By Brock Swinson.
Over the past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to interview a number of screenwriters, from first-time writers to Oscar nominees. Below are a selection of my favourite quotes and pieces of advice from these interviews. I hope you enjoy them, and of course, if you want to read more, just click on the link at the bottom of each quotation to see the complete article.
Do the research, block off time to write, and just write.
I write in a very compressed period. I don’t like to extend it or work on something too long. When you’re writing, I think it’s important to make it happen. There is something about a focused amount of writing. So I do a ton of research and a ton of outlining and then I don’t leave my apartment day or night to write. It might take me until three in the afternoon to actually begin putting words down, but that’s just part of my process.
Raise the stakes and nothing can get in your way.
I learned I could deliver pages at five in the morning with a nuclear war going on around me. That gave me a lot of confidence because early on, I thought I could only write within the constraints of X, Y, and Z factors. With Ice Age, the stakes were so high I had to write when I had to write because they needed pages for the story department or to be animated. I performed outside my comfort level.
Not all writing occurs in the room.
It seems that the best ideas come when I’m not writing. Whether I’m walking in a forest or doing something else all together. With my next film, I will try to remember that you don’t need to bang your head in an office, but you can actually do something else, which will be more useful for your day and your writing. Sometimes you need to do something else to figure out your writing problem.
Obstacles make the journey.
I don’t look at anything as difficult. Every obstacle is part of the creative journey. What I learned at Improv is the illusion. If you have the ability to improvise, writing a scene can be easy. Actors who write should learn this gift, because it helps you improve as a writer.
Character comes first.
Characters should come first—even above story and plot. Story and plot can get in the way of a good screen play. They can interrupt a good screenplay or movie. You need to find a balance of twists and curves plotwise, while still focusing on character—the people, because that’s who your audience is going to relate to the most.
Make sure your audience can identify with the protagonist.
Lots of things can make a good story, but if you cannot identify with the protagonist, no amount of an ingenious plot will make a difference. You need to have your audience be able to locate themselves within the story, or else it’s pointless.
Love your work and finish the draft.
Actually, write it if you love it but I would say have an additional way of financially supporting yourself. I act and do voices for animations and so I try to use one discipline to support the other. And keep writing even when you think it’s shit. Get to the end, then go back and make it better.
Take the journey with your characters.
With the story, I was very conscious that this had to be a movie first. It’s not a documentary. You’ve got to care about these characters. You’ve got to take this journey with them. I purposely structured the film where you are on the ground, taking this journey with them. There are always a dozen ways to skin a cat. You could start with Mary being ten years old, like a biopic. You could start the movie the day after the story runs and have it all fall apart. I wanted the audience to participate along this journey, through the character’s eyes, step-by-step.
Every good story is a crime story.
In a way, I feel like all great stories are crime stories. Whether they begin with an outright law-breaking event, transgression, or lie, great stories happen when something goes wrong. That goes along with almost every great story, from Adam and Eve to Mission Impossible to True Detective. They begin with some element of transgression or crime. Sometimes the world itself is the crime and when the world is unfair or morally skewed, that can be a great jumping off point in a good story.
There are many journeys to success and writing is a job.
As a writer, you collect bits of wisdom and pass them on to others like a custodian of fortune cookies. There are two pieces of advice I would give and neither of which are my own. The first is from E. L. Doctorow and I learned while writing prose, but it states, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” This, to me, really applies to anything whether you’re writing a scene, an act, an episode, or an entire season. You’ll loose your mind trying to focus on the whole, the entire time, but if you make the ascent line-by-line, or scene-by-scene, you can make the whole trip that way.
The second quote is honestly the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard. I’m certainly not the originator and I can no longer remember where I first read it, but the most important development as a writer is when you stop thinking of writing as a high art and start thinking about it as work. It took me a long time to do that, especially beginning as a prose writer. I began because I loved prose stylists like Lorrie Moore so I had all of these high-faluting ideas about myself as an artist. In reality, the writers I know that have made a lifetime of writing have set aside those ideas and focus on the work at hand. They write every day.