From Josh: My Writing Process
Look at me, I’m a fancy creative talking about his writing process! How artsy and cool.
But yeah, I will. I know a bunch of different writers, and writing is a totally different experience for each of them. I don’t particularly think of myself as a writer, per se. I can do it, my writing doesn’t always totally suck, but man it can be a SLOG. I envy some people I know, how they’re able to just seemingly summon up a script at will. For me, it’s a war. With feature scripts especially, it can be a real “start and stop to slam my head against the wall for a few months” situation.
Short films are a different story. Most of the great short ideas I have in the pipeline started out as prompts during film school. Oakdale 1959, née ‘The Emperor’ was originally a very loose adaptation of on of my favorite poems, “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens. It’s a poem about the underlying ugliness of something that appears to be wholesome and fun. I became fixated on the line “let be be finale of seem,” where Stevens demands that the audience abandon the world of “seeming” and focus on the reality of what we’re truly seeing.
That was my jumping off point:mChuck has to cast away childish things and focus on the ugly truth.
Getting down to it, every script is it’s own thing. Sometimes, especially with shorts, I’ll just start writing. As Megan can attest, I am a major league binger. Sometimes it’s book reading binge time. Sometimes it’s video game binge time. And with some scripts, I seize on an idea and knock it out as quickly as possible. Then I’ll tackle the structure and rewrite it in the redraft.
Structurally, short films can be wildly different than a feature film. When you write a feature, you’re generally sticking to three act structure.
For those new to screenwriting, three act structure is a broad formula that you apply to a feature film as you outline and write it. It’s designed to help you structure your plot and character development.
The thing is, short films can be anywhere between 30 seconds and 40 minutes. There aren’t any rules, but it’s very hard to apply a three act template to a film that’s less than 10 minutes long.
FYI, Raindance has a great guide for making short films. I highly recommend it, especially for first-time short filmmakers.
Of those seven rules, rule number four (find single moments), is key if your short is say, 15 minutes or less. That’s what I did for Oakdale. I took the line “Let be be finale of seem” and made it the climax, and central focus for both the plot and the characters, and built it from there.
That being said, in my opinion, the most important step of writing any script is feedback. Luckily, Katie started a writer’s group with a bunch of smart, talented people. When I submitted Oakdale to the group, Anna (a talented writer who is also making a short this year as proof of concept for a feature) really cracked it with a note about a secondary character. She helped me see a path that I hadn’t considered and helped me see the right way to say the things I wanted the script to say.
The thing is, the longer you work on and tinker with a story, the harder it is to have an objective eye. You can get stuck in the weeds and sometimes need a poke in the head to take that left turn to where you need to go.
-Josh