Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Jacob Krueger finishes the 2017 Screenwriting Challenge with a special writing exercise!

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The Second Challenge Check-In!

By Jacob Krueger

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Greetings from Thailand! You can probably hear the sounds of the jungle and of rushing water around me. It’s been raining here for the last 12 days, and pretty much every path has turned into a river.

Nevertheless, it’s been a pretty magical experience.

As many of you know in addition to my own little writing retreat, I’ve been here for the last couple of weeks studying yoga and meditation. And I recently participated in a life-changing meditation, created by AUM Humaniversity, that I wanted to share with you with this 2017 Screenwriting Challenge check-in.

The meditation was nearly three hours long—12 stages of 12 minutes each. And each stage focused on experiencing an emotion that is normally feared or repressed.

It occurred to me, of course, that this is a lot like writing.

Writing takes courage. It takes a willingness to look inside that most people do not have. And even more courageous, it takes a willingness to look inside ourselves and put what we find there on the page—even the parts of us that we don’t very much like, the parts that make us feel exposed, or vulnerable, or weak, or unacceptable.

There’s a myth about writers that we are in the fiction business. But actually the opposite is true. We are in the business of telling the truth through fiction: the emotional truth of our experience.

As those of you who have taken my Write Your Screenplay class or Jess’s Meditative Writing class know, writing is like a dance between these two parts of your mind: the part that wants to create something that others will understand, and the part that has something it desperately needs to say. Something that may or may not be socially acceptable. Something that may or may not fit your career goals or your plans for your story. Something that may or may not be in a form that others will understand.

This is where our characters come from. Not from an idea, not from a formula, not from what your conscious mind thinks is necessary for your story. But from somewhere deep inside. Somewhere we don’t normally access.

 

Your characters are simply a part of you that you don’t normally show to the world.

 

Jung called this idea the collective unconscious. His belief was that in our daily lives, we only experienced a very tiny bit of the universe—a very tiny bit of who we really are.

But in our dreams, he believed, we could tap into the full universe that already existed within us. Not an individual experience, but a collective one—the metaphors we all share. The things that make our stories universal.

In other words, he believed that the whole universe already existed inside of you. That every script you’ll ever write, every character you’ll ever create, every line of dialogue. Every possibility. It’s all there, in this part of your mind you don’t normally go to in your waking life.

 

I remember when I was first starting out as a writer, how much work it was to write.

 

I remember listening to famous writers talk about how they saw themselves not so much like a writer as like a scribe, that they weren’t actually “doing the writing,” but rather simply transcribing what their inner writer, their muse, their instincts—choose your word for it—simply transcribing what that force inside them was telling them.

I remember thinking, what a bunch of horse shit.

I didn’t have a muse like that. If I want to create something, I sat down and wrestled with it, and forced it into the shape I wanted it to take.

Then I was lucky enough to study with a brilliant writer named Peter Parnell. At the time, Peter was a starving playwright, though he went on to become one of the biggest writers in Television.

And what Peter taught me was that writing didn’t have to be so much work. That the answers I was looking for were not in some formulaic book, or even in my own conscious mind.

That they already existed in my subconscious mind.

 

And the work of a great teacher was not to teach me “how to write,” but to teach me how to access what was already there.

 

Many people would say that Peter taught me how to find my voice. But actually he did so much more. He taught me how to find not only my voice, but also the entire structure of the story I wanted to tell. How to stop wrestling with my characters and start listening to them. How to stop puppeteering them through the twists and turns of some predetermined plot, and instead start letting them lead. And most importantly, how to stop manipulating the feelings of my audience, and turn writing into a process where I actually experienced the emotions myself.

When I made the move from playwriting to screenwriting, I took Peter’s teachings with me. But I also ran into a problem.  Screenplays were so much bigger than plays. They had so many moving parts.

Plays have something called unity of place. They all take place on one stage, and usually in one or just a handful of locations. And the scenes go very long. Most of the action happens through dialogue, so it’s really easy to dive deep within a very simple structure.

Movies, on the other hand, have much shorter scenes. And they have a lot of them.  In just a couple of pages, you can jump to 10 different locations and many different storylines. And most of the action happens in action, which means you don’t get to linger in any scene for very long. Everything is always moving, moving, moving!

You end up with so many moving parts, that you can’t hold them all in your head at one time. It’s easy to lose track, not only of where you’re going, but also where you’ve been.  It’s easy for all those parts to get jumbled together.

To answer this problem, I did the same thing everybody does. I started reading screenwriting books. Screenplay by Syd Field. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Campbell… and many others, all suggesting a different answer to this fundamental problem of structure.

But, no matter what approach I took, I found myself returning to the same bad habits-- once again manipulating my characters through the structural architecture I’d built for them rather than allowing them to exist as real people in the universe.  Thinking with the conscious part of my mind-- what I wanted my audience to experience-- rather than the subconscious part—what my characters were experiencing, what I was actually seeing, feeling or hearing when I went inside and watched them.

 

I was writing with the conscious brain rather than the subconscious one. The editing brain rather than the writing brain.

 

And what I found was that while my writing did become clearer it also became totally boring.

People were no longer quibbling with my structure. But they also weren’t moved.  

I had turned myself into the worst kind of bad writer. The kind of writer who wants an emotional reaction from his audience, but is shut off from the emotions in himself. The kind of writer whose obsession with craft becomes so all encompassing that he loses track of his art.

This not only took away the magic of the final product. It also took away the magic of the journey by which I reached that product. It took away the magic of writing.

So I thought back to what Peter Parnell had taught me, and I realized that all these “principles” that seemed so important in all these screenwriting books had never even been a part of the conversation.

Then I started researching the people whose books I was reading. And what I found was that unlike Peter, most of them weren’t actually screenwriters at all.

 

Most of them had never even sold a screenplay.

 

Later, I’d come to understand that there’s a very simple reason for this. Unlike playwrights, who are all starving, successful screenwriters make money. Want so study with your favorite playwright? Guaranteed they’re teaching somewhere.

But successful screenwriters don’t have to teach. And even those who love teaching, or who have reached a point in their career where they are ready to give back, are rarely writing screenwriting books, and rarely teaching at Universities, where Phd’s (which very few screenwriters have), are often so much more valued than experience.  It’s simply a matter of numbers—to write a screenwriting book, you’ve got to desperately want to do it. Because you could spend a third of the time writing a screenplay, and end up with ten times as much money.

I realized at that point why I was having trouble. I knew I was a talented young writer .  But I wasn’t learning screenwriting from writers. I was learning from critics and academics, people who had been trained to analyze and deconstruct a finished product. Not how to create one from the blank page.

And suddenly things made sense. This kind of outside-in approach could teach me how to look at a great screenplay academically once I’d finished it.  But they couldn’t teach me how to put it on the page.

 

I knew I needed to get back to the approach Peter had taught me. And at the same time, I knew I couldn’t simply write a screenplay as if it were a play.

 

I needed an approach that would help me make sense of all these disparate visual pieces—that would help me organize and shape the creations of my subconscious mind into a structure that I and others could understand—to dip subconsciously into the collective unconscious, and then find a way to come back outside and create structural value for what I found there.

That’s how I created the 7 Act Structure that I now teach in my Write Your Screenplay classes.

The Second Check-In for the Jacob Krueger Studio 2017 Screenwriting Challenge! Jacob talks about the Writer's fear, and how to overcome it!

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The First Challenge Check-In!

By Jacob Krueger

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We’re now 5 days into the screenwriting challenge, and we’re so excited about the tremendous response that we’ve had, and how many people have been doing such amazing work.

We’re going to use today's podcast just for a little check-in to answer some questions from people who might be struggling with the challenge and maybe to give a little bit of inspiration for people who are doing it. If you don't know what all this screenwriting challenge is about and you want to learn about it, go to writeyourscreenplay.com/challenge for all the details.

Here’s the most common question we always get about the challenge:

What if I want to participate and I missed the deadline? Should I wait till next year?

Of course the answer is no, it’s never too late to start.

Oftentimes as writers we end up pushing off those things that really matter to us. It always feels like it's not the right time, and we think maybe it’ll be a little quieter next year, it’ll be a little easier next year. My life will slow down, my kid will grow up, my family will be less crazy, my job will be less intense, and of course this is never true.

It's like if you wanted to become a mighty river, but you keep telling yourself there's just not enough water.

Really the creation of a great river begins with a tiny little stream.

It all begins with a few droplets, and as that riverbed starts to get deeper and deeper, it starts to make room for the kind of volume of water that we really want.

One of the things that is really interesting is a lot of people think that they’re going to quit their job and do nothing but write, but the facts are that actually that is one of the hardest things to do as a writer. For many writers, that first year, when they actually sell their first script and are able to quit their job is the hardest year, because they often don't have the infrastructure underneath them to sustain that kind of volume.

So you can look at this time now, even if you're too busy, even if you're feeling behind, you can look at this time now as a time to start building that riverbed, a time to start allowing those few droplets that you have to carve a path that eventually the water will come to fill. This is truly an “if you build it, they will come” situation.

If you're hesitating, if you haven't bought your journal yet, if you haven't started yet, go grab a piece of paper right now. Take 7 minutes right now.

Because here's the thing -- you have 7 minutes. You can't bullshit yourself out of 7 minutes. You can bullshit yourself out of an hour. You can bullshit yourself out of time to finish your script. But you can’t bullshit yourself out of 7 minutes, and those 7 minutes are going to end up changing your life.

Here's the other really common issue that comes up with the screenwriting challenge. A lot of people have been doing the challenge, but they really hate the things they are writing.

Sometimes that feeling of judgment can cause us to lose steam.

As writers we play a really strange game with ourselves. Instead of dwelling on our successes, we often focus on our failures as evidence that we’re not meant to be writers.

Usually this has more to do with fear than anything -- fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear that we don't have what it takes.

When your judgment of your writing is based on fear, it has very little connection to reality. You may dismiss really brilliant writing as terrible, simply because you're afraid that other people aren’t going to like it. Or you may fall in love with scenes that are not working simply because they feel safe to you.

There are a ton of ways to overcome these kinds of fears.  

Oftentimes we have expectations of ourselves as writers that are not fair. If you were taking your first violin lesson, you wouldn't expect to play Carnegie Hall. Yet for a lot of writers there’s so much pressure on making that first script-- that first scribbling, that first page-- something you can sell or something that can lead you to somewhere very specific.

The result is that you never actually give yourself the chance to learn.

Picasso said he spent four years of his life trying to paint like Raphael, and the second half trying to paint like a child.

One of the things we often forget as writers is the power of the beginner's mind.

I would like to suggest to you that rather than focusing on the fears, I want you to focus on the joy of beginning.

That begins with shifting your perspective.

Rather than giving yourself the kind of feedback that tears you down, see what happens if you start with the kind of feedback that inspires you. Look at the things that are great about your writing rather than the things that are problematic.

If you don't know what's good about your writing, find somebody who can help you see it. Take a class, find a mentor.

One thing a lot of people don't realize about professional writers is that professional writers do not write well any more often than you do. Professional writers write badly more often than you do.

But the gift of professional writers, of successful professional writers, is being able to see the beauty in their own writing before other people can see it, before it's been brought to the surface. Being able to identify the thing that, in its infancy, is still a child stumbling around, crawling and drooling, and to recognize what that is eventually going to grow into when it’s all grown up, many drafts from now.      

The challenge that many young writers have is that, rather than thinking of their writing as something that they nurture and grow, they think of it as something that should be different from what it is.

If you are experiencing that, find somebody who can point you in the right direction. Obviously here at the Studio, we have classes and one-on-one mentorships that's designed to do that. But whether you work with us or with somebody else, find someone who points you in the right direction rather than tearing you down.

It's so easy to tear down writers, and it's so easy to tear down ourselves.

Most of our population is filled with blocked artists: people who did not pursue their dreams. It’s easy for a blocked artist to admire the people who have already succeeded in achieving their dream.  

But watching somebody in the infancy of pursuing their dreams is scary to a blocked artist.

It's scary because it suggests that maybe they could be pursuing their dreams.

And it’s scary because all of the fears that they have that have kept them blocked are going to come out in relation to you.

The person who's blocking you may be your mother, may be your father. It may be your best friend or your boss. It may be your writing group, and if you're with the wrong person it may even be your writing teacher.

Great feedback all has one thing in common. Great feedback doesn't tell you what to do. Great feedback helps you explore the things to find the solutions yourself.

Great feedback does not tear you down. Great feedback shows you what can be beautiful and puts you on a path to shaping it into its beautiful form. Great feedback doesn't impose somebody else's formula. Great feedback shows you what’s working in your script and allows you to build the structure that only your script could follow.

Most importantly, great feedback does not focus on what’s wrong. Great feedback focuses on what's already working, even in the earliest drafts.

This is something that you can do for yourself.

You can start this right now by simply refusing to engage with the part of you that wants to tear you down, the part of you that's a blocked writer, the part of you that’s stuck, the part of you that's scared.

See what happens if you simply refuse to engage with that part, because the truth of the matter is that it is so much easier to tear something down than build it up.

We are all trained to tear things down from the moment we come out of the womb.

From the moment we see our first movie, we learn how to dish with our friends about what sucks. That comes easy.

When it comes to our own writing, it comes even easier. We say things to ourselves that we would never dream of or dare saying to another writer.

So I'm going to challenge you, as part of your screenwriting challenge, as you're doing your daily writing for the rest of this challenge, not to look for the bad at all.

Ignore every thought you have about what’s bad.

In fact, for every thought that tears you down, come up with 2 that build you up.

I’m not talking about baloney. I'm not talking about looking in the mirror and saying, “I'm smart enough, and people like me.”

I'm talking about looking at the actual thing you wrote, and for everything that you tore down, find 2 things that genuinely do work, that you genuinely do like, that you genuinely do see potential in.

It can be the tiniest little thing, and it might not even be on the surface yet. I want you to look for the opportunities rather than the problems. I want you to focus on building on what you have, rather than fixing your problems.

If you've taken my screenwriting classes, you know that one of the most powerful tools we have for this is an exercise called “the bad screenwriting exercise.”

All writers write badly all the time. Even the true greats leave hundreds of discarded pages in their hard drives, never to see the light of day.

The First Check In for the 2017 Screenwriting Challenge! This week, Jacob Krueger has some inspiration and advice for our Challenge participants!

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The 2017 Screenwriting Challenge!

By Jacob Krueger

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We’re going to do something special this podcast, because the holidays are a particularly challenging time for writers. And the New Year can come with its own added pressures.

We all do our best as writers when we get into a rhythm, but during the holiday season that rhythm can be really hard to maintain. Your schedule gets jammed up, you’ve got parties, you’ve got gifts to buy, you’ve got family visits, you’ve got stress, and you’ve got a little too much vacation time. The next thing you know you haven’t written.

Of course that's not even the real problem. The real problem is getting started up again. Ideally you want writing to be part of your daily routine. You want it to be as natural for you as brushing your teeth, getting dressed for work, drinking your morning coffee. But for most writers, this is rarely the case. Many of us write in fits and starts, waiting for those moments of inspiration and spending most of our time beating ourselves up when the inspiration doesn't come. Then just when we get started on a new rhythm, something happens to interrupt it.

I’m always amused when I participate in writing panels, because invariably there’s a young writer who asks that all-important question: “How do you know when you’re really a writer?”

What you get to do then is you get to watch famous writers lie their butts off. You get to watch one panelist after another insist, “What real writers do is write. You know you’re a writer when you write...”

Having worked as a writer for most of my professional life, I can tell you that that's not the truth. It doesn't really matter if you're an Academy Award winner or a first-time writer.

Most of what writers do is not writing. What writers really do is procrastinate.

Writers are brilliant at finding really important tasks to interfere with their writing. You set aside a couple minutes to write, and suddenly those dirty dishes really start to call to you. The next thing you know, you've cleaned your whole kitchen, scrubbed your shower tiles to a sparkling sheen, reorganized your closet, updated your Facebook photos, and you’ve still not written a single word.

You're upset with yourself. And, at the same time, a part of you feels like you didn’t have a choice, that time just got away from you.

Then you start to punish yourself. You tell yourself, “I’ll write for twice as long tomorrow.” Maybe you wrote for 2 hours today, then you’ll write for 4 hours tomorrow. Then tomorrow comes, and 4 hours seems like an impossible amount of time.

Even if you do manage to bang out a few pages, it's hard to find any joy when you're feeling like that. The next thing you know, you’ve gone a whole week, month, or maybe even a year without writing.

Under these circumstances, it’s really easy to doubt if you're a writer at all. You may even be tempted to give up on writing entirely. You may feel so blocked that you don't see any way out.

At the same time, you know that giving up on writing would be giving up on the best part of yourself.

So what are you supposed to do?

I'm going to tell you that the difference between successful and unsuccessful writers is not that one group never procrastinates, or that one group never gets blocked. The difference is that successful writers are better at managing their procrastination.

Successful writers are better at maintaining their creative rhythm, even when the inspiration is not flowing.           

Today's podcast is actually going to take place in 2 parts. First,

This week Jake has a special podcast featuring Jessica Hinds, and a New Year's Challenge!

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Arrival: The Writer's Journey

By Jacob Krueger

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This week we’re going to be talking about Eric Heisserer’s script Arrival.

It's really a beautiful thing when you see a friend create something that is such a pure expression of who they are. I’m lucky to count Eric among my friends, and I'm really proud of him for this movie.

Beyond just the superb quality of the film, one of the reasons that I'm proud of Eric, and one of the reasons that I think that Arrival is so valuable for emerging screenwriters to look at, is the process by which Eric wrote it.

Now, Eric is a pretty big time writer. He writes a lot of horror movies, he’s written for the Nightmare on Elm Street & Final Destination franchises, and he just had a big hit with Lights Out earlier this year.  Eric is not a guy who needs to write scripts on spec; he is not a writer who needs to go out and write a movie that he's not getting paid for.

But Eric made a really bold choice. Instead of taking one more well-paid ‘work for hire’ project, he instead dedicated years of his life to making a little movie that mattered to him. A movie that, quite frankly, is a pretty hard sell.

Imagine walking into a producer and trying to explain this film. “Look, I want to make an expensive sci-fi movie, the main character is a linguist, it's mostly about language and the nature of time. It’s going to get really deep into very complex ideas that normal people don't understand. And most of the action is just the main character standing in a spaceship, trying to learn a language that neither she nor the audience can possibly understand. It’s going to cost a lot of money to make because we’re going to need some big special-effects. And, oh, did I mention it's also really sad and profound?”

 

This is not an easy pitch.  If it had been, Eric, at this phase of his career, probably would not have had to write the script for free.  But that’s what he did. 

He did it because it moved something in him. He read this short story-- written in 1998, so it’s not like this was the hot new thing out on the market-- he read this “unadaptable” short story and he was moved by it. And he decided that he wanted to turn it into a screenplay, whether it was “adaptable” or not.  

Before this movie was completed he had written over 100 drafts of this script. And, I think the thing that stands out here, that you should think about if you are an emerging screenwriter, is the humbleness. The desire not to get it done, but to get it right.

Not to get it finished or get it sold, but to get it to a place where it was a pure expression of what he wanted to say. 

So often, when I work with young screenwriters, they are rushing through the process of screenwriting. They're either going out looking for the hot idea that they “know” they can sell,  which as we all know rarely turns out to be the one that actually does. Or, they are rushing to complete the idea, just to get the script on the page, following some commercial formula, trying to sell out, or blow things up, or “save the cat,” or do whatever they've been taught by a screenwriting book in order to conform to the formula. They’re rushing through the process, looking for that quick payoff.

If you are one of those writers, if you have made that mistake, I want to suggest to you that you take a page from Eric Heisserer.

Rather than looking for the script that you think you can sell for a lot of money, look for the script that you would be willing to write for free.

 

Instead of looking for the formula that you've seen before in other movies,

This week, Jake analyzes Eric Heisserer's new sci-fi feature film Arrival starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner

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Transparent: The Series and The Craft

By Jacob Krueger

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This week we're going to be talking about the series, Transparent.

This is a series I've been wanting to talk about for a very long time. And we're going to do so from a different perspective than we usually do when we talk about TV series.

Oftentimes on this podcast, when we've spoken about series we've talked about big picture stuff. We've talked about theme and engine and structure. But today, what we're going to do is zoom in really close on one particular episode.

We're going to look at Season 3 Episode 5, and we're going to break it down to its fundamental craft elements: the way that the scenes are actually constructed.

If you've seen Transparent Season 3, you know that episode 5 is a kind of monumental moment in the season. A lot of threads that we’ve been following all end up coming together. So if you haven't watched the season, you should be aware that there are going to be some spoilers ahead.

 

 

At the end of Season 3, Episode 4, Josh’s former babysitter and lover, Rita has killed herself.

And as we enter Episode 5, Josh is dealing with that emotional fallout, trying to explain to his transgendered parent, Maura, that Rita is dead.

It's a devastating scene for so many reasons. One of the beautiful things about Transparent is that all of these characters are always doing the best that they can, but they are also all incredibly selfish and self-centered. So, what we see between Josh and Maura is really a scene in which Josh shares the devastating news of Rita’s death, and Maura makes it all about her-- a scene in which  Maura fails to comfort, or even hug her son, and instead gets caught up in her own desire not to believe that Rita’s death was a suicide.

And this builds to a culminating moment, when Josh asks Maura if she knew that he and Rita were having sex, way back when he was a kid and she was babysitting him. Maura insists that she didn't know, but reveals that, in fact, what she thought she was paying for Rita to be Josh’s best friend. Josh responds, appropriately, “that was really fucked up.” And Maura agrees that it was.

So, we start with this really, really heavy scene and this presents a challenge for the writers of Transparent.

One of the beautiful things if you watch Transparent is the dance that Transparent is always doing between light and dark, between comedy and drama, between sadness and beauty and selfishness and love.

And we witness this juxtaposition in the way the piece is constructed.

As so often happens in Transparent, this incredibly heavy scene is juxtaposed with a much lighter one. And it's that lighter one that I actually want to talk about, because this is a scene that has the potential to be a total flop, especially bouncing up against a scene where the stakes and the emotional drama are so high.

To give you a little bit of background, Sarah Pfefferman, Josh’s sister, has been spending this whole season trying to become a more active part of her synagogue community. But she keeps getting rejected from the board. And, primarily, the reason she gets rejected is because of her unconventional relationship with her husband, with whom she's living and raising children, even though they're separated and he's dating other women. She’s also not well liked because of her desperate need to be accepted.

Sarah has managed to wrangle the Rabbi, Raquel, who is Josh's former girlfriend, into allowing her to throw a big Havdalah ceremony in the school gymnasium.