Screenwriting Tips - Practical Advice For Writing Screenplays & Television Scripts

Marilyn Horowitz's Monthly Tips
Marilyn Horowitz, the president of ArtMar Productions and creator of The Horowitz System®, a revolutionary visual writing system, is an award-winning New York University professor, a producer, a screenwriter, and a New York-based writing coach who works with bestselling novelists, produced screenwriters, and award-winning filmmakers. She is the author of five books, including How to Write a Screenplay in 10 Weeks and The Four Magic Questions of Screenwriting.

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How To Use A Specific Cultural Heritage To Improve Your Plot

If your current script is feeling a bit anemic, one way to beef up your story is to add a dash of ethnicity. While it's a fairly obvious idea that by giving a character a specific ethnic background you can add depth, adding culture as a plot element is not. The beliefs and expectations of any ethnic group help to define the range of possibilities available to your plot, and will suggest organic rather than contrived stories.

For example, in the film Bend It Like Beckham, marriage for a young woman is a cultural expectation and not a personal choice. The key here is to look at how the social behavior of that particular culture's customs and beliefs affects the plot. A dramatic example of this is in the film, The Godfather, where the cultural convention is that on the wedding day of the eldest daughter, an Italian father must grant wishes. This convention creates the plot event that snaps the story into motion. In the film, Love Actually and in many other films, it's the cultural traditions of Christmas that drive the plot.

Let's put this idea into practice. Imagine that you are writing a script about a plain, and not young woman who can't get herself married. She is rescued from that fate by a wonderful man who falls in love with her. Somehow your script is flat and you can't figure out how to make it "pop." By adding some Greek culture to the mix suddenly an ordinary screenplay can be transformed into -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding! In this film, as in the other examples above, it is the conventions of the culture, not the character elements that the ethnic element could provide.

The key to this technique is to understand that the culture does not have to be religious or national. Rather the story has to have a set of specific beliefs and rules that define the world in which the characters make their choices. Perhaps the paradigm of the use of ethnicity, are Science Fiction films which create an imaginary world altogether.

For example, in the film Avatar, the culture that shapes the story is that of the Na'vi culture of the aliens who live on the planet, Pandora.

Even fantasy films such as The Toy Story series are based on a culture where the toys have a society apart from that of the humans they "belong" to.

In many dramas, try adding culture to the plot. This technique can set up and suggest the inevitable climax even before the characters enter the play. For example, in the innumerable Romeo and Juliet stories, the lovers always meet in a setting where the cultural context is the enmity between their two families. While this is not limited to any specific ethnicity, the basic situation of any two families being at war with one another provides a fundamental cultural foundation that will make the plot gripping.

To summarize, one way to intensify your story is to add a specific cultural heritage to the plot.

Here's the exercise:
  1. Take your current script and write a few lines defining the cultural elements in the story and how they affect your plot. For example, In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the culture is Greek-American, and in Avatar, it's the Na'vi culture of its inhabitants.
  2. Next, consider how the script would play out if you transferred the story to a different culture. What if The Godfather had been written and directed by Spike Lee? What if My Big Fat Greek Wedding had been set in a Muslim culture?
  3. Write a one-paragraph synopsis describing how the plot of your script would change as a result. For example, what events would change in the plot if you changed the locale of the film, Witness, to an ashram in India?

Change Your Structure, Improve Your Script

What do you do when your screenplay is not as compelling as you had hoped, but you know somehow the story is "in there?" Here is a 3-step technique that can help.

First, go back and write your story as a one-page synopsis, laying out your plot from beginning to end, regardless of how it has been written. No matter what level a writer is at, I almost always recommend that he or she work this way even when first creating a story because it's easier to change something when it has been developed properly. If you build the right foundation, it's a lot more likely that the "house" of your story will be well built.

Completing the first part of the exercise will help you determine whether the story is strong enough because even if it's already written in the traditional order, compressing the plot into a short description exposes the plot so that you will be able to look at it objectively, separate from the words on the written page. Ask yourself if you would actually pay to see your own movie.

The second and third parts of the exercise are to temporarily restructure your script and either put the end of the story at the beginning, or to retell it backwards. Since many scripts are just not interesting enough or have too much boring "backstory” the audience would have to understand before enjoying the film, changing the order in which the story is presented can solve these problems.

A good way to perform this exercise is to split your third act into two parts and use the first part of Act 3 as either a prologue to, or as a new Act 1. You would then pick up where you left off after the end of Act 2.

For example, Christopher Nolan's latest picture, Inception, uses this technique. By using the first scene from Act 3 as a prologue to "frame" the action of Acts 1 and 2. It creates a strong point of reference so that the audience can relax and enjoy the sometimes-confusing dream within a dream structure. In another example, the movie, Pulp Fiction, uses this technique for a different purpose, that is, to create a sense of unity in what is really a series of episodes strung together.

If you decide to try telling your story backwards, the film Memento, is a good example to follow. The movie tells the story of a man who is trying to 1) remember his own identity and 2) find out who murdered his wife. Telling the story backwards makes this ordinary plot feel fresh and makes it possible for the clever device of having Leonard, the hero, trying to decipher the clues through the tattoos on his body.

Here's how to do the exercise:

Step 1:

Write the story of your screenplay from beginning to end. Try to write only one paragraph for each thirty-minute/page chunk.

Step 2:

Use either the story told backwards technique or split your third act in half, using the first half as the beginning of your story, and leave the rest where it is.

Step 3:

Write a new one-page synopsis describing the action of your screenplay with this structural change. Whether or not you incorporate the changes into your screenplay, this exercise will give you new insights and help you improve your story.

The Secret Of Pitching: Know What You’re Selling

I will be presenting and offering private consultations at this year’s Great American PitchFest. Since many of you will be attending this event, or pitching in a similar situation, I thought I would share the pitching tips and tricks that have helped my private students succeed.

The Most Important Rule Of Pitching: You must bait the hook to suit the fish.

How do you do that? You need to do these three things:
  1. A Strong Title. This may be the hardest part of the whole process, but you must fight for it. It's the first contact a reader, producer, agent or actor will have with your material. The title should suggest what type of story you are telling and tease the audience's imagination. They want to know what they are seeing before they buy it. For example, a title such as "Date Night," suggests a romantic comedy, "Nightmare on Elm Street " sounds like a horror film and "Insomnia" sounds like a thriller. By finding the right title for your work, you have already overcome many problems.
  2. Identify The Genre. Few films are purely one genre or another, but identifying the main genre is the key. Little Miss Sunshine is clearly not only a comedy, but is more comedy than drama, so you would pitch a story like that as a comedy. Screenplays are products like anything else and by knowing what you're selling it will be easier to identify who will see your script and who will buy it. Basic genres include but are not limited to: Comedy, Drama, Horror, Thriller and Action. There are other genres and sub-genres to consider as well. Look up films similar to your own at IMBD or Netflix to determine in what genre you are writing.
  3. Create A Logline. A logline is a one-to-five sentence summary of what the story is about. This is also a way of testing if your script has all of the elements it needs to get a "yes." Does it have: a strong main character with a clear goal that either is achieved or forfeit? Does it suggest the plot in as few words as possible? Does it suggest your script's "hook," that plot element which makes your story unique? For example, the "hook" in the Usual Suspects is that the narrator turns out to be the villain.
My technique for accomplishing the above is to ask one question: What is your main character's dream?

In my writing system, The Four Magic Questions of Screenwriting, I encourage writers to answer this question before they begin to write, but answering the question at the pitching stage will help you focus your pitch because most successful movies are character driven and great characters are the way to attract successful actors to play the parts, which is one way to break into the industry. For example, my student Caytha Jentis was able to attract Vanessa Williams, Ben Vereen and Eartha Kitt to her film And Then Came Love because the character parts were so well written.

Putting It All Together:
  1. Find a title that suggests what kind of film you have written and stimulates the imagination.
  2. Identify the genre, and the "hook," the twist that makes your story unique.
  3. Create a logline that focuses on one character's dream and whether or not he or she achieves it.
Here's a bonus tip: Once you have organized these three elements of your pitch, the last part of baiting the hook is to see if your "fish" (whoever you are pitching to) is "hungry" for your story. Know your "fish." Research your intended target to ascertain if they are likely to be truly interested in your story. Once you get into the room with him or her, take the time to make the connection by introducing yourself and shake hands with a smile. You should then ask what type of story they are looking for. If the script you intended to pitch doesn't fit their needs, you should also have several other stories in different states of development ready to pitch. Hopefully, one of your alternate stories will be a better fit.

Whichever story you pitch, once you have their attention, go for it, pitch the story, speaking slowly and clearly. The result you are hoping for is that he or she asks to hear more of the story, and after hearing more, wants to then read your script.

Marilyn is offering a FREE 20-minute video screenwriting class to any writer interested in taking their craft to the next level.

Just visit www.MarilynHorowitz.com and click on FREE STUFF.

How To Use The Formative Event Technique To Raise The Stakes In Your Story

When I teach my New York University course Writing The Screenplay In 10 Weeks, I begin with a series of character exercises that allow the student to do deep character work efficiently in order to get them directly to the information they need to begin writing. One of the exercises calls for the student to create a Formative Event that explains why the character must do whatever she or he has to do in the film. This is very useful tool when designing a first draft or revising an existing draft.

The example used in my writing program is taken from the film, The Silence Of The Lambs. The heroine, Clarice Starling, recounts how she was unable to save the spring lambs born on her uncle's farm from being slaughtered. We learn about this Formative Event through her conversation with Hannibal Lector. He observes that her desire to be an FBI agent springs from a deep need to resolve the guilt she feels for not saving the lambs by saving people from violent deaths. So her mission has a double purpose -- to cure the current problem, and to make up for something in the past.

Another example of a Formative Event that creates depth and motivation for a main character can be found in The Wizard of Oz. In the film, Dorothy has already lost one home before she ever sings, "Somewhere Over The Rainbow." She has been orphaned and taken in by her Auntie Em, so her quest for home encompasses a far greater need than to merely return to Kansas.

When you are plotting your own screenplay, try to find some Formative Event from the past that will raise the stakes. While this is relatively easy when crafting a first draft, it takes a little more work when working on a rewrite or finished draft that hasn't sold. Reverse engineering the back-story after you have already written your plot is a trick I teach to my advanced students and I am how happy to share it with you as a bonus.

Here's how it works: Let's look at the film, In The Line Of Fire. The hero, Frank Horrigan, is a Secret Service agent who failed to protect John F. Kennedy when he was shot in Texas. This is Frank’s Formative Event. The plot concerns Frank's obsessive efforts to prevent a second president from being killed. The subplot of his romance with fellow agent, Lilly Raines, also echoes the past -- he lost his wife because of his work, and would have to give up his work to win Lilly. What might have been a fairly irrelevant subplot takes on deeper meaning because there's a past sin to undo. Because of Frank’s past, the stakes begin at a very high level and are pushed to the limit from the moment the story begins, because he has to resolve the past before he can have a future.

How to do the exercise:
  1. Write a sentence encapsulating your current plot. For example, if your film were In The Line Of Fire, you might describe the story as: An aging Secret Service Agent finally gets a chance to save a president.
  2. Look at your description of the action and ask yourself whether something similar happened to your character before the story began? Whatever answer you get will describe a Formative Event. In our example, Horrigan's Formative Event was that he was on duty when John F. Kennedy was shot, and failed to save him. Knowing this raises the jeopardy in the story much higher, because Frank has already failed and this is a second chance.
  3. Think of a Formative Event for your main character that is similar to an event or plot line you described in your previous answer:
    ___________________________________________________________________________
  4. Now try to restructure your story line as follows:

    Because of the Formative Event________________________________, my main character has to overcome _________________________________ in the plot, which will allow him or her resolve the past and move on.
This technique works equally well with the villain or obstacle and can humanize them. Try it!

Marilyn is offering a FREE 20-minute video screenwriting class to any writer interested in taking their craft to the next level.

Just visit www.MarilynHorowitz.com and click on FREE STUFF.

How To Improve Your Plot By Asking Three Questions About Your Main Character

One of my students was utterly stuck on a rewrite because he felt the plot had become convoluted and contrived. The story was about how an accountant helped recover millions of dollars stolen from the Jews by the Nazis during World War 11, risking his life in the process. In the course of the screenplay, the mousy accountant picks up a shotgun and discovers he likes using it. This change from mild-mannered to murderous came too abruptly and without sufficient motivation for the screenplay to flow. Although the second half of Act 2 of the script became a well-structured action movie, the third act once again fell flat, although there was lots of violence and the bad guys were killed. My student was ready to abandon the project when he came to see me.

Over the years, I have learned that many seeming plot problems are the result of the writer not knowing his or her hero or heroine well enough. I dug into my bag of tricks and asked three questions:
  1. When is your main character's birthday?
  2. Was anyone famous born on his or her birthday?
  3. What's the relationship between your main character and his or her parents?
There was a pause, and then my student, a strapping ex-quarterback type suddenly began to sob in my office! I handed him a box of tissues. After he calmed down, he said, " I was born on Hitler's birthday. That's why I wrote this script."

I nodded. "Thank you for sharing, but it's not about your birthday, it's about your hero's. When is it?"

There was a pause, and then my student leaned forward. "Of course! My hero shares my curse."

"What about his parents?"

"Mine were concentration camp survivors -- and so are his."

I nodded, pleased. He looked unsure, "Can I do this? Can I use my stuff from my own life?"

"Who else's can you use?"

He thought about it, then took out his notebook and made a note. "Okay, I get it -- the accountant's parents were survivors and he was told all his life about the money that was stolen from them. He was filled with a burning desire to find it and return it to his parents among others."

"Yes, now we're getting somewhere -- but not far enough. Why did you make him so timid? What was his relationship with his parents?"

My student said, "my father..."

"No, think of what your character's father was like."

"Every loud noise, every sight of a man in uniform or a gun would cause my hero's father to tremble uncontrollably, and to tell stories about how he'd suffered in the camps. As a result, my main character grew up afraid. On top of that, his mother told endless stories of the wealth they had lost in the war as she cooked over a hotplate in their tiny poverty stricken apartment."

"Very good, "I started to say, but he was already at the door.

"Okay, I can do this." He smiled, waved and left. Four weeks later I received a fully revised script that was on the road to becoming excellent.

Here's the exercise:
  1. Decide what date your character's birthday is.
  2. Find out who else was born on that day. If no one relevant shares the day, reverse the process and find a date that a relevant public figure was born on and give that date to your hero or heroine. For example, if your main character were a struggling actress, have her be born on June 1 as Marilyn Monroe was, and see how that affects your character’s motivation.
  3. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Write from the main character's point of view as if you were the character about a specific childhood birthday experience and how the parents were or were not a part of it. My student might have written pretending that he was the accountant, "On my 13th birthday, my father gave me a gold watch, the only thing that was left of the family fortune. At that moment, I swore to get that money back."
In summary, by asking these three questions and answering them, you can easily improve you plot -- even if it's already pretty good.

How An Overheard Conversation Can Improve Your Plot

I was writing a new story about two characters regaining their faith in love, but was a stuck about how to move the plot forward to where their differing religious upbringings cause them to question their assumptions about what "having faith" means. After a few hours, I gave up and went to lunch.

Since it was Saint Patrick’s Day, I went with my assistant to the local Irish pub. My prayer to be unstuck was answered in the form of an overheard conversation at the next table, between a young couple, clearly infatuated with each other, who were drinking Guinness and sharing an order of fish and chips.

The movie star handsome young man had reddish hair, a green sweatshirt that read, "Cast me -- I'm Irish." The young woman was a pretty redhead, also dressed in green.

The young man took a swig of beer and said:

" I'm up for the part of the son in this new play. The father is from Dublin and was raised Catholic. He has a patron saint that he talks to when he gets in trouble."

The girl nodded and said,” Cool. And what is the purpose of having a patron saint?"

The young man was surprised. "Seriously?"

The young woman frowned, "Seriously. I don't know from saints."

The young man, now adopting a heavy Irish brogue explained: " It's like having a lawyer who can talk to God on your behalf."

The young woman took a bite of fish and said: "So the play is about a man asking his patron saint to intervene with God?"

The young man nodded and fed her a French fry. " I would be the second lead."

"And you're okay with that? Being the second lead?"

The young man laughed, "The way I was raised, you're always the second lead."

"Who's the first lead?"

"God is."

The young woman was silent for a long moment, and then picked up her beer glass, and said, " To the first lead, then."

They clinked and drank -- and I rejoiced! I had the key to the scene I'd been stuck on. Later, at my computer, I nailed the scene by loosely recreating the dialogue I'd overheard at lunch into the imaginary world of my story. This allowed me to advance the plot by having my main character overhear and respond to a similar conversation to the one on which I had eavesdropped.

One example of a film that uses this technique effectively is The Godfather. At the wedding in the beginning of the movie, Kay Adams attends a wedding with boyfriend Michael Corleone. As they eat, she overhears the family assassin, Luca Brasi, rehearsing aloud the speech he is planning to make to Don Corleone, Michael's father. She asks Michael who is the scary man talking to himself is. Michael then tells her the story of how his father strong-armed a producer by making him "an offer he couldn't refuse." Michael then comments that the values in his tale pertain to his family, but not to him. This scene not only has advanced the plot, but also set up the conflict of values between Kay and Michael that runs throughout the movie.

From this example, you can see how powerful this technique can be. Completing this exercise may also yield surprisingly profound and dramatically efficient results.

Here's The Overheard Conversation Exercise:

Set a timer for 15 minutes.

Think of something you overheard recently and use it as the basis for a new scene in your current project.

Write a scene between your characters, trying to use as much of the actual dialogue as you can remember.

Good luck and happy writing! Remember, Don't get it right, get it written.

The Three Most Common Rewriting Challenges and How To Fix Them

During the past week, I began private coaching with a team rewriting a novel and with a screenwriter who’s rewriting a new screenplay at the request of her agent. In the same week, my private class on rewriting, Finish Your Script began and has nine students, each of whom are each rewriting a screenplay or a novel. Each project is a first, second or third draft, and all tell interesting stories and are well written. They all need work because each story suffers from one or more of the three most common rewriting challenges I find in most of the projects I work on: A passive hero or heroine, an overcomplicated or oversimplified plot, and a lack of suspense.

Here are three exercises that will be helpful.

To Cure Problem: Ask the Right Question.

Passive hero syndrome is the number one challenge for a rewriter. There are two possible reasons: The character's wants and needs are subordinated to the plot or the hero or heroine was passive from the conception of the story. The passive lead character is one who reacts to the events in your story, not one who acts upon it. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker actively wants to stop the Empire because it killed his father and aunt and uncle. Luke is a strong example of an active hero. In contrast, in Avatar, Jake Sully merely reacts to events until finally, in Act 3, he takes charge, but in my opinion, this change is not motivated and not plausible. What if he'd had something to prove, such as avenging his brother's death or a moral conviction?

This would have strengthened the entire plot and made the conclusion powerful.

The Exercise: Ask yourself Question #3 of The Four Magic Questions of Screenwriting: Who or what would my main character "die" for (a literal or symbolic death)? When answering, make sure that the plot events push the hero or heroine willingly to make difficult choices in order to achieve a resolution. For example, Luke in Star Wars was ready to die for the Empire, but Jake in Avatar had to be pushed into doing the right thing.

To Solve Problem: Make a Scene-by-Scene Outline.

Over complication or over simplification of a plot is the hardest thing for the writer to see because you are writing from inside the screenplay and therefore cannot be objective.

The Exercise: Prepare a scene-by-scene outline, and then make a separate list of all the information that leads to the resolution of the plot. Plot and character repetitions will be easy to spot and relatively simple to fix. If there is not enough plot, you will also be able to spot what's missing. Another trick is to tell your story verbally to a colleague and you'll hear what's wrong right away. Alternatively, if another human isn't available, you can tell it to yourself and tape it.

To Create Suspense: Think of Every Story as Being a Mystery.

Every good story has a mystery. Even broad comedies such as The Hangover or dramas such as An Education have mysteries. In The Hangover, the plot revolves around getting the bridegroom back to the wedding on time, and in An Education, the mystery is will she marry him.

The Exercise: Watch a classic mystery such as Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and note how he doles out key information. Make a list of the information conveyed in each scene, studying how he teases the viewer until the reveal at the end. Feel free to use any film that is more relevant to your particular screenplay, and follow the same process. Then review your Scene-by-Scene outline and analyze your story using my golden rule: Never tell your audience more than they need to know to understand the scene they are reading or watching. You may be giving away the story too soon or, conversely, not planting enough clues so the audience can follow the character's emotional journey. The comparison with the other film will speed your understanding and decision-making.

To recap, I have attempted to provide solutions for the three most common challenges faced when rewriting a screenplay: a passive hero or heroine, an overcomplicated story, and lack of suspense.

Please let me know which of these techniques helped the most.

Good luck!

What's For Dinner?

Setting a scene at a dinner is an amazing way to raise the stakes and to provide new opportunities for character development, both from the situation itself as well as the ongoing plot. A good example is in the film “Seven”, a thriller in which a retiring detective (Morgan Freeman) has to train the new detective (Brad Pitt) who is taking over his job while a serial murder case is still in progress. The new detective's wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) invites the retiring detective to dinner at their home.

After a difficult meal where the two detectives reveal their conflicting views of the case, they reach an impasse. Suddenly, the table begins to shake as a subway train passes outside the apartment window. The three diners collapse into helpless, uncontrollable laughter and because of this shared experience, they bond. By placing them in a home setting, it allows them to agree to solve the case together in a way they couldn’t otherwise.

A comic example is the classic first dinner scene in the movie “Moonstruck”, where Johnny (Nicholas Cage) proposes to Loretta (Cher) in the Italian restaurant. This scene is what sets the entire story in motion. How can she not accept in such a romantic situation? She has no time to think because he proposes during dinner, in a public place and her inner conflict is revealed when she insists that he get on his knees because she wants a more traditional proposal.

Now, think of a critical scene in your screenplay that is not working as well as you would like and see what happens if you add to or change the situation so that the characters are at dinner together. Consider this a practice exercise. Even if you don't end up using it in the script, you may find out new details that you didn't know before.

Here's the exercise:
  1. Select the scene in your current project you are going to practice with.
  2. Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Write without stopping, making sure you have the scene reach a crisis. Answer the questions listed below.
    3. Who is having dinner (For example, Somerset, Mr. and Mrs. Mills) What: Is being eaten specifically (For example, Manicotti) When: Time of day and the season/weather Why are they having dinner? What is the occasion? For example, Johnny is leaving to visit his dying mother in Sicily. Where: Location, i.e. busy public restaurant or at home
  3. Write the scene and put it aside for a bit.
  4. Make a list of 10 great dinner scenes in movies that you love.
Here's my short list, in no particular order:
  1. The scene in Silence Of The Lambs where the guards bring Hannibal Lector the extra rare lamb chops and he murders them while Bach plays on the soundtrack.
  2. The scene in Alien where the monster comes out of John Hurt's chest
  3. The scene on the train in North By Northwest
  4. The dinner scene in When Harry Met Sally after they have slept together
  5. The eating scene in Tom Jones
  1. Now watch one or two of them and study each scene to see why they are or aren't good. Is there anything in what you're watching that inspires you?
  2. Now read your practice scene and improve it using what you have just learned.
  3. Go have a snack -- you deserve it.
Bon Apetit!

Use the Cultural Context of Your Screenplay To Improve Your Plot

It's the end of the year, a time when we often reflect about recent past events. It's hard to believe President Obama has been inaugurated, the Jay Leno Show moved to a ten o'clock timeslot, and the Yankees have won their 27th world series. What we often don't do is take a moment to connect what was happening in our personal lives at the moment these larger events occurred. Making this connection for the characters in your screenplay can be the key to turning the script into a profound story instead of a superficial confection. For example, in the movie Forrest Gump it's because the events in the larger world drive the plot that the lovable simple-minded character played by Tom Hanks assumes heroic proportions.

Here's a practical application of this idea that worked for one of my students who was writing a period screenplay about a lesbian who finds true love. The script is set in San Francisco during the 1970s and the heroine lives a few doors down from Harvey Milk. The climax of the screenplay was a gay wedding at the City Hall, but this had no significant impact in large measure because there had been no mention of the larger political turmoil of what eventually led to the assassination of Harvey Milk at the same City Hall. Once she connected the story indirectly to Harvey Milk and made the homosexual activism part of the story, the screenplay came to life.

Here's how to do the exercise:

Step 1: Define the year (or years) in which your screenplay is set

For example, one of my novelist students is writing a book that spans 20 years. I suggested that she create a time line of world events for her book. She discovered that her love story spanned the entire Gulf War. Even though it's a love story, not a war story, adding contextual references to the war and introducing a secondary character that was a soldier was a way to take an interesting story and make it fascinating and relevant.

Step 2: List 3 world events that happened during your screenplay

For example, the film A Walk On The Moon takes place during the summer of both Woodstock and the Moon Landing, and the juxtaposition of these events will create an overall cultural mood making make your story more concrete and defining the plot.

Step 3: Consider how the cultural context of any story can be another character

Consider how in the film Casablanca how the German invasion of Paris functions like a character – a villain or catalyst to push the lovers apart, and later how the Nazis create the frame for the difficult and noble choices the characters must make.

Step 4: Rewrite a current scene to explore the potential of how the cultural context could shape the plot of your script

Select a key scene in a screenplay you are working on that just doesn’t seem to be as significant or effective as you would like. Select one of the three events you identified in Step 2, and add it in some way to the scene. For example in Casablanca there's the famous scene where Ilsa comes to Rick and they "remember" their romance in Paris in flashback.

If this were your scene you would add the cultural context -- the German's invading Paris. So if the scene you are going to work on has the characters drinking in a bar, and the TV is currently showing sports, you might change what's on the TV screen to a newscast of the event you selected and have the characters express their reactions. Try it and see what happens, you may be happily surprised at the improvement.

To recap, to create profundity in your screenplay, use the cultural context as a character.

Happy 2010!

How To Create More Suspense in Act II: Use an event with a deadline

What do the World Series and Halloween have in common? Aside from the fact that wearing a costume or a uniform is part of the deal, they are both defining events that happen at a certain time. Events with deadlines can be very useful as potential "ticking clocks" in your screenplay. Adding an event with a clear deadline is a great way to shore up any kind of story. Holidays are a good example, but other kinds of events that are germane to the arena of your story can be equally effective.

In my “Finish Your Script” class a few nights ago, five of my incredibly talented and prolific students who are writing in different genres had all hit a mid-script wall and were struggling with what should happen next in Act II, part 2 of their screenplays. ?What was needed was a way to create suspense, a sense of mystery that would tantalize the viewer to keep watching until the end. How could this be done for all five scripts, regardless of genre?

The answer in all five cases was to take whatever the event was in the third act climax, revisit the first act, and revise it in order to lay in hints that let the audience know where the film is headed, almost from page 1.

By using a deadline, either subtly or explicitly, to highlight the amount of time that will pass between the moments when the event hinted at in the first act until the event occurs in Act III is a great way to add that tension that will keep the audience on the edge of their seats. This can be done in a number of ways, such as by placing reminders in the dialogue about an impending deadline or by using such devices as a newscast in the background of a scene where the impending disaster or presidential election is discussed. A voiceover can be the right answer, but should be used only as a last resort unless it's a fundamental structural element.

For example, in the film, Election, we know immediately that the big event that's happening in the school is the upcoming Student Council election. The action of the film is driven by the fervent desire of a teacher, Jim McAllister, who does not want an ambitious student, Tracy Flick, to win because she has wronged his friend. In Act I, a voiceover introduces us to Jim’s passionate anger towards Tracy Flick for destroying his friend’s career. The vehemence in Jim's monologue creates organic curiosity and anticipation in the audience: how far will he really go? As the film progresses, Jim becomes increasingly desperate and it's only a matter of time until he loses control of his rage. Because we are aware of the deadline of the election, we stay involved, even as the film seems to detour in Act II, part 2, when he has the affair with his neighbor.

So to recap, the question asked was how to get past the mid-script wall? The answer is to create more suspense in Act II by going back and revising Act I! Revising Act I to accentuate and underline the Act III climactic event (for example, the counting of the votes in an Election) is the solution to getting your Act II to be both well structured and highly entertaining.

A last tip: This technique works for all genres. The Student Council election described above is only one particular type of event, but you could easily replace it with a dinner party, Halloween, a presidential election or any other deadline and achieve a similar result. Other successful examples are the use of New Year's Eve to precipitate Harry committing to Sally, the president's speech in In the Line of Fire, or the baptism of the child in The Godfather. Personal events such as birthdays, anniversaries, and payments due can also be effective. Even the simplest deadline of having to get up in the morning can be very powerful as evidenced in the film, Groundhog Day.

Exercise: Pick an event that is relevant to your screenplay and see if by planting it in Act I, mentioning it throughout Act II and having it happen in Act III you can't raise the level of suspense and keep your audience on the edge of their seats.

I also suggest you take a look at the breakdown of “Pretty Woman” in Movie Outline 3's reference library, in which the element of “time pressure” and the ticking clock is established at the end of Act I (Step 8). Vivian charges by the hour so Edward decides to eliminate this pressure and pay her for the night. Then in Act II (Step 13) Edward decides to hire Vivian for the entire week and here is where the deadline is set which pays off in Act III (Step 44). This is where the relationship reaches its end game and their week together is finally over. Had the deadline not been set up in Act I and Act II this scene would have no emotional impact and be redundant.

Good luck and happy writing.

How To Improve Your Characters' Dialogue

Most of the writers I work with struggle with dialogue at some point in the writing process. Here's one way to improve your craft fast.

In most American films the characters speak in their own version of the English language, which reflects the special world they live in. Within that world, each character's speech is unique, as he or she uses words and references specific not only to the general arena of the script, but also to their upbringing, education and intellectual interests. The most primary source of how people speak is what they first heard, usually what was said at home.

One of the things that I work on as a coach when trying to help other writers improve their dialogue is to explore this aspect of their characters' backgrounds.

In The Godfather, Michael's speech is always somewhat formal as if English were not his first language. He sounds very much like his father, who first spoke in Italian. If you look at the film again, notice the similarities not only in content but also in word choice and arrangement. There is no doubt that Michael is his "father's son", in more ways than one!

Another example is in the film, Moonstruck, where both father and daughter respond to verbal confrontations by saying, "I don't want to talk about it," and later in the movie, the mother tells the daughter, "you're just like your father."

So, the one key question to ask yourself is: How did my character's parents speak and how did that affect my character's speech?

How to do the exercise:

Step 1: Set a timer for fifteen minutes.

Step 2: Writing as if you are your main character or the obstacle or villain, write continuously about childhood experiences such as favorite and least favorite meal and clothes, first pet, first school day, first bike, birth of siblings, etc.

Step 3: When you're done, take a highlighter and note any unusual or repetitive words or phrases.

Step 4: Write a brief description of the first time the character ever heard that special word or phrase, keeping the example from Moonstruck in mind. For example, if that were your character, you would write about when the first time she ever heard her father say, "I don't want to talk about it."

Doing this exercise will open your imagination to other conversations in the early life of your characters, and will help you improve your characters’ dialogue right away.

Let me know what you discovered.

How Remembering A Tragic Historical Event Can Help Us Improve our Plot

A catastrophic world event can provide a historical benchmark and advance the plot of your screenplay.

Asking and answering the question, "Where were you when..." a disaster happened defines us because our answer reveals how we see our relationship to that world event. The same degree of character revelation in response to this question can also be true for our main characters.

The world event you select will also reveal the age and the period that the character is living in. Asking where you were when Lincoln was shot, or where you were when America dropped the bomb on Hiroshima adds context and relevance to your story.

In When Harry Met Sally, Harry’s asked by a friend if the new girl he’s dating isn’t a little young for him. Harry agrees, saying that when he asked his date where she was when Kennedy was shot, she was surprised and asked when Ted Kennedy had been shot. This was a cleverly indirect way of showing their too-great age gap. We don't learn the details of where Harry was when Kennedy was shot, but it’s clear that he considered it a defining moment in his life.

Using the open-ended question, “Where were you when...” can be an amazingly sharp tool when you combine it with The Three Levels of Conflict, a technique I use when teaching writers to plot better by using their characters’ emotional conflicts to generate original events. Plumbing the depths of your character can be a messy business, so an organizing principle is needed to allow the emotional depths of the characters to drive the plot in a methodical way.

The Three Levels of Conflict are:

Level I: The Inner Conflict – This covers the emotional reasons why the character has not already realized his or her dream. For example, Harry has no ability to sustain an emotional connection with a woman, but he doesn't even see it as a problem.

Level 2: The Outer Conflict – This addresses the challenges presented in the plot, so in our example, Harry is trying to avoid getting involved with a new partner by clinging to the belief that men and women can't be friends.

Level 3: The Societal Conflict – This is about the larger implications of the other two levels as they relate to the world as a whole. This level of conflict addresses the accepted belief that everyone should have a partner, and the plot revolves around Harry avoiding this issue by dating many women, including those far too young for him.

This key scene gives us a revealing insight into Harry’s situation. Kennedy being shot doesn't function as a plot event so much as a kind of divining rod to let us see Harry’s Three Levels Of Conflict in action. In another film, In The Line Of Fire, this same tragic event does function as a key part of the plot, although it's part of the backstory, so the five-step exercise can be used in various ways.

How to do the exercise:

Step 1: Pick a world tragedy.

Step 2: Cast yourself as an anonymous interviewer.

Step 3: Ask your character the following questions, and answer them as if you were the character, using the first-person voice.

Question A: Where were you when the event occurred?
Question B: What did you do?
Question C: How did this event change your life?

Step 4: Repeat the exercise for your villain or obstacle.

Step 5: Write a short practice scene in which the hero/heroine and villain or obstacle tell each other where they were, and see how the characters interact.

This is a powerful exercise, because having your characters engage in a different way – that is, discussing, not fighting – will naturally improve your plot.

Interviewing Your Characters

Using A Real Life Experience to Get More Creative Fast

It's a hot humid summer in New York City where I am based, and it's not the most exciting or creative time of the year. What should screenwriters do when they're feeling a little depleted, whether it's from the heat or overwork?

My suggestion is to get away from your computer and to go live a little. There is nothing like a change of scenery to get your brain simmering. Often the real life experiences you have by talking to someone you've never met before, seeing two lovers kiss or overhearing an amazing conversation may be just what you need to give you the spark for your next scene or an insight into a character you can't seem to connect with.

For example, I was feeling creatively flat so I forced myself to go out for a walk. I entered a little park on West 72nd Street and Broadway and saw a bearded, ragged homeless man sitting on the sidewalk making a meal of half-eaten things he had retrieved from the trash. I handed him a few dollar bills. "Thank you," he said, and took the money. He examined the bills and then handed them back to me with a smile, saying "I don't use them, but thank you."

Of course I immediately wanted to talk to him and find out how he lived on a daily basis, and to develop a story about someone in our society who manages to survive without using cash. More importantly, the exchange made me think about what money means to me? I raced home and turned on the computer to write because this self-query brought me back to a time-honored technique I developed years ago that always works called, "Interviewing Your Main Character." Funny, how I forgot to remember to use my own technique! Here is an exercise in how to use it yourself:

How To Do The Exercise:
  1. Find a question that came up as a result of a recent foray into the real world. In the example above, the question I thought of after my encounter with the homeless man as: what are my beliefs about money? Now, ask yourself what you learned from your experience. For example, I learned that I think money is very important, though I often pretend it isn't.
  2. Cast yourself as an anonymous interviewer.
  3. Formulate four questions that were stimulated by your real life experience.
  4. Interview your main characters. Type the questions as the anonymous interviewer and then answer as if you were the character in your own script.
For example, the questions I, as the interviewer, asked were:
  1. How do you feel about money?
  2. What you would do if you were stuck somewhere without money?
  3. What you would be willing to do for money?
  4. What would you not be willing to do for money?
I then pretended to be the main character, the villain and the love interest and answered the questions. A bonus tip: before you write, sit as the character you are writing as sits. You will get their "voice" easily and write something you can use.

As a result of my doing the exercise, I made a real connection with my characters, and wrote a new scene! Try it and see how it works for you.

Be True to Yourself.. and Smart with your Script

In my private class last night, I was asked, "How do I choose my story?" The answer to that question is another question: When do you choose your story? Do you start writing it first or do you first research what sells?

The most important principle in my method of writing a screenplay is: Create for yourself first. You are your own first audience, and it seems obvious that if you don't like your story, no one else will either. But, sadly, I see so many writers – in their attempts to be commercially successful – take on a story that they think will sell. This can be a savvy choice, but if you are not connected emotionally to your material, it will be many times harder to make the script any good. Also, part of what helps us write screenplays is the knowledge we’ve gained from the hundreds of movies we've seen. So if you decide to write in a genre you don't know or like, please understand that you will end up having to do much more preparation than if you work in a style you know and love.

When you are writing your first draft, let the story tell you what it wants to be. Truly original material can't be judged in advance because it doesn't exist yet, and there are no benchmarks. Write the script however you feel it and then assess it for the marketplace later.

When you are trying to sell your script, you have to tailor your viewpoint and ask yourself if you would pay to see the movie of your screenplay. If you answer that question affirmatively, you must then consider objectively who – and how large – your audience would be. You can research this by comparing your script to completed films and finding out how well they did at the box office. I am not suggesting that you make changes based on this research, but you will get a clear idea of your screenplay's chances.

You can also determine the right people to send your script to by looking at a similar movie’s credits and finding out which producers are already making films like yours. The Internet is your friend – there are many great sites, such as www.imdb.com, with information that will help you sell your screenplay. It’s also important to read trade magazines, but take the information with a grain of salt. Just because a script is being produced that’s similar to yours doesn’t mean you should scrap your idea. You just need to find an original tweak for your plot.

To summarize, in your first draft, let the story and your own interests tell you where to start. Then before putting your script into the marketplace, evaluate your screenplay based on the factors we've just discussed.

If you genuinely like it, others probably will too. But the most important thing to remember is: Don't get it right get it written.

How To Make Your Third Act Fresher and Better

If the ending of every story has already been told how do you make yours original? An ending is either happy or sad – it’s your point of view and beliefs that create something new.

In order to be original, we writers must have an understanding that the world has gone through a huge change because of the recent financial upheaval, and how that has affected the way people live. The key to writing the new Act III is seeing how the world has changed and writing stories that show us how to live better. Many people have lost their jobs and lost money on investments and – as a result –are being forced to re-examine their core values and to reinvent themselves. The ending that was expected in real life is no longer there, so the new Act III must offer both fresh possibility and the hope that it's never too late for us to have an exciting future.

Successful new movie plots echo our everyday experiences as well as providing an escape. So a story like Up, in which an old man gets to be an action hero after his wife dies, is a perfect example of the kind of film that offers confirmation of the hope that we can reinvent ourselves and have a new adventure at any point in our lives. Another recent film, Easy Virtue, is a comedy in which an older woman finds love with a younger man whose father is in an awful marriage, and in the end falls in love with his son's bride. And this turns out to be a good thing. The message of the film is that it's never too late to find true love and to live a new life.

The world around you must be considered when designing the plot because people go to see movies that not only help them escape, but that allow them to understand their life experiences and how to deal with them.

To find a better ending, do the following exercise:

For our example, we will use the film, The Godfather I, which is a film that uses the old ending.
  1. Briefly describe the ending you currently have for your screenplay. For example, if your film were The Godfather, you might write: Michael Corleone takes over the family business.
  2. Now describe an opposite ending for your screenplay. For example, what if in The Godfather, Michael never went to the hospital after his father was shot, so he doesn’t save his dad and lives happily every after with his wife, Kay.
  3. Briefly describe the wildest, most unlikely ending. For example, if your film were The Godfather, what if Michael Corleone’s wife had lived and he'd stayed in Sicily and bought a vineyard?
This last example shows how you could take an old ending and turn it into a new one. In this alternate ending, for The Godfather, Michael chooses a new adventure and reinvents himself. Now, ask yourself how could your main character do this in your screenplay? In light of the current depressing economic conditions, your characters, like your audience, must find new paths and new ways of prospering. Good movies can inspire us to get past our own old boundaries and try harder to live our dreams. Looking for a new ending for your story will allow you to gain insight into your own experiences and discover a new perspective in how to live your own life, and give you a better shot at getting your movie made.

Use the Four Magic Questions Of Screenwriting to Find the Emotional Logic in Your Story

In the midst of writing, it’s easy to let your hero or heroine become a slave to your plot. This results in wooden writing, because characters will behave in a way that defies emotional logic. For example, we’ve all seen horror movies where the heroine runs up the stairs instead of searching for the nearest exit.

The Four Magic Questions Of Screenwriting is a technique I developed to help the writer create plot and character together using a simple set of questions.

The Four Magic Questions of Screenwriting are:
  1. What is the main character’s dream?
  2. What is the main character’s worst nightmare?
  3. Who or what would they “die” for? (Literally or figuratively)
  4. What is the resolution of the dream or a new dream?
Let’s use the film The Godfather and its hero, Michael Corleone, as an example of how to apply the 4MQS.

In case you haven’t seen The Godfather recently, here’s a brief synopsis using the 4MQS that shows how the emotional logic drives of the events of the plot:

Michael Corleone – a war hero and the youngest son of the powerful head of Don Vito Corleone, one of New York’s five mob families – wants nothing to do with the family business. So Michael’s dream is to live a life free from the Mafia.

When his father’s shot, Michael is forced to save the don’s life by shooting the men who attempted to kill him. Being dragged into the violence is Michael’s nightmare.

While hiding out in Sicily, Michael falls in love, but his father’s enemies kill his new bride. He would have died for her, but didn’t have the chance.

Heartbroken and hardened, Michael returns to America and, in an orgy of violence, takes control of the business and prepares to lead the family into a new era. Michael forfeits his dream and becomes the new godfather.

Here’s how to do the three-part exercise:
  1. Write a brief synopsis of the plot of your own screenplay.
  2. Answer the 4MQS for your main character.
    • What is your main character's dream?
    • What is your main character's nightmare?
    • Who or what would your main character literally or figuratively die for?
    • Will your character realize his/her dream or find a new dream?
  3. The final step is to compare the synopsis with the 4MQS answers for your main character and make sure that each one complements the other. If not, consider making some adjustments.
Remember that even though films are made at least three times – once when they’re written, once when they are filmed and once when they are edited, the screenplay is the place where you, the writer, are in total control. When you allow your characters to behave in an emotionally consistent way, your plot will become convincing and coherent. Now, get back to work and tape the answers to your computer and continue to strive for emotional logic.

How Would Your Main Character Escape?

Getting your audience to connect with your screenplay on a gut level should be the goal of the screenwriter, whether writing a violent action film or a comedy.

But when actually writing the screenplay, sometimes it's hard to know how your hero or heroine and villain would deal with a moment of extreme emotional stress. This is critical knowledge to have, and gaining it can be fun. Placing your hero or heroine and villain in tough situations that they – for emotional reasons – must physically escape, is an effective way to move your story forward and to create a more dynamic relationship between these key characters.

Recently, I watched a beloved film, Garden State, to prepare for a class on a new method for screenplay structure I've developed. In the film, the hero, Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) returns to his family home in New Jersey to attend his mother's funeral, and after the service escapes on an old-fashioned motorcycle with a sidecar. As he drives off, moody rock in a melancholy key plays on the soundtrack, perfectly underscoring the emotional quality of the film. It's a moment we all have really felt - that we must flee the situation we're in.

As a viewer, I was moved by this moment in the film. It spoke to me and made me care passionately about what happened.

Good writing creates an immediate emotional connection with audiences, which keeps them watching until the story is done. I have taught writers to do this by putting themselves in the story before they write.

When doing the following exercise, I want to encourage all of you to write organically, from a place inside of you that is resonant, so that you actually feel what you are trying to communicate to others as you write it.

The exercise is to ask yourself what you would do to get away from an unbearable confrontation, then to consider what your main character's and your villain's escape method would be and what the soundtrack is. For example, in The Silence Of The Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is moved to another prison and kills the two guards, then escapes on a hospital gurney. The accompanying music is soothing, luminous Bach.

Exercise: Part 1

The first part of the exercise is to write a brief scene that drives your characters to that moment of crisis. For example, in Garden State, the scene that leads to the crisis and need to escape takes place in his father, Gideon's, home office after the funeral. The talk is civil, desultory until Gideon can't resist a vicious comment that makes Andrew turn and silently leave the room.

In the next scene, Andrew's very upset and enters the family garage. He rips the tarp off a hidden object as if he were completing a magic trick, revealing the old-fashioned motorcycle with a sidecar. He drives off in state of fury. Andrew's anger is what creates a powerful sequence that will keep us riveted to the screen because we are connected to his feelings.

Now try this for your main character by describing the action that leads to the moment of escape:

Exercise: Part 2

Now write about the specific method that would be used to escape.
Write how you would escape:
And the music that would be playing:


Now repeat the exercise for your hero or heroine. How would he or she escape: And the music that would be playing:

Now repeat the exercise for your villain:
How would he or she escape:
And the music that would be playing:

Good work! I hope you found this exercise useful and will make a habit of imagining situations using this exercise, as it will lead you to more effective screenwriting.

Deadlines Make Scripts better, Every Time!

As spring approaches and we're all trying to diet to make our Memorial Day bathing-suit deadlines, it seems like a good time to consider how we can use this season to make the plots of our screenplays richer. One way is to provide a deadline or "ticking clock" to add pressure and suspense to our scripts. For example, I have to do many things in the next hour, which include writing this script tip. Suddenly, my day - which is always interesting - is fraught with danger. What if I don't get this done in time? What will happen? Whose life will I impact? Obviously I'm being dramatic here, but that is my point - use the element of time to give your screenplay more punch.

There are many examples we can look at to see how a deadline juices up a story. What kinds of story ideas immediately jump to mind when we think of deadlines? The movie Speed is a classic example. The Bank Job is another, as is Run Lola Run. The key to using deadlines is to think in terms of what happens if the deadline is missed. In Speed, the bus will be blown up, in Lola, her boyfriend will commit a robbery, and in The Bank Job, they will lose their window of opportunity to complete the theft.

To give your story an extra jolt, do the following exercise:

Make a list of the major events in your screenplay. This process requires a basic knowledge of the 3-act structure often used in movies in which the action is separated into three basic movements, each with its own dramatic purpose. Act 1 is the beginning or Setup, Act 2 is the middle or the Conflict, and Act 3 is the end or the Resolution.

The key is to understand that you can use different kinds of deadlines for Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3, and the more deadlines the better.

For example, in Act 1 of Some like It Hot, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) must make the train to Florida or be shot by the Mob. The rest of the film depends on this first act deadline.

Now, look at your list of the events that occur in Act 1 of your screenplay. Is there something you can expand upon and create a "ticking clock?"

Now let's look at how to punch up Act 2. In my writing system, this act is reorganized as having two sections of equal length, which I describe as being Act 2, part 1 and Act 2, part 2. Using this two-part structure for Act 2, you can create two deadlines, one in the first half, and one in the second half to really give your story a huge burst of energy and keep your audience on the edge of their seats!

For an example of Act 2 deadlines, think of The Godfather. In the first part of Act 2, Michael (Al Pacino) goes to visit his father in the hospital and must save him before the bad guys come to kill him. In the second part of Act 2, he must shoot the drug dealer and the cop before they get a chance to murder his father.

Now look at the list of events for your Act 2 and see if there are at least one, maybe two deadlines that you can introduce or expand. Use these deadlines to tighten the suspense in your screenplay.

Finally, let's look at Act 3. This will be the easiest act for which to create deadlines because the final crisis occurs here. In this act, you would use a deadline to create a further complication that would in some way delay the final act from occurring. It can be something as small as not being able to call a cab, as in When Harry Met Sally.

Using the technique of creating deadlines for each act of your screenplay will increase the excellence of your work and provide more audience enjoyment.

How To Write a Great Twist For Your Third Act

One way to improve a screenplay is to find a way to look at it from another viewpoint - whether the story is to be optimistic or pessimistic. If we take the notion of optimism versus pessimism and look to Aristotle, we can come up with a truly original ending for our scripts. Aristotle defined a "reversal" as being a plot change by which the action veers round to its opposite. According to Aristotle, the best reversals are caused by the main character's recognition of something that causes the reversal, so it doesn't come out of left field, that is, it must be subject to the boundaries of probability or necessity. The reversal arises out of the recognition of something that could have been seen before, but was not. This is where we reach those edges of boundaries that will help you find that original twist you were looking for.

One of the cornerstones of my method is the use of the main character's personality to drive the plot. An example of recognition and reversal occurs in The Line Of Fire. This is Frank Horgan's (Clint Eastwood) recognition that the field office number is an anagram, and that unraveling a different anagram can reveal the secret of the would-be assassin's identity. We have been directed towards a pessimistic ending - that is, it's been set up in Act I that Frank won't catch Leary (John Malkovich) in time, and Act 2 has furthered this expectation, but this recognition of the anagram is what allows for the reversal to create the opposite outcome in the third act. Frank has gone from being pessimistic to being optimistic.

Another example of recognition and reversal occurs in The Usual Suspects, in this case, the reversal is of the audience's expectations. It is the audience's optimistic belief that "Verbal" (Kevin Spacey) is innocent that allows us to enjoy the reversal when he's revealed by his limp to be the perpetrator, and not the victim. We have gone from being optimistic to being pessimistic.

Here's the exercise:

Step 1: First re-read your script or outline and decide what ending is suggested by what you have written or designed. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? Ask yourself whether or not your ending is predictable, that is, does it end the way it's been suggested in the first two acts of the screenplay or outline.

Step 2: Imagine that you are your main character. You are going to write in the first person as that character, and describe from their point of view a different ending than the one you'd planned for Act 3. Remember not to worry about the execution, but have fun imagining another outcome. The first line should read, "I had no idea that..."

If you were writing as Frank In The Line Of Fire, you might write something like this, " I had no idea that I would ever get another chance to catch Leary. I was the same loser I had always been. As I headed for the taxi, the sick taste of failure in my mouth, the young smartass agent rattled off the number for the field office I was being sent to. Then it hit, me - I suddenly knew how to find Leary! It was the old feeling of sureness I hadn't felt since I blew things with Kennedy, and I had no reason to believe in myself, but I had nothing left to lose..."

What you've done here is to allow the character to "tell" you how they made the recognition so that your ending can have a strong reversal! It can almost feel like Magic!

Step 3: Now ask yourself what the opposite ending might be, but don't concern yourself with how you will make it work just yet, just imagine it will be fine. For example, the predictable ending of The Usual Suspects is that "Verbal" is not "Soze", but the opposite ending and reversal of the audience's expectations comes from his realization he is getting away with it and as a result, stops concealing his limp.

When you re-read what you wrote, did you get an unexpected and clever ending? Is it one that you would prefer to use? If so, don't worry yet about how to make the reversal and recognition happen, but commit to making the change in your screenplay. If not, go one step further and ask yourself what is the most unlikely ending? Sometimes that will provoke a new insight. Otherwise, consider that the ending you have is just right, and commit to the best execution possible.

Let's assume you found a new ending. You can now go back and reverse engineer how to make it happen. We do that by revisiting the events of the preceding two acts and finding where the assumptions have been made. In the Line Of Fire, Frank is shown to lack confidence in his own judgment, so by giving him a moment of recognition when he has a gut feeling that the anagram is the key, his confidence is restored. In The Usual Suspects, it's "Verbal/Soze's" supreme confidence that both carries him through and then gives him away at then end.

To summarize: By moving from optimism or pessimism and applying Aristotle's simple principles of reversal and recognition, it's possible to come up with a great new ending for your screenplay.

How To Write A Better Script By Using "Memories"

As screenwriters, one of our most difficult tasks is to structure our ideas so that they will fit into screenplay form. As a writing teacher, one of the biggest problems I often see is that writers with great ideas try to structure their story to conform to screenplay format before they actually have fully created their characters. While this is a good idea in theory, and seems as if it would be more efficient, it often limits a writer's interaction with the material by only providing enough information to fill in the 3-act form, that is, to provide merely an abstract "back story."

This emphasis on the 3-act structure is what frequently blocks the writer from completing his or her screenplay because scripts approached this way are never "whole," that is, the writer never puts the big, ugly mess of their story down on paper for fear it won't fit. The result of working this way is that it tends to keep us from seeing the big picture of our ideas. This is not to say that we shouldn't outline the script and then write it in a methodical manner but I believe that there is a better way to execute this task, and the key is to change the initial interaction the screenwriter has with his or her material.

Many films are adapted from books, and there's a good reason for this beyond the fact that success in one medium suggests success in another - it's because the book was written in a more organic way, with less concern for the final presentation form. As a practical matter, this means that the fiction writer probably knows more about his story than the screenwriter does when he or she embarks on writing a screenplay. The key to writing a better first draft is to allow the writer to know as much as any novelist would, but not necessarily to convey all of that extra information in the script.

In my method, The Horowitz System®, I teach writers to do a series of character exercises, many of which are visual so that they can create a database of knowledge as broad and deep as a fiction writer's but in such a way the information is not just a bunch of facts. Rather, it is a series of images that form a living history as if you'd known your characters in real life for a long time. This trick of reframing our concept of "back story" into "memories" is an amazingly effective way to improve both plot and character.

The Creating Character Memories Exercise:

You are going to "interview" your hero or heroine by asking them a series of questions and allowing them to "answer." The questions you will ask are:
  1. What is your first memory of childhood?
  2. What was your first word?
  3. What was your favorite food as a child?
  4. What did you want to be when you grew up?
  5. Did you have a best friend and who was it?
  6. Did you have a pet and what happened?
  7. What was your worst fear?
Set a timer for 15 minutes and answer the questions, writing in the first person as if you were your main character responding to the interviewer's questions. By writing as if you were your hero or heroine, you will be able to perceive what you have created not as abstract story material, but rather as real events that occurred in your character's life, experiences that you now hold in your imagination in common with your character.

You can repeat this exercise for as many characters as makes sense. This will help your character work, but the best part is that it will really improve your plot work. If past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior, you can now chart how your characters will react to the new occurrences they face in the screenplay you are writing.

How To Use Christmas Eve To Raise The Stakes of Your Screenplay

The Christmas holidays bring both excitement and stress. Determining how your main character feels about holidays can be a fast track to understanding them on a deeper level. Scripts also need a deadline, a "ticking clock", and by placing your hero or heroine in a situation with the added pressure of a holiday is a sure way to raise the stakes in your screenplay.

This is true for holidays in general, but I want to focus on Christmas Eve since that seems to be an ultimate moment in time that can reveal character and heighten the tension in a script, regardless of the genre you're writing in. Here are some examples of how setting a story on Christmas Eve can help:

In A Christmas Carol, which is based on a book by Charles Dickens and seems to be remade once a year, Christmas Eve is used as a catalyst for Scrooge to realize he's capable of love. Scrooge hates the holiday. On the eve, he is visited by ghosts and gains clarity about his life, and learns to love Christmas. In It's A Wonderful Life, George Bailey (James Stewart) is dissatisfied by his life, and becomes suicidal on Christmas Eve. Being shown what a difference he has made helps him both appreciate his life and help save the town.

Love Actually has several plot lines that all reach a crisis on Christmas Eve. A few of them are: The Prime Minister (High Grant) is moved to find Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), the girl he's scorned, because he receives a holiday card from her explaining her suspicious behavior; a little boy (Thomas Sangster) finds out his love is requited when he follows his girl to the airport, and in another subplot, adultery is averted when the wife (Emma Thompson) confronts her wayward husband (Alan Rickman) when she finds an expensive Christmas gift not intended for her.

Try the following exercise for your current screenplay or the next one you are planning to write:

The Christmas Eve Exercise

It's Christmas Eve in the world of your story. Visualize your main character doing what they might be doing on that evening. Is he or she celebrating? Brooding? Committing a crime? This can be a current experience or a past one where something traumatic occurred which affects the current events on your script.

For example, if you were writing Casablanca, you would imagine that Ilsa and Rick were planning to leave together on Christmas Eve, and she stood him up. Using this example, Ilsa would now walk into Rick's Bar on -- you guessed it, Christmas Eve. Imagine how that might have changed their first reunion. If you were writing Die Hard, your hero would be visiting his wife and get caught up in a current situation.

Now take your screenplay and make the same leap of imagination. Write a brief monologue for each character as if the experience has already happened and see if you don't get something helpful for your current script.

For example, if your main character were John McClane, you might write, "Geez. If I'd known that I was going to have to save my wife from a bunch of thieves pretending to be terrorists, I would've brought some extra weapons and would never have taken my shoes off in a strange bathroom. I'm not much on the holidays, but there was something about it being Christmas Eve that really made me realize just how much I loved Holly, and nothing was worth losing her over."

How To Get Mean To Finish Your Script

Last night I held my monthly salon where I facilitate writers to have the opportunity to talk with each other and compare notes about their work. I break the attendees into groups based on their interests and experience level, and I work with the students who are having serious challenges.

On this occasion, I worked with a student who couldn't seem to finish her script. Her screenplay was about a young woman married to a soldier who had recently completed several tours of duty in a recent war and was suffering from traumatic experiences. He was plagued with nightmares, fits of rage and often drank himself to sleep.

The screenwriter was on her eighth draft and had been told repeatedly that she "didn't seem to know the main character very well." She admitted that she didn't understand why she kept getting the same complaint.

I have worked with many screenwriters who have wrestled with a similar problem. I asked the screenwriter if she knew what her character wanted so badly that she was willing to risk everything to get it. Of course the writer knew: her heroine wanted to be loved by the soldier. Why wasn't it coming through in the script?

Based on my experience, I suspected that the problem was not what it appeared to be; that it had nothing to do with the screenwriter not knowing her character. Rather, it had to do with a natural reluctance to raise the stakes by allowing her main character to suffer to the necessary degree.

We love our fictional characters as if they were our children, so of course we want to protect them. We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: In order to succeed as writers we must be willing to allow our characters to suffer, but as people we want to keep our characters safe.

"Do you love your main character?" I asked the writer. She nodded, close to tears. A few moments later, she smiled because she now understood that this was why she'd been unable to move forward.

This is the dilemma that keeps many scripts from reaching their potential. How can we put our characters through the horrors necessary to tell the story? The solution is to understand that a fictional character's turmoil can actually prevent real people from suffering by showing them the consequences of the choices they have made.

I asked the scriptwriter if she could be sure that if one woman saw the film and understood how to end her own actual suffering, would the torments the writer put her fictional character through be worth it? Of course it would!
There was a happy ending: the screenwriter left hurriedly, intending to go home and finish her script.

So, If you are stuck, revisit your script and ask yourself if you are being too nice, and if so, see if the idea that your character must suffer so that your audience can avoid it gives you a reason to do what you need to do.

How To Eat Dessert First

No matter where you are in the writing process, the plot of your screenplay can always be improved. In life, it often happens that we have a goal, with no clear idea of how to reach it. We are likely to hamstring ourselves by not letting ourselves emotionally experience our future success in our own imagination. This reluctance to "make up a story" about how we will attain a goal extends to our work as screenwriters. We force ourselves to structure our screenplays from "beginning to end" without being emotionally involved in the process. Correcting this way of thinking can make both our lives and our screenplays "pop".

It's not a question of adding more explosions to your climax; but rather it's a question of finding more interesting events that lead up to these climactic moments. How many scenes do you have where the characters are in a restaurant, at home, walking around as they discuss whatever exposition must happen in order to make the story move forward? How can we take this material and crank it up a notch and find more interesting ways and places for these scenes?

We do this by borrowing a strategy from all of those positive thinking do-gooders who insist that life is uncertain, so you should eat dessert first. Use this 3-part exercise to learn how:

Part 1: Take a few minutes and write out the end of your screenplay. For example, if your screenplay was for North By Northwest, writing the ending might look like this: Roger (Cary Grant) rescues Eve (Eva Marie Saint) and they have to climb down Mount Rushmore while fighting off Leonard (Martin Landau) in order to survive. They succeed and live happily ever after.

Now write your own climax and ending here:

Part 2: List all of the events or scenes in your screenplay you would like to include that lead up to the climax, without worrying how to connect them in a logical fashion. Imagine what you would like to happen, not how it will happen.

Using our example of North By Northwest, the events that led up to the climax were:
  1. Roger is mistaken for a spy
  2. Roger is framed for a murder at the U.N.
  3. Eve saves Roger on the train and they begin a love affair
Now, list the crucial events for your story...

Part. 3: The last step is to pretend that you are the hero or heroine of your story, and that the story of your screenplay is over. It is now several years later, and you have moved forward in your life and are looking back.

Again using North By Northwest as a model, writing as Roger, your story might read: "After I survived the climb down Mount Rushmore, and got the girl, I thought back to how this all happened: I was in a bar, and these 2 men mistook me for this spy, and I was taken to this fancy house in the suburbs. I was made to drink liquor and put in a speeding car, but managed not to crash.When I found out who the owner of the house was, I went to the UN to confront him, but before I could he was killed and I was framed. I escaped and found myself on a train to Chicago. The cops were about to catch me but I was befriended by Eve, a beautiful woman who hid me in her compartment..."

Set a timer for 15 minutes and write without stopping, completing the phrase: "After I survived..."

You get the idea. They say: "Hindsight is 20/20," so why not make practical use of it and imagine your story beyond the end.This act of imagination frees you to make more interesting plot connections you would otherwise have been unable to make. These connections enable you to create more unusual and effective scenes and will tighten your screenplay as a whole.

Want to Finish Your Script Fast?

Happy fall! This tip is for those who are getting near the end of their screenplays and anyone who wonders how you actually finish a screenplay so that it's ready to go to market. If you want to climb a mountain, you have to do it step by step. The same is true for a screenplay. You rewrite it word by word. When you are deep into a rewrite or polish you are so close to the work that it's easy to lose your perspective on the big picture of the overall structure. Getting the structure right is essential.

Bill Goldman wrote in Adventures In The Screen Trade, "Screenplays are structure. Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure it's nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have swell characters spouting just swell talk at each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it." (Pp.195)

How to overcome being too close to your work? Read it Aloud! A wise man once told me that in life there are always two choices: when you come to a fork in the road, you can take the right way or the long way.

The technique of reading aloud won't help you skip steps, but it will give you control over your work by helping you find a new perspective fast. Changing your point of view will give you instant objectivity, thus you will be able to see the overall structure of your script with ease. Once you get the structure right, then you can work in improving the dialog and action. Reading aloud will help you here as well, but begin with correcting the structure first. If you compared writing a screenplay to building a house, you would naturally want to get the rooms in the right places before you began decorating.

This first reading should be for you only. One of the core principles of my writing system is that we writers must create for ourselves first, and then decide what we'll present to our intended audience. I know from experience that reading the script aloud can save dozens of passes through the written text because when you hear something, you immediately know whether it's working or not.

Here's how to do it:
  1. Read the script aloud all the way through and tape it. You may already find places that need work. Make notes but don't change the written text yet.
  2. Once you have completed the reading, watch a movie that inspires you and is similar in structure to the one you are writing.
  3. Now listen to the recording in 10-minute page chunks, while rereading the corresponding pages in your screenplay. In this listening, you will focus on how the story is structured. Later, you re-listen focusing on the dialogue and action, but first get your structure right. Warning: hearing your own voice may be torture at first, but you will get used to it.
  4. Write out a list of the action as it unfolds.
  5. Compare the action list with basic 3-act structure and see if it fits. In my writing system, we use The Mythic Journey Map at this point to check that our scenes answer the question that needs to be answered at any point in the story, and that the action that needs to happen at that point, happens. The Map organizes screenplay structure into 12 smaller sequences within an overall 3-act structure. I like to work in bite-size chunks, but any method of structuring that works for you will do.
  6. Now ask yourself: How can I tell the story more simply? Have I complicated the story? Are there enough complications? How does the structure compare with the movie I watched in Step #2? Find the script for this movie and read it aloud, tape it and then listen to your recording reading along with the script. Since you know this film was a success, you can measure your own against it will easily see where your script matches, falls short, or is better!
You are now ready to finish your script. As you make revisions - read them aloud. Once you take the script as far as you can, I recommend that you organize a table reading. This is where a few people, be they actors or fellow writers sit around and read the script aloud, with one person reading the narration, the others reading the parts. This is the last step in completing any script. Keep tweaking it until you can't do anymore, and then, send it out.

Remember, reading aloud is the right way to finish Your Script.

How To Set Up Act 1: Think In Your Hero Or Villain's Voice

In my new class, Story Development 2.0, a student came in with a problem: "I have a good outline, but I feel like it's taking me too long to get into the story. What can I do?" Exposition is the hardest part of any new script because you are setting up the world of the story. The facts surrounding the set up the story can be vast and overwhelming.

There are many techniques that can effectively help you when you present your screenplay to the marketplace. The original Star Wars utilized an onscreen written narration The Godfather shows us a lengthy wedding sequence, and GoodFellas uses a narrator to talk us through the beginning.

Whether your screenplay is a comedy or a drama, presenting the character and situation takes time. I find that screenwriters try to squeeze the set up into their script without fully defining what it is. Very often this happens out of fear of not fitting into screenplay form. And yes, make no mistake - be afraid, very afraid, for this process is much like trying to take a photo with a camera with a standard lens. Only a fraction of what you see actually makes it into the picture. Ironically, the attempt to control what you imagine will hinder and not helps you because you are not allowing yourself to fully express your vision. The key here is to allow yourself to mentally "see" the whole picture before you decide which "snapshot" to present to your audience. But how can we do this and not end with a fifty page first act?

The answer is to write a first person narration of the events of the first act as if you were the hero, heroine or villain. Understanding the way a character thinks and feels about the situation you have placed them in can cut your writing time in half. By allowing your characters to think and feel in their own voice is the fast track to successfully compressing exposition so that you can get into your story more quickly.

Think of how the opening narration in Goodfellas gets you right into to the story as the camera pans through a restaurant. You can borrow the idea of the character explaining him or herself to the audience no matter what kind of story you are trying to tell, because you will use this technique as a tool for exploration only. Don't assume everything you write has to go into the script, though you will often get a great line or two from this exercise.

Here's the technique:

Decide whether you will write as your hero or your villain or obstacle. Next, find a way to physically mimic your character by finding a gesture and a sitting position that they would use. For example, the guy who asked the question is a well-built guy with a shaved head who often sits with one ankle crossed onto the opposite knee. He's writing a comedy screenplay about a woman trying to get to her wedding on time. In his outline, the first act was all about the heroine going through the lengthy preparation the many women go through to get ready for a big event. This was the right approach, but he went through every procedure from hair washing to make up. How could he figure out what was most important to his character? I suggested that he sit the way she might sit and to select a gesture that she would make.

His heroine was a flirtatious girl with long hair. He changed his posture so that his legs were crossed and he dangled an imaginary shoe from his left foot, and twirled his imaginary long hair with his hand. He began to write, "I am trying to get to my wedding, but first I have to do 500 things that bore me." he looked up with a grin. When I asked him why he was smiling, he told me that he'd suddenly understood that his character didn't care about the details, but the overwhelming amount of them, and that the steps that were taking so long could be combined into a montage! His writing exercise gave him new insight into the character and he actually used a brief opening narration that came out of this exercise.

Now you try it:
  1. Use a timer. Set it for 15 minutes.
  2. Take a minute to find a posture and a gesture.
  3. Write by hand. Begin by writing "I".
  4. Now start the timer and try to write without stopping until the timer goes off. Have the character describe the events in Act 1.
Very good. Put the work away for an hour or two, and then reread it out to yourself. You will find that you have naturally compressed and simplified the plot so that you can get to the action more quickly.

To Dramatize or Summarize? That is the question

We often need a single organizing principle to act as a compass as we navigate through our own work and pinpoint what needs rewriting. Finding the right question to ask, one that allows you to evaluate each part of your screenplay, is the key.

Here's how it works: As you read through your draft, at the beginning of each scene, ask yourself, have I dramatized and summarized the right parts of the story? While the concepts of summarizing and dramatizing are not new, their application will help you get a handle on the work that needs to be done in a fresh and fun way.

In my private class, students write a screenplay, revise the draft and complete their script in 9-week cycles. Many take the class several times to support and speed their rewriting progress. Every week we workshop each student's pages and I give a talk about an aspect of rewriting. While there are many elements involved with this process, having the right place to start saves much confusion and time.

An effective way to begin is to imagine that every scene has a moment before it began and a moment after and each one of these is a separate scene, and so each of your scenes becomes part of a larger whole, called a sequence. If you look at each scene as a sequence, it will give you the overview you need for correct assessment. Now ask yourself if you have dramatized the moments where there is the most conflict? Did you stay in the scene with the characters until they resolved it, or cut away to a new scene just as the previous one got juicy?

I often read drafts which include a two-page scene of the characters dining at a restaurant. When the waitperson finally leaves, the writer summarizes the conflict of the scene in a line or two. What the writer should have done was start the scene after the waitperson left, and stayed with the characters until the conflict was resolved.

Question: But how do I make the right decision as to what to rewrite or cut?

Answer: By identifying the conflict in the scene, and determining what each character wants. For example, in The Godfather, Michael wants to murder the Turk, who wants to make a drug deal. As they eat dinner in a restaurant, each seemingly mundane event (sitting down, ordering, being served) is loaded, because it all leads up to the climax.

Why do we so often dilute the tension or suspense that writing real conflict generates? Simple - we're trained to avoid conflict in real life, so we naturally try to minimize the conflicts in our scripts. However, we must overcome this, because our job as writers is to look for conflict and to amplify it. Audiences don't want to see films that are like everyday life; but rather, larger than life. Using the questions will help you do that.

The Zero Draft

What is a zero draft?

When I first became a screenwriter, I was struggling to adapt a novel into a screenplay for a producer. The novel was about a serial child-killer, his sister, and the FBI agent hunting them down.

By the time the book got optioned, I'd made a short film in college that I sold to a cable network, so I thought I knew something about writing. But I got a rude awakening with my first attempts at the screenplay. I couldn't seem to get hold of it. How was I supposed to squeeze this much story into a single script?

These were the days before I had developed The Horowitz SystemT and I was trying to learn from anyone who had written or spoken on the subject of how to write a screenplay. I had the file cards; I had the board; I had 120 blank pages bound to look like a screenplay; I knew my inciting incident-yet, I hadn't managed to eke out a single word, and my deadline was fast approaching.

My Aunt Judy was a longtime mentor, a person I always turned to when I was stuck. Judy was an amazing person, a woman who had had many careers-general counsel at a major movie studio, a judge on the Board of Ethics of New York City, and a psychotherapist who counseled teenage girls with drug problems. She was a confirmed bachelorette who lived in a fashionable area of Greenwich Village, loved movies, and collected jewelry. I adored her.

Aunt Judy and I got together for our regular dinner, and after sending out for Chinese food, she asked me why I looked "like death." The story spilled out, and I paced dramatically in a state of high anxiety. At the crucial moment, as I was about to admit defeat, the doorbell rang and the food arrived.

As we dug in, Aunt Judy looked at me thoughtfully and said, "Have you done a zero draft?" I was thunderstruck.

"A what?" I asked, taking a bite of a moo-shoo-vegetable pancake.

"You know, the draft you do before the first draft, the one you are allowed to throw away, the one you are allowed to write any old way."

I was excited but suspicious. "It sounds too easy-permission to sketch before you sketch? There must be a catch."

She nodded and finished her pancake. "Yes, you have to go all the way from beginning to end, no matter how bad or good you think it is."

"Does it have to be in screenplay format?"

"No, but you need to feel it's real, so the formatting can help."

"What do you mean 'beginning'? That's my biggest problem: the novel I'm adapting has three openings, one for each of the main characters?"

"It doesn't matter. Socrates said there were two reasons things don't get written: one, because they're never started-your problem-and second, because they don't get finished. Not your problem, since you have nothing to finish."

"Okay, so where do I start?"

She laughed. "That is the big question, isn't it? Where did you begin the book?"

"Oh, I just wrote, 'Once upon a time,'" I said sarcastically, and then stopped in mid-lip curl. She had put her finger squarely on the problem.

When telling the story as a fiction writer, I hadn't been worried. I'd begun each character's story at a moment of crisis, a natural choice that I had somehow forgotten to make when I turned to the screenplay form.

I went home and began my zero draft with vigor because I had reconnected to my natural storytelling self that was confident and knew where to start. The zero draft I wrote was a mixture of different things: there were third-person past-tense sections and scenes I felt sure about written in screenplay form. Other parts I summarized with sentences like "fight scene goes here-the hero wins, but the partner dies." My zero draft came in at 139 pages, and had a beginning, middle, and an end.

By the time I was done with the script, I'd kept about 60 percent-a lot considering I had expected to throw out the whole stinking mess, lock, stock, and barrel. It wasn't terrific, but I had achieved the most important thing-I had written a first draft.

Since then I have used this technique combined with The Horowitz SystemT often. It was how I came up with a personal mantra that I use myself and which I also teach my students: "Don't get it right, get it written."

So, if you get stuck, using the Zero Draft technique will get you back on track fast. Just pick a place, anyplace, to start and keep writing until the end.

How To Use Your Main Character's Belief System To Improve Your Plot

My stepmother is dying. She's got a form of emphysema that is slowly strangling her. My father and she have been married for about 30 years and live in a beautiful house on top of a mountain in the Southwest. It's somewhat isolated and I worry what my father will do since he is no longer allowed to drive. He called me to tell me of this grave situation. I have never heard him cry before. I struggled for something to say, some notion that has helped me.

I offered the idea that even in the face of the worst loss, there is an essential part of us that is always happy, regardless of the external situation.

It's A Wonderful Life and Life is Beautiful are examples of films where the hero finds a basic joy within himself, far deeper than the despair the outward situation engenders.

Although my father was understandably overwhelmed by the prospect of losing the person he loves most, he repeated the idea and agreed that there was this aspect of himself. There was a pause and then he said, "Everyday she stays is a gift, she is not in pain, she is very stoic and is helping me to make the final arrangements." He was suddenly finding all of the positives in this terrible situation. He is a remarkable man.

Later I asked myself, why does such a simple idea have such a helpful effect?

The connection to a deeper self brings us to the present moment and helps us find relief. This is the state of mind called the "flow" state.

"People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging."

This is the description of the term coined by psychology Professor Csíkszentmihályi in 1975. Somehow, accepting that there is a deeper place within us that is impervious to the events that are presently occurring are both helpful when we are confronted with the rocky parts of life, and also can help when writing a screenplay.

How can you use this idea when writing your script?

Deciding up upon the level of awareness that your characters have is a great way to develop subtext. Make the following choice: Does your hero or heroine see the glass half-full or half empty? Do they feel a connection to this larger self, or do they feel alone?

In It's A Wonderful Life, George Bailey begins at half-empty and ends at half-full. The painful events of the plot teach him to see things differently. Even if you find this kind of message annoying, it doesn't mean that you can avoid noticing that many great films embody this message. And further, that it isn't one we aren't all secretly relieved to hear.

Look at your current script and ask yourself if your character has an awareness of something larger than him or her. Here are some easy ways to figure this out: Does your main character pray or go to church when stressed? Meditate or do yoga? Curse God? Mention a fear of going to hell in their dialogue?

If the answer is yes, how are you dramatizing this? And if not, how could add an arc that begins at one end of the spectrum and ends with the other?

Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) in The Bucket List begins the film in a state of lonely despair and ends up uniting with his daughter and finding inner peace. The plot involves him learning that he has six months to live and befriends his hospital roommate, Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman). The lesson he earns is that by healing others you help yourself.

Ask yourself: Does your character learn from the lesson that they have received by going through the events in the plot?

In Next Stop Wonderland, directed by Brad Anderson, a nurse played by Hope Davis combats her feelings of despair by randomly opening a book of poetry written by her late father, and placing her finger on any word on the page she opens to. She uses this word to help her find a deeper thought, and to solve the problem she's having. The plot of the film is about whether or not two people who are meant to be together will allow circumstances to let them come together. In It's A Wonderful Life, that deeper awareness is represented by Clarence, the struggling angel who shows George (James Stewart) how much value he has to others. This allows him to accept his life as it is and find the joy in it.

Ask yourself: is there a plot event that forces the character to reexamine or confront his or her belief system?

The "miracle" in Pulp Fiction is an example of how a plot event creates subplot and breadth of story. In the film, both Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel Jackson) witness the "miracle", by the end of the film, one changes as a result and the other doesn't. One reforms his life and the other doesn't. Vincent refuses to see that the event is a sign, a call to adventure to change their lives. Jules realizes it and stops killing people, because he realizes he's a part of something larger than himself.

Finding a deeper level of awareness, understanding that everyone and every character has a "god speck," within themselves, a phrase that, Adrienne Weiss, director of Love Ludlow, used in a wonderful short film called Mother's Day, can improve both our writing and make life itself more bearable.

How to tweak your plot in one easy thought

The most common mistake I see in screenplays is that the plots just aren't good enough. There are unlimited variations on the basic plots, b ut rarely do we get a truly original story such as Memento, Little Miss Sunshine, The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects.

Screenwriters often struggle to find a good plot twist because they keep looking at the structure as if moving scenes around will magically transform the script into something better. This is often true, but just as often, the writer may be looking in the wrong place.

Often the best way to give your plot a fresh twist is to imagine your characters in a situation that may never make it into the script but will force them to act. One of my favorite exercises is to consider what would drive a main character to commit murder.

This technique allows you to see your characters in a new way.

Consider what the film, Memento (directed by Christopher Nolan), would have been like if the hero, Leonard (Guy Pearce), had been an obvious villain. There would have been no suspense and the plot, even told backwards would have been predictable. It was the choice of an unexpected character, not the structural gimmick that made this film feel fresh and original.

Even if your script is about characters who kill for a living, asking yourself why they chose this as an occupation in the first place can yield useful insights that can create depth to even the most archetypal cop, killer, soldier or hit man.

Dr. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist conducted a set of studies that investigated the underlying motives and circumstances of murders, conducted a highly detailed study of nearly 400 murders, the most extensive study of homicidal fantasy ever conducted. Dr. Buss says: "Killing is fundamentally in our nature because over the eons of human evolution murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the intense game of reproductive competition," and that "Our minds have developed adaptations to kill, which is contrary to previous theories that murder is something outside of human nature-a pathology imposed from the distorting influences of culture, media images, poverty or child abuse.

In one of Dr. Buss' studies, in order to determine what would drive people over the edge and cause them to kill, participants were presented with more than a hundred different scenarios in which they recorded the probability they would kill. "Nearly all people express a willingness to kill in some circumstances-to prevent being killed or to defend their children from killers," Buss said.

Finding the answer to this question of what could drive your main character to murder can be the one question you need to answer to make your screenplay "pop."

The best part is that identifying the homicidal moment for your characters can work well whether you're writing a drama or a comedy. In the drama, The Godfather II, Vito Corleone, as a young man becomes capable of murder in order to save his family when the local Mafiosi takes away his job. Before that event he is shown as a gentle man. In the comedy, Little Miss Sunshine, Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) becomes so angry with his agent, Larry Sugarman (Gordon Thompson), that he wants to kill him, but instead does some crazy things to get his daughter to the Beauty Pageant. If he hadn't become so enraged, we would not have been able to believe that he would really steal his father's body from the hospital.

Imagining a situation where your main character would commit murder can lead you to a better, more original story.

How to Develop a Biopic - A fast and easy way to get ready to write

Writing a screenplay about someone's life, whether a famous person, or someone special to you can be one of the most rewarding experiences a writer can have. If you have always wanted to write a biopic, here's a fast and easy way to get started:

First, find your subject then make sure the subject's life is legally available to you. I recommend that you consult with an entertainment attorney before you begin unless you are writing about your own life.

Identify which part of the subject's life you want to write about and why. If you are writing about an athlete with a world record, you may want to write about the events that led up to the moment of winning; if it's a tormented celebrity, the events that led up to their tragic death or biggest success. Follow the steps below to get your biopic in shape.

1.Write a synopsis

Write down all the events you wish to cover in the screenplay. The synopsis should be long and messy - you must tell the story as you see it before you can turn it into a good screenplay. The goal is NOT TO CENSOR yourself yet. Simply end a paragraph when you finish describing one event and begin a new one. I tell my students that there's an old Chinese proverb that says, "If you would compress, first you must expand." Your synopsis, if done properly, will have way more than can fit into a screenplay.

2. Read it aloud.

Once you have written a synopsis that tells the whole story, my advice is to read it aloud to a sympathetic listener or to yourself. It's amazing how when you read your work aloud, it's easy to hear every mistake. Do this several times until you are satisfied with the story. Don't worry about it fitting into a screenplay form just yet.

By accepting that our natural style is often broader than the slim format of movies, we get to have it all: to tell our story just as we would like it, and then decide what we want to present to an audience.

3. Create an outline for your story as a film.

The next step is to structure the film. Here is where you must compress. Take your synopsis and try to mold the person's life into a 3-act structure. (Movie Outline software is an ideal tool for this) being aware that it can't fit perfectly -- because life is messy! In my writing system, we use The Mythic Journey Map, a narrative technique that defines 12 clear plot steps for feature length films. The key is to get as much of the story as you can to fit into the 3-act film structure. I teach my students to look at the 3-act structure In this way: Act I sets up the main characters dream, Act II is the unfolding of the main character's nightmare and Act III is the resolution of the dream from Act I. For example, in Witness, Act I is about catching the killer, Act II is about being unable to catch the killer, and Act III is about how the villain is caught.

The key to a strong outline is that by assuming that the climactic event you have chosen will be the climax of Act III, or the resolution of the dream, you can reverse engineer Act 1, the dream, and imply Act II, the nightmare. Once you have created your outline, read it aloud several times and make sure you are satisfied. Now you are ready to write the first draft of your biopic.

How to Cross the Act II Threshold

Many of my students say that the hardest part or writing a screenplay is getting the characters out of Act 1 and into Act II. In my writing system, the question the writer must answer is, "Does the character cross a threshold and enter a new world?" We can define 'new world' as the next place your character has to go. In Star Wars, it's going to a new planet; in The Wizard it's getting to the dream world of Oz, and in Tootsie, Michael gets the job as an actress.

The first thing you need to do to successfully transition into Act II is a strong first act finish that forces the character into a crisis. For example, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy has run away with Toto to prevent his being killed. When she meets Professor Marvel, he convinces her to go home because Auntie Em will die without her. Here is her dilemma: If she goes away with Toto, Auntie Em dies. If she returns to Auntie Em, Toto dies. Try to find a way end your first act with these kinds of stakes.

Main characters are often passive at the start of the film, and we need to get them to become active and take control of their destinies. Many times we don't pick plot events that are strong enough and the character remains passive throughout Act 2. Remember that our fictional characters, like real human beings often need a strong push before they can let go of where they are and move forward.

So to push them hard enough, the next element needed to move powerfully from Act I to Act II is an event, such as a tornado, that literally forces our characters to enter a new situation and to act. The goal is not to just add some random plot twist, but rather to understand what the character's fear is, and select an event that forces him or to face their worst fear.

The right choice of events also sends them on a new adventure. Otherwise, Dorothy would have just gone home. The tornado whisks Dorothy to Oz, which takes her far away from home which is her worst fear, and also sends her on a journey that helps her understand what "home" truly means.

This event does not have to be weather. In the original Star Wars, The Empire kills Luke's family. The event was the murder of his aunt and uncle. In Tootsie, the event is the audition, which gets him the job as an actress.

By making sure your first act climax places your characters in a crisis situation where there is no compromise, and then finding a powerful event that leads your main character on a new adventure, you will dramatically improve the structure of your screenplay, what ever stage it's at.

How To Write A Better Third Act

There are two basic problems with third acts.

The first problem I find is that when my students are structuring new screenplays, there is always a concern about whether or not they need to know the ending before they begin to write. My reply is always that they already know the answer: the ending will be happy, sad - or something else. I suggest they write the scenes they are sure of and the end will become apparent.

Also if the writer has created juicy, dynamic characters, they grow and change during the writing process. If the writer forces the characters to behave in a certain way in order to fit the ending he or she has planned, this can dilute an otherwise strong piece of work.

Writers who are willing to be open to what happens in the third act write better scripts. There will be greater suspense because the writer doesn't know what the outcome will be.

The second problem I find is that writers often don't answer the dramatic questions in Act 3 that they have set up in Act 1.

Bill Wilder said, "If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act."

And he was right. If your third act isn't working, don't blame it. The trouble is probably back in the first act. The first step is for you to go back and look at Act 1. What expectations have you set up for your audience?

Now review what happens in Act 3. Have you really answered those questions and satisfied your audience? If not, you know what to do.

For example, in Witness, the first act raises questions: will John book catch the killer, will Samuel and Rachel escape and will Rachel, a widow, find love?

The third act, answers these questions: the bad guys are caught, the boy is safe, and Rachel will find love, but not with John Book.

By identifying the dramatic questions you have set-up in Act 1, and pay them off in Act 3, you will definitely create a strong third act.

Each of your main characters should have a secret

An effective way to improve or create a scene is to add secrets that each character hides from the other. Secrets are both things that our characters don't want other people to know, and things that they hide from themselves. You may already know what those secrets are but aren't using them, or perhaps you will have to create them at some point. Remember, everyone has something they think they need to hide.

Let's use When Harry Met Sally as an example. In the beginning of the film, Harry and Sally are driving from Chicago to New York, and they stop at a diner. In the diner, Sally's secret is that she has slept with Sheldon and broke up with him over the days-of-the-week underwear. Harry's secret is that he's attracted to Sally. When Harry claims that Sally has never had great sex, it gets her to reveal her own secret and creates the conflict in the scene. It is, of course, Harry's secret attraction to Sally that drove him to raise the subject of sex in the first place.

Sometimes characters even keep secrets from themselves. When Sally breaks up with Joe, she pretends that she's fine about it. The secret that she keeps from herself is that she's actually very upset about it. She pretends everything is okay until Joe gets engaged to someone else. Then she breaks down and innocently calls Harry to come and comfort her. Her sudden vulnerability is what gets her into trouble with Harry. Meanwhile, Harry's secret from himself is that he's in love with her. When she rejects him, he has to face the fact that he wants to marry her.

You can see how tapping into the secrets your characters keep from themselves and others can improve both your scene work and plot. Secrets raise the stakes and instantly add subtext.

Remember: Don't Get It Right, Get It Written!

Good luck and happy writing!

© 2007-2009 Marilyn Horowitz
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