstacles placed in their path by the writer.

Characters don’t care whether or not what they’re doing makes for a good story, that’s the writer’s job, and that’s also why you can’t afford to simply abdicate your responsibility as the writer to your characters.

Whether or not you “outline” I think is pretty much a moot point. You can outline, use index cards, do a treatment, a beat sheet, come up with character histories for their back-story, or not, some people actually find it easier to do all that in their head, (wish I was one of ‘em frankly), or you can do an ass-load of page one rewriting to hammer things into place if you want. What the hell, if you’ve got the time and the patience for that, God love ya, and more power to you. Go to it.

But what you can’t do is simply skip the writer’s part of the work.

Somebody has to edit the dialog of that character, that left to its own devices, will go on about the Mets for 22 unbroken pages.

Somebody has to edit the story for the value of what is seen and heard. There’s a reason that good stories don’t have someone sitting on the commode reading the paper for ten pages if that doesn’t have something to offer the story. It happened, the character DID go to the can at some point, the question is - does including that little nugget add to the story?

In any story there are ants, outside the main character’s home, tearing down a piece of banana, the garbage is rotting in the trash cans, a bird crapped on the sidewalk while a cop took a sip of his coffee, and a little girl giggled at the fat lady in the check out line much to her mother’s dismay.

It’s been said that life is a story, but that’s complete bullshit. Life is not a story. Life is a nearly infinite collection of concurrent events all going on at once, some of which can be used to construct a story by picking and choosing which events bare a useful dramatic relationship to each other.

If an outline helps you figure out which events are related in a dramatically useful way to which others, fine, use an outline, or index cards, or a treatment, or do it all in your head. Come up with a great logline, and expand it into a story. Or write the story and figure out how to compress it into a logline. Whatever works for you.

But at one level of another ALL good writers are “outlining” if that’s the term you want to use.

All good writers, at one level or another, have to make choices as to which events, of the nearly limitless myriad of them there are or could be, bare useful dramatic relationships to others, and weave them into what we call “a story”.

If “outlining” is what you want to call that process, fine, “outlining” it is, and in that respect I have to agree with Craig, one way or another “outlining” is what organizes events into a “story”, and a “story” is what you create a “screenplay” from.

Imo it could be no other way.

My four cents, (inflation you know).

Mike

Wow. A lot of people making a lot of absolute statements on this topic. The first script my partner and I wrote together (which was our big break… sold, front page of Variety, Brad Pitt attached, got us an agent, got us a manager, began our careers) never had an outline. Yes, it took us four months instead of two. Yes, we spent a month trying to figure out a way to get our character out of a jam. But we always felt like the extra time allowed us to write something unconventional. To give us a fresh voice. It seemed like an outline might have produced something more ‘straight-down-the-middle.’ Who knows?

Now that we write mainly on assignment, an outline/treatment is necessary for the studios. I can’t say which one I like better; writing with our without an outline. I’m always so damn eager to get to the screenwriting, that it kills me to spend time developing a treatment.

I’ve always used an outline, but there is a big difference between an outline for me, and an outline/treatment that is going to be read by someone else as a “step”. The latter becomes another sales tool to garner more enthusiasm for the project. It becomes about “the read.” Consequently, I sometimes find the public treatment as much or more consuming (time-wise or mentally) than the screenplay itself. It embarrasses me how long I spend on treatments actually. Craig, are you including the treatment in your 8 weeks to a screenplay quote?

derek

excellent points. getting into jams because the story has structural problems and therefore gaining the time to come up with unconventional stuff all because you didn’t use an outline is great. also, starting a script without an outline because you’re eager to get things revved up (only to spend the time you saved to unravel thorny structural problems later on) is also great.

two great points. well said

Easy on the hostility there, Mike. Not only are you misinterpreting a writing technique, you’re arguiging apples and oranges. Authors and screenwriters are as different as poets and songwriters.

This debate is exactly why writing is the world’s most difficult profession to master, and why so few people are actually good at it. Any technique you choose is fraught with peril. Too much outlining and you might sap creative spontaneity, no outline and the work probably rambles. The key is finding whatever balance works for YOU.

Me, personally, I can’t start any script until I have a kickass logline, a lead character with a well-defined arc, and a killer title.

Damn. I knew someone would point out my flawed thinking with effective sarcasm. ; ) I could talk about that we weren’t in a jam… the character was… we could have spent the time on an outline coming up with the clever twist/plot point/whatever to get said character out of said jam… or we could have addressed it in the flow of the story… like we did. Had we outlined, we might have come to the same point anyway… who knows? I could also point out that this wasn’t a structural problem but an end-of-scene problem… but now we’re splitting hairs, aren’t we?

Look, if the objective is to finish with a great, salable script… who cares how you get there? Whether you spend four months on an outline and 2 weeks on a script, or 2 weeks on an outline and 4 months on a script… it just seems like the rule doesn’t have to be hard and fast. Now excuse me. I have to go work on my treatment.

I imagine Craig in some highly organized space with neatly labled folders and cubbies… but I could be wrong…

Oh man…you are sooooooooooooo wrong. :)

Craig, are you including the treatment in your 8 weeks to a screenplay quote?

Gary Ross also swears by outlining. He says he regularly spends five months outlining before he starts writing. Doesn’t he know he will never get writing assignments working that way?

Although I’m no Gary Ross (nor a Craig Mazin nor a Ted Elliot), I hope to be one when I grow up, so I, too, outline extensively. On the other hand, maybe if I stopped outlining, I’d end up as a Derek Haas, which would be pretty cool, too.

this is not adding anything to what’s been said, but i just want to say that mike tully’s rant up there was AWESOME!!! :D

i did want to comment on something that was said earlier, but jokes don’t always come across well on the internet and i’d probably get banned for it …

What do you think? Want to talk at length on theme, characters, plot, key sequeneces and temporal structure?

Mmm, I dunno. I’ve said before that I’m a bit uncomfortable with anything that feels “lesson-y”, if only because I feel like I still have so much to learn myself.

Every now and again, I’ll feel like I’m very firm ground with a craft concept, and I’ll write about it.

I find it easier, I suppose, to answer direct questions. Theme’s my favorite, by the way. :)

Charles Deemer, in his Screenwright course, says there are two basic types of writers: Tree People and Forest People. Some of us need that 40 page backstory history on every character, every plot outlined in advance (where he went to school, his best friend, favourite tv show etc) and some of us only need a brush stroke hint where you have a general idea and let the story and character take you along the journey of discovery. I have been 1/3 of the way through a script and found my main character needed a younger sister. So what? I just put her in the second draft re-write, it’s not difficult to alter. I consider a script a jello mold not a metal box

Is outlining a definite for other forms of writing? I outline for my screenplays but not for my column which runs about 2700 words.

Charles Deemer, in his Screenwright course, says there are two basic types of writers: Tree People and Forest People.

Uh huh. And who the hell is Charles Deemer, and where can I see his movie?

jon

re: gary ross taking months to prep a script. this is instructional. must be prepped. i’ll cook an idea for months typically, sometimes years. put simply, this allows me the time to get my ducks in a row

same goes for rewrite. for the last 8 weeks i’ve been working on what amounts to 5-8 minutes screen time. the resulting minutia adds a great deal to the quality of the script/story as a whole (not just the few pages actually worked on)

of course, you can’t take that kind of time on assignment, but… point remains valid. outlining/rewriting adds sheen to a story

Craig, just because someone doesn’t have IMDB credits doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them…and somewhere in Blogville there is a whole thread on this topic as well What’s the old adage ‘opinions are like…um..something or other?’ Here is Mr Deemer’s blog if you are curious http://cdeemer.blogspot.com/

Yes, everyone has an opinion.

And yes, opinions can be qualified and evaluated based on the individual’s credentials. I don’t go to a guy who wants to be a doctor to ask for medical advice.

You know, I think this issue might be worth an article. :)

Charles Deemer, a pioneer of “hyperdrama.” Give me a fucking break.

Craig:

I wrote about that topic a bit over at blank page. Check it out.

craig

if you’re going to write an article about this i strongly recommend you outline it first

zilla

ah, but there is the rub… why wouldn’t you ask for medical advice from someone wanting to be a doctor? If your choices were Suzie the wanna be med student who has read several medical text books and is hooked on 72 med blogs, Fred the disgruntled bus mechanic who sat through the new Dukes Of Hazzard remake eleven times in a row or Pepe, my gardner who dishes out advice on any topic as long as it starts with the letter R (he is almost done reading that encyclopedia volume). So you see, Suzy is the expert in her field occasionally

If Suzie has been trying for 40 years to be a doctor and still isn’t, I might as well ask Pepe. Chances are stronger he’ll hit on something useful.

“Hyperdrama” Roll the Greeks over, he’s inventing a ‘New’ form of drama! One that no one will ever want to see. It’s sort of a post-structuralist deconstructionist expression of onanism. You can experience it on his blog.

Craig and all:

You just dismissed every career screenwriting professor who ever taught. Somewhere in the bunch, there must be some good instructors. Otherwise, how do all these hot shot screenwriting graduates come out knowing anything, which many of them seem to?

There are career paths where acedemic knowledge is king. And there are careers where practical knowledge carries more weight. Medical school and that all important diploma matter among doctors… and as a patient I don’t want a doctor that made all C’s in med-school. Conversly, I don’t think that anybody has ever asked a working screenwriter what his GPA in film school was. So, while screenwriting professors across America do a great job of priming the pump they are teaching a subject where applied knowledge carries more weight. They pour the foundation but they don’t build the house.

Even Tiger Woods has a coach. I’m not defending Deemer. I know nothing about him other than seeing his name in ads. On the other hand, while I never studied screenwriting in school, I don’t think learning to write from the screenwriting program at USC is likely to be a bad thing.

I was really only condemning this guy Deemer and his rambling, incoherent, grammar-challenged, post-structural blog.

You just dismissed every career screenwriting professor who ever taught. Somewhere in the bunch, there must be some good instructors. Otherwise, how do all these hot shot screenwriting graduates come out knowing anything, which many of them seem to?

Yup. Dismissed. Here’s the thing. Screenwriting is a vocation. Screenwriting classes are vocational classes. In order to have any legitimacy as a vocational instructor, you must have had experience in the vocation itself.

I do not view the vocation of “screenwriting” as “a job writing scripts”. I view the vocation of “screenwriting” as “a job writing movies”. If you’ve never written the kind of movies that you’re teaching your students to write, you are not a legitimate instructor.

Harsh? I’m just gettin’ warmed up… :)

“I don’t think learning to write from the screenwriting program at USC is likely to be a bad thing.”

really? how many samey, derivative, follows the rules and the formulas but still doesn’t interest you scripts have you read lately?

screenwriters are like children - they need rules in place that they can push against, but at the same time stop them going out of control and over the edge.

since we seem to like the medical analogies here - if someone breaks their leg randomly and leaves it, the leg will heal badly. when presented to a doctor later, the doctor knows just how and where to break the leg again in order to reset it and make the leg as a whole better.

picasso was an amazing artist who could replicate any painting or any scene in front of him almost photographically. but he took that knowledge of painting and used it to create people with eyes on the side of their heads and vertical mouths and so on. trent reznor of nine inch nails fine tuned the art of writing standard three minute pop songs and used that knowledge of their structure to put them through a computer and create (commercial) industrial metal.

my point is, if these “hotshot screenwriting graduates” know as much as you say they seem to, then they should know enough to be able to take the rules and bend, twist and break them to arts benefit.

but most of them don’t. they just know the rules.

and if they don’t know how to use and abuse the rules to their advantage, then how good have their teachers been?

well there are quack doctors out there with medical degrees who still leave the forceps inside a patient, and personally I don’t ‘get’ abstract art as it looks like any ten year old child with a water color set could do better.. so I guess dishing out professional advice is all pomp and circumstance. It’s a relative thing. One man’s genius is another man’s pile of crap which is probably why I thought David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive was awful and others consider it a stroke of brilliance. Opinions don’t make the writing bad, just our own personal interpretations do. I value some bloggers and instructor’s opinions over others because I took something from them and improved MY work. That’s all that matters, not that YOU don’t like them, but if I can learn something from them. And yes Craig, I do learn from you (smiles)

i guess my post failed to explain my point then. shows up my bad as a writer.

i HATE picasso. years ago, there was a downstairs triangular room at the national gallery here in london that had a couple of monets, a couple of manets, two van goughs and half a dozen picassos. in a 360 turn you could see these three major movements. i used to drag anyone and everyone who’d go with me down there and give them an impassioned speech about how looking at a picasso is like looking at maths, but looking at the van goughs you could see the passion on the canvas. when i didn’t have anyone with me, i used to give the same speech to people who happened to wander by! (which always seemed to shock them considering it was coming from a 6’3, hippie long haired, heavy metal t-shirt wearing, dressed all in black rocker).

my point was, picasso learnt all the rules - like a lot of “sreenwriters” do - and then used those rules as a jumping off point for coming up with something stunningly original. and whether you like or hate his art, that fact of the matter is he was original. even though he had learnt all the rules. ever heard about how picasso used to burn his paintings for heat when he was poor? you know what paintings he burned? the photographic style ones. because they meant little to him as all they did was follow the rules.

there are a lot of “screenwriters” who learn the rules … and that’s it. they don’t use them. they don’t bend or break them. nothing. they just think “ok, i’ve learnt the rules. i’m a screenwriter now”.

well, i don’t think knowing the rules makes someone a screenwriter. knowing how to apply AND bend/break the rules does.

or at least brings them closer …

craig

the thread has morphed into a ‘what makes you a screenwriter’ kind of thing. that’s an excellent topic. perhaps you start a new thread with your comments on the matter

craig

sorry. i meant ‘i’d be interested to hear your take on the matter’

Alan:

You mean…what determines who gets to call themselves a “screenwriter” and who doesn’t? That sort of thing?

(see, now, this is where a message board would be handy, because any of us could start a new topic off the post of another one without having to wait for/suggest to craig to start one)

(just saying)

(i still claim i’m not a message board geek … )

Well, hell, wanna try the beta version??? :)

in one of the several books on the art I read, the author claimed I couldn’t call myself a ‘screenwriter’ until I actually made a sale (or get invite to the WGA I suppose) so I guess I am just a writer in the grand scheme of it all…this has been quite the thread for sure

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can’t call myself a screenwriter yet. I’m kind of a post-pre-pro, I guess. I won’t be able to enter Nicholl soon, though, so maybe that means something.

moviequill -

i wrote a screenplay that i then directed in 1999 off my own money, screwed it all up, lost it all, wrote two more screenplays and start principal photography on my next movie july 17th 2006 and might reshoot the other movie again before then.

i will never sell a script to anyone else, even if i get all my movies made and maybe distributed beyond selling them off my own site.

no matter how many movies i make, i guess i’ll never be a screenwriter, then, huh? :)

being a screenwriter is what you make of it, i think.

Mr Abrasive, I was quoting what the author told ME as the reader… I write screenplays that have not been optioned or even read yet, if you want to call me a Screenwriter, I won’t stand in anyone’s way hanging that moniker on my head (grins)

“I don�t think learning to write from the screenwriting program at USC is likely to be a bad thing.”

Are you comparing the screenwriting program at USC (and I assume other top film programs) to Charles Deemer and the anonymous mass of unqualified screenwriting “experts”? Go through the list of faculty at the top film schools, and you’ll quickly see most of these screenwriting professors have real credits on produced films and television shows. They also bring in guest speakers who are current working and successful writers.

Learning and practicing screenwriting at a top professional film program is not the same as listening to some self-proclaimed expert with a weblog.

craig

well, i was thinking more the ‘craft vs. talent’ argument. lots of up/coming writers believe in learning the basics of craft/technique, etc and attacking screenwriting as a career (whether they’re cut out for it or not - because it’s such a sexy/glam field [or at least that’s the perception]). i feel it’s far better to figure out whether you have the talent for it before getting serious about a career.

in my view there’s just not that many people who have the talent for this gig (i know, that’s harsh, but really, i’ve seen some sad cases - it just damages people sometimes). problem is compounded when little discipline is applied to the process

end of ramble

Alan:

Gotcha. Okay, lemme noodle.

I realize this is late in the game… but to me the prerequisite for participating in the Outline vs. No Outline debate is: you have to have tried both.

And half-assed attempts don’t count.

How can you compare the taste of Coke and Pepsi, if you haven’t tried one?

The people I’ve met who don’t believe in outlines have one thing in common: they’ve never really tried it.

My set of experiences is most definitely limited, but I whole-heartedly agree w/ Craig, the man, the legend…

No outline = Amateur.

Very cool, Craig. This is the first time I’ve seen the ‘outline’ stage considered so broadly.

I build the story before I write it, and I would say I build it mostly on the theme. I write page after page of notes. But I never have considered myself a major outliner, because I don’t sit down and write an ‘outline.’ Although I do a brief sketch of the sequences and their purpose just before I begin to write. And I rework those sequences after each turning point, because invariably I come up with something in the writing process that shifts things around a bit.

I agree completely that the story should be the product, not the SP, and stories contain too many dimensions to be fully fleshed out in one linear process. You need the planning to get the depth of field. A lot of the movies I see that have a good concept but don’t really quite work it seems to me are missing this kind of design.

I have read Deemer’s books on screenwriting, and I do not recall him ever writing that a treatment was unimportant. The debate is on when it is written. I don’t know about the classes themselves. I have often threatened to take the online course, but have not to date.

He’s been quite successful as a playwright by usuing what he would call the “forest approach” (or, running in without an outline), but it is true that although he has had several screenplays optioned, his work is typically too character-oriented for mainstream success. The only full-length film on one of his screenplays which ever got made was for television broadcast. But hey, it won an award…

Personally, I believe he outlines his major plot points and then see where it goes from there.

I’ll concede even myself that something in the future needs to be known just to make sure one does not write oneself into a tangent and not be able to return.

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