Howard Michael Gould on "Page Fright"
Ed. Note: Today’s post is written by a guest author, Howard Michael Gould. This piece originally appeared in Written By (the WGAw magazine), and I really enjoyed it. Howard has generously allowed us to reprint it here for your enjoyment.
Each word is garbage. If I can even think of a word. When I do somehow manage to spit out a line, or couplet, my characters all sound the same, bland and lifeless. I’m sure as hell not funny any more. Who knows, maybe I never was. And I’ve lost all sense of how to shape a scene. No one would want to read this script, let alone produce it. My mother was right: I should have gone to law school. Who am I kidding? I couldn’t have hacked that, either.
Face it: my talent, such as it ever was, is gone — again — and this time it’s never coming back. This is the script, this is the job on which when I finally won’t be able to fool them, when I’ll get found out for the fraud that I am and always have been, and I’ll never work again. And then it’s all over.
That’s what it’s like, every line, every page, the first time through, from “FADE IN” until “THE END.” Two decades, maybe forty full-length scripts, plus all those TV episodes, you’d think it would get easier. But it never does. It gets harder with every year, more terrifying with every script.
I call it Page Fright.
I haven’t discovered a cure, but over time I’ve lurched into a design for living with it. Basically, I do everything I possibly can to shorten the hell.
I start by noodling notes for as long as I need to, just a conversation with myself on the computer screen, toward figuring out all the answers, all the story lines, all the basic beats. Then I put each beat on a virtual index card (with my beloved Writer’s Blocks software), using a different color for each story. Next, I separate the cards into acts, then shuffle them around until they’ve landed in an order which feels like it has some kind of a flow. I transfer these cards into a word processing program, and spend as long as I need to fleshing that out into as full a prose outline as I can manage. Every character is named and described, all sluglines accounted for, there’s even some dialogue if it happens to come to me. Unless it’s a production rewrite with a tight clock, I’ll allow myself as many unhurried weeks as I need to complete all those steps, and the outlines can run anywhere from fifteen single-spaced pages (on, say, a book adaptation) to almost fifty.
I find this “pre-writing” period relatively painless; some parts, like pushing the index cards around, are almost fun. Sure, there are points when I get stuck, but somehow, even when I’m under a production deadline, it all feels fairly free of pressure. I know how to do this stuff.
It’s only when that process is complete, when I’m at last ready to “write,” that the terror descends. My mantra becomes this: as fast as I can; as bad as I have to. I compose on the computer (I’m a very quick typist) and I don’t look back, don’t even re-read the page I’m on, even if I know something I’m writing now doesn’t square with something from before. I back up the file regularly, but never print it. I’ll only quit for the day at the end of a scene, and not until I’ve knocked off at least eleven pages if it’s a weekday, six pages on the weekends. On a hurry-up production rewrite I might force a fifteen page minimum. If, by some miracle, I catch a wave, I might even race through twenty or twenty-five. I think I did my whole first pass at Mr. 3000 — probably 95% new dialogue — in five days. As fast as I can; as bad as I have to.
On average, I can get this over with in a week and a half. But once in a while the script runs long, and by the time the draft presses into its third week, I start feeling physically ill, as if my heart is going to stop beating unless I consciously will it to keep going. I’ve had moments, in fact, when I’ve decided that it would be easier just to let the heartbeats stop than to try to fake my way through one more wretched and humiliating scene. Of course, that’s never worked, either.
Eventually, though, the ordeal does end. I can finally press “print,” and then hold in my hands something which at least looks like a script, oddly unfamiliar to me though it still is, not having re-read a word of it. I usually say that this document has no value except, literally, as an insurance policy; that is, I always let my wife know that if I get run over by a bus tomorrow (please?), she can turn this in and get paid for the step.
Then, unless I’m under a tight deadline, I’ll let it sit for two or three dreadful days, not out of some well-considered intention to gain critical distance, but because I simply can’t muster the courage to actually look at what I’m sure must be absolutely the worst piece of cow dung anyone’s ever slopped onto paper.
Finally, I face up to reading it. And guess what? It does suck. Always.
But here’s the thing: it never sucks quite as badly as I thought it would. First off, the structure is generally sound, thanks to all those weeks of outlining. And there are also pleasant surprises, every time, lines or half-pages where somehow I’d actually managed to hit the ball pretty cleanly, though they must have happened so fast and amidst so much misery that I’d totally forgotten about those happy little accidents the instant they occurred.
Anyway, during this read I make notes on the script, both general and specific, trying to treat it like somebody else’s writing, like something from back when I used to run TV shows, maybe a disappointing first draft delivered by some freelancer who turned out not to be as talented as I’d thought. I scribble notes into the margins, notions on how to fix every scene — again, in a nod to my TV days — as if I were giving these instructions to a bunch of staff writers who’ll go and do a pass on this script while I’m off running a different room.
The next draft, the second, is the one where I get serious, where I work and re-work each scene and each line painstakingly, where I won’t move on to the next until I feel like I’ve truly licked it. I do this scratching by hand, in red pen on the script and in black on extra looseleaf pages. This second pass could easily take longer than the first one. But a few years ago, under the pressure of a hard deadline, I discovered that if I hole up somewhere out of town, away from my family and away from the comforts and distractions of my home and office, and with the pressure of a hotel bill and a check-out date, I can manage this entire grueling draft in four long and intense days. I also found that the work itself gets better through this kind of immersion, that I’m more likely to stumble on some felicitous connection between page 78 and page 16 when I’ve been working on those scenes only a day or two apart. I’ve been going out on the road to do my second draft of every script ever since.
What I bring home looks laughable, whole pages crossed out in red and rewritten in the margins, almost no pages with even half of the original writing untouched. But once this scrawl is retyped cleanly, it’s an almost reasonable facsimile of a presentable script. The back of the beast has been broken. One more pass over several easier days, and it’s ready for my wife to read; two or three more brief passes after that, and it’s ready for the world.
And guess what? Now the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I’ve got 110 pages or so which represent the best that I’m capable of.
And by that point I’ve pretty much forgotten that I was ever worried about this script at all.
This post is fantastic and personally timely.
One of the issues that it raises for me, which I struggle with, is how limiting vs. liberating is outlining. I definitely see it as necessary, and I don’t intend to dispute that, yet sometimes I become so beholden to my outline, not allowing a new, possible, entirely different direction when I’m sitting in front of the page that some of the things I write read like dead fish floating on the surface of water. Though I spend time outlining, it can be flat and reads like something that has been micromanaged rather than a story breathing with life. (Maybe I need to learn more about story and outlining, but I also think I’m touching on another point here).
A related question I have is, when outlining, to what extent do you start with the climax and allow the story to follow from that versus starting at the beginning and moving linear and chronological way through the story? It is likely both but which do you feel offers better direction?
thanks,
sh
Excellent article.
Similar to being holed up in a hotel somewhere I have a similar idea. Take a week long cruise.
Seriously. Relaxed atmosphere. Beautiful weather (usually), and all your food and lodging accounted for. Also, you are cut off from all communication. Cell Phones don’t work, and you get internet only if you pay for it.
I did a little writing on the last cruise I took, and thought to myself that if I ever started actually getting paid to write, that I would strongly consider this notion of a floating paradise/prison as a location for writing a draft.
Of course this is only good if you don’t get sea sick.
Finally, a non-method method. I love it. More evidence that humans’ wonderful ability to forget pain is what allows them to persist.
Thanks for sharing, Howard and Craig!
Snerk. Good news/bad news.
The good news is the veterans put themselves through this shit, too.
That’s also the bad news.
Enjoyed this, HM. Thanks, Craig.
Smara:
I think of the climax as a mirror of the beginning. One reflects the other. So before I start outlining, I try and think of the story as the simplest of movements.
Man with thematic problem faces appropriate tests, but must ultimately experience this certain climax before the theme is resolved.
Craig,
Thanks for the response. I’ve been reading previous posts as well, which have been helpful in answering some of the other questions I posed. My mind, at the moment, is spinning with all the different and interesting nuggets you’ve documented here.
thanks again,
sH
…Ya know when you sit still and listen to all that is swirling around you while perched on the edge of your bed just after your shower and just prior to the children joyfully pummeling into your room…
In that silence you can feel the palpable numbness and the broken-ness of your spirit of having felt cruelty by two people who breached a level of trust you gave to them freely, and they were sooo mean you still can’t figure out how you let such ‘yuck’ into your life…
…or you can feel torn up with the reality that your friend may die of cancer/leukemia today, tomorrow, or will it be next week…how do I plan around death - or is there such a capacity that one could actually ‘plan’ their day/week…?
…and then there is the other reality in that we as writers, not only of the Guild, but of all sorts must adhere to the pencil and paper mode in that there awaits the Yale Doctoral candidate calling every 30 minutes for you to finalize their 32 page presentation with some profoundly pounding closing paragraph so to lock in their research grant…
…or even the Law student who MUST have their paper(s) in APA style, and, “Laura could you open the paper for me because you’re sooo good at that and please close it too becasue you are even better at that”…
…so it is here that the paper, the Papermate Blue (only) pen and my mind meet - I only go to the computer once I’ve make peace with my final draft - and it is here that the pensivity can keep me or kill me…
…However with the above so weighty it is sheer divinity that a gift should arrive, in the form of the above entry of course :)!
It is available to read and be swallowed by it and know that someone on some side of this planet is able to pull me through and is feeling the same challenge(s) I feel whether it be today, 16 years ago or tomorrow in that what is expected of me/us by my precious clients is wicked greatness, and that from this petite little woman with this tireless mind I too can feel adversity within, yet serve all that call upon and expect ‘from’ and ‘of’ me…
Howard/Craig have you been told today that you are loved…
You are loved for the entirety, but most specifically this…
“you�d think it would get easier. But it never does. It gets harder with every year, more terrifying…”
And then some amazing commentor writes this -
“More evidence that humans� wonderful ability to forget pain is what allows them to persist.”
Refreshing, refreshing, refreshing…
Much thanks, gratitude, appreciation, enlightenment and amore!
xoxoLL
Wow. Great stuff. Read it twice. Thanks a lot for this post.
I spend a lot of time doubting myself, but now I think I must be a writer, because the described process actually sounds like FUN to me. Now I wish I wasn’t at work right now — I want to go home and write!!
Thanks, all, for the kind words, and thanks, Craig, for putting this out into the wider world.
Smara — I don’t start outlining until I’ve figured everything out. If I have a beginning to a story but nothing else, I start asking myself all the questions about where it might go, who the people might be, etc., and don’t really “outline” until I’ve pretty much figured out those answers.
Likewise, if I begin with a great climax, I ask myself all the questions about who these people are and how they got here, then do the same.
I understand your not uncommon concern about outlines leading to flat and “micromanaged” writing. But it seems to me that it’s invariably much easier to bring life to flat scenes in subsequent drafts than it is to breeze through lively and spontaneous page after lively and spontaneous page, and also somehow find yourself on page 110 reaching a lively and spontaneously satisfying landing.
I’d always prefer having to fix first act problems than third act problems.
I’m going to do something insane here and risk appearing to be picking on a pair of my greatest heroes, but this line of discussion always brings to mind the Coen brothers. For me, the first hour of virtually every one of their movies feels like a masterpiece, but the second hour lives up to the first maybe one time in three. I’ve never met them, nor read an interview with them about how they write, but I’ve always assumed that they did little outlining, just jumped right into the real writing from the top, letting their nifty music take them wherever it would.
Maybe I would have had the nerve to work like that once upon a time, but I wouldn’t any more.
Howard:
Oddly enough, I’ve read a bunch of interviews with the Coen Brothers and you are 100% correct. They don’t really outline and they just jump right in.
We’ve actually discussed outlining on this site before and in the past, I admitted that I do little outlining. When I write with my co-director, he’s strictly outline city. But it took me awhile to realize that my first drafts are just long extended outlines. It’s actually kind of a stupid way to write and I’ve officially joined the outlining club (which in turn has just won me my first Screenplay award).
Thanks for taking the time to come on!
Stephen King, in the back of The Gunslinger, said something along the lines of “outlines are for hacks who wish they were writing college thesis papers instead of novels.”
Think what you want of King’s work, but the dude knows how to craft a story. Of course as a novelist King doesn’t have to worry about page count, three act structure, or the requisite beats readers look for. His can tangent and get ridiculous with the verbosity all he wants. Also one could also point to The Stand as a novel that could have benefited from some forethought. I mean he obviously had NO idea how to end that thing. But I think there’s some truth to his words. By knowing exactly where you’re going beforehand, you’re missing out on the best part, the real right-brain creative part. Some of the best writing - I mean the best writing of all time - comes from that jazz school of wordsmiths.
Of course I don’t think King is the kind of guy who fears the blank page either. Some folks just don’t. Some tear their hair out for a week before typing word one. Me, I think whatever works for you is what’s best. If index cards get the job done for you, do it. If eating a bag of psylosibin mushrooms and free-styling your first draft in a weekend does the trick, do that instead.
We get off our plane(s) to come to this country to study and our entire community knows where to go for writing help in studies. She is part of our underground and we label her ‘famous’ for how she teaches us form and structure with our language skills and writing attempts. So strict, and unmatched her sky-high expectations of her students. We are expected to read new posts here, and on John August and follow and learn from each style and formation. We travel from Brooklyn and Flushing to have her teaching/writing discipline of outlining envelope us, and her hook is called ‘sloppy copy.’
We MUST go from ‘web’ to ‘sloppy-copy’ in full form before we are ‘invited’ to put it to the keyboard. (We have to skip lines and use pencil, before papermate ) She says again and again, “everything must have calm form, structure and backup/reinforcement.” It doesn’t matter if you are like me in writer’s workshop at LI university or if you are Doctorate like Sveltlana in Connecticut, we don’t fear page once we listen and follow her ‘way’ even though this English language is not our first.
Our Prof. LL, or we refer to her as ‘Long Island Laurichka’, has made our works and drafts very capable! There will NEVER be a way to give back to her with equal because outlining.
To this site, we Thankyou Mr. Mazin and Mr. Eilliot, your site serves so much of us…
Yuri, you’re very welcome.
Ronnie —
Re King, the demands of dramatic writing are very, very different from fiction. In a novel, if you want to take an extra 20 pages to get where you’re going, or an extra 200, you can do it if they’re interesting enough, with no cost or consequence. (And by “the demands of dramatic writing, I’m not talking about what McKee or Field or some reader has to say, I’m just talking about the basics of keeping the audience interested and sending them home satisfied.)
Here’s another way of looking at what you say, though: why must that thing you call “the best part, the real right-brain creative part” happen during the first “FADE-IN-to-THE-END” draft? Who’s to say it can’t happen during the notes stage even before outlining, or during the outlining, or during rewrites? OR during the first draft, despite knowing where a scene is supposed to end up?
Look, I’m not saying anybody’s got to do it my way; this was just a personal essay on my own demons and how I get around them. I’m with you — whatever works for you is what’s best.
I’ll say this, though: if you want to be a professional screenwriter, I can’t recommend highly enough developing your own MO, and relying on it. When I book a gig, or even when I sit down to write a play or a spec for myself, I don’t want to spend all day balancing between work avoidance and waiting for the muse to descend with mystical inspiration. I want to figure out what I have to do, and sit down and do it. I want to think about it as work, and let the “creative” or “artistic” magic take care of itself while I’m not looking, while I’m just trying to get my work done.
That may sound programmatic, but I haven’t suffered any kind of stifling “writer’s block” in ten years, I’ve done as many as four studio scripts a year several times, and while quality is of course subjective, I can fairly look back at the two dozen or so studio gigs I’ve done and say that on only a couple of them does my own work really disappoint me in retrospect.
One time some years ago, as I was switching over from TV to features, I really did get stuck; I’d set up an utterly non-filmic novel with a director attached, but it was really all on me to figure the thing out, and as I started, I realized that my successful pitch had been nothing but smoke and mirrors and a Jack Nicholson attachment, and now that I had a deadline, I had no idea how actually to pull off the adaptation. A writer friend said at the time, “Just do the things you always do, whatever they are,” and it was the most brilliant advice anyone ever gave me.
But hey, if the thing you always do is gulp down some mushrooms and binge write for a weekend, then sober up and sift through to find your real story and real characters and then do all the rewriting you need to to start making the thing actually hang together? By all means, do your thing.
I totally agree with Mr. Gould, do your thing, kids… more work for the rest of us.
Lets take off the gloves, shall we? I propose the following statement as undisputed fact: Pros outline, novices don’t.
Imo, this whole “Do your thing, little buddy” concept is bull. Writing a scene means squat unless that scene is a precise piece in the greater construct that is the screenplay. Anyone who believes they can write 90-150 consecutive scenes that fulfill that requirement to a satisfying end by sitting down and hacking away at the keys, I have only one thing to say to you: Forget it, you’re not that smart, lil’ buddy.
What baffles me is that many “writers” think outlining is not writing. It’s the best part! This is where you design the great arcs, come up with small scenes that pay off big, create the twists that take your audience by surprise, and the endings that make them want to see your film again and again. Everything after that is just typing…
Look at some of the great screenplays, like “Memento”, “A Few Good Men”, “The Terminator”. You don’t write that shit by popping mushrooms and raping your keyboard for 48 hours. These are carefully constructed narratives, worthy of study.
But please, prove me wrong, I’ll stand down as soon as one professional screenwriter comes on this blog with a produced credit that was entirely written by just jumping into draft without ever writing an outline or beatsheet…
Takers?
Anyone who believes they can write 90-150 consecutive scenes that fulfill that requirement to a satisfying end by sitting down and hacking away at the keys, I have only one thing to say to you: Forget it, you’re not that smart, lil’ buddy.
Maybe it’s just that you’re not that smart.
Some people can do this. I’m not saying I’m one of those people. But one of the best scripts I’ve ever read — one as structurally complex as MEMENTO or any of the above-mentioned — was written without an outline, index cards, or beat sheet. I was shocked when the writer told me so. I’d just assumed that he couldn’t have done something that intricate without mapping it out first, but apparently he had it all in his head. And yes that script is set up at a major studio. And a number of well regarded directors have been begging to shoot it.
I know some great writers who outline in extensively, too many to agree fully with Mr. King’s sentiment. But it’s the writers who don’t, and don’t need to, who scare the shit out of me. They’re the monsters lurking under my bed.
I like to think I’m a professional screenwriter, but every day that goes by in which Rachel Shane doesn’t return my call, I believe in my professional status less and less.
But, I also map things out in my head without writing them down a lot of times, but I consider that to be a form of outlining.
“But please, prove me wrong, I’ll stand down as soon as one professional screenwriter comes on this blog with a produced credit that was entirely written by just jumping into draft without ever writing an outline or beatsheet…”
Just to play devil’s advocate, The Coen Brothers have admitted to not outlining whatsoever. Apparently the brothers get into a car, drive to absolutely nowhere, and just start writing. Here’s a link:
http://www.writersstore.com/article.php?articles_id=365
Check out Number 8, for the exact excerpt.
But again, I agree that outlining is the way to go. But it doesn’t mean that some people who don’t do it are idiots. They’re just…different.
I’ve known Rachel for years…back when she was an assistant.
Tomorrow, she calls you back, or I’m not as powerful as I believe I am.
Whoa, Craig.
It looked your site was hijacked by the bad guys from 24.
What happened?
Has anyone ever tried the “i’m just gonna outline the next twenty or so pages?” technique? That shit is death. That’s like the final step to, “i’m never writing without an outline again—not even a letter.”
Howard, question…re: working on multiple projects at once…
…any tips on that one?
Craig,
You’re not as powerful as you believe you are.
But thanks.
Actually, I’m just forgetful. :)
I forgot to call her. Dammit!
Email me on Monday to remind me. For real.
MLB —
I actually like working on multiple projects at once, though not so much if they’re in the same stage. And there are a couple of points in the process (e.g. the first fast pass I described, or the four days out of town) when I can’t split my focus at all.
But I’m pretty happy if, say, I’m addressing studio notes on one project for most of the day, and doing research or making first notes toward the next script for a couple hours in the afternoon.
The other thing I kind of like, when projects happen to stagger just right, is to really go back and forth — do a pass at a script, then put it away for a couple of days or a week while I work on something else full-time, and then come back to the first one with fresh eyes.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is how much we’re working on something when we don’t think we’re working on it. When you’re stuck, walk away from your project for a while — watch a movie, play with the kids, work on something different for a couple days — and often the answers come, and better ones than you’d have found just by grinding away at the problem.
Craig, you’ve proven your power in Hollywood is secure.
Thanks again, Ryan