I finished the initial draft of One Nation on Friday Aug. 17, and I had to sit and reflect on what I did right – and what I did wrong.
I can’t say too much about One Nation, other than what the producer (M. T. Postupak) has already said. And as we get farther into the process of it, more will change. There’ll be schedule issues, budget, actor’s schedules, logistics, etc. The remarks I have all concern the first draft – and there’ll be many re-writes I’m sure! Often when working on a movie or miniseries, you’re doing re-writes right up to the last minute of filming.
Let’s look at what I did right.
- I continued to research methods of how to write screenplays. One Nation is not my first screenplay. My first screenplay was an action martial arts movie with Ninjas. My producer would send me funny little texts and emails from time to time about “make sure you put Ninjas in One Nation.” I was really tempted in the last scene of the movie to have a Ninja walk through a scene bouncing a tennis ball up and down on a tennis racket, just as a joke for Mike (and then cut it out after we laughed about it). The essential reason you should continue to research writing is this – professionals constantly learn. If you want to make a living writing, you should ALWAYS learn from others.
- I spent a lot of time in research. The single fastest way to lose an audience is to make a HUGE factual error. As my producer remarked early in the project, “The real history buffs will get the important details” – including one little easter egg he stuck in his initial pitch script. I took that easter egg, and RAN with it. If you know your history, you’ll spot it. To pull this off, I had to look for little historical facts and embed those into the scripts. The real history people will love the project, because they’ll spot the easter egg. There’s another series of easter eggs, but you’ll have to wait and see the project when it hits the screen to spot them!
- I didn’t worry too much about narrative. Listen, big narrative passages are for novels. We don’t need to know about green bugs on trees making a din. That’s the other people’s jobs. All you really need to write in there is “Warehouse. Dark. Water dripping in the distance.” We got it. Any little icing things you put in the script to get past the bored script readers you can add in re-writes.
- I spent most of the writing time on dialog. Dialog in screenplays is the essence of conflict. No kidding. The entire purpose of someone saying something in a movie is not to have lovely sounding bunches of words. It’s to communicate conflict. The actor’s job now is to take that dialog and add the pacing, the gesturing, the tone of voice and amplitude needed to convey those levels of conflict. When writing the first draft, it’s far more important to get the dialog right!
- I preplanned. There’s a phenomenon in novel writing called “Pant’sing” where you literally have no idea what you’re going to write. Screenwriters never do that. Screenplay formatting is so bare, so white page, that if you do that, you’ll still be on page one while I’m writing “fade to black”. I knew before I started writing what I was going to write. The last episode of One Nation I actually had so mentally diagrammed I never did the beat board! It literally would have taken me years to complete this project if I didn’t approach it with setting structure and trying to determine, “what MUST I get into this project to tell this story?” The story will begin to drag you along by its own momentum as you proceed.
- I brainstormed. Brainstorming for any of my projects (whether novel or screenplay) often involves a process I’ve done all my life – I stop thinking, and let my brain come up with images. These images run from what I KNOW I need in it (battles, combat, politics, what have you) to what I FEEL I have to put in there (anger, sadness, fear). One scene I wrote in the very middle of the project will probably be the most memorable scene in the entire series – and emotionally it cost me a lot. And I saw the entire scene, word for word, action for action during this brainstorming process. Don’t rely just on “I know” – make room for the emotionally charged as well.
- I asked Questions. Back in April of last year, I asked Mike Postupak for him to sit down and give me two sentences on each episode, so that I knew how to write them. He had figured out my brain very quickly, and he wrote down historical information. I knew how each episode had to go. I of course departed from that, but each sentence he wrote had an emotional expression, and that part I never deviated from at ALL. Emotions tell the story.
- I got impatient. For reasons I’m going to discuss shortly, the project ended up taking MUCH longer than I thought it would. A few days ago, I had nothing planned after ten am, and I just sat down and wrote almost thirty pages of script in one day. There comes a point where you’ve lived with the story, ate, drank, slept it, that you eventually just want to write “FADE TO BLACK THE END”. And you’ll sit, tune everyone and everything out. Strong hint – if you push your writing chair away and kneel down on the floor to write, it means you need to go to the bathroom. Sometimes, the big surge of impatience is actually nothing more than “I just reached the crucial point where the script is alive – I need to write this down TODAY to capture this.”
Conclusion
Writing Screenplays is often about sitting in the chair and working. Remember the 5P principle – “Proper planning prevents poor performance”, and the phrase “Fail to plan, plan to fail.”
You need to jot down your structure, Brainstorm. And understand if you feel nothing writing it, people will feel nothing watching it. Writing fiction – whether novel or screenplay – is a process of using words to sculpt emotional responses in the reader or viewer. Know what you’re going to write, write it. Use words and phrases that will elicit emotional responses watching or reading it.
These are my take away lessons from the last 16 months. Learn from them as I have, and make sure you incorporate them into your writing!
