ENGLISH 365:WRITING THE SCREENPLAY

FALL 2008
If you would create something, you must be something.
Goethe

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You
have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can!t get there
by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you!re doing. What you!ll discover will
be wonderful. What you!ll discover is yourself.
Alan Alda, advice to his daughter

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion

We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.
Cecil Day-Lewis

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as a valuable experience, to be lost in the woods at any time.
Henry David Thoreau

It!s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
John Wooden

Today!s would-be writers rush to the typewriter without first learning their craft.
Robert McKee

Read, read, read. Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a
carpenter, who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You!ll absorb it. Then write. If
it is good, you!ll find out. If it!s not, throw it out the window.
William Faulkner

An aspect of the business of playwriting that I!m very passionate about is craft. The word is
playwright, W-R-I-G-H-T. . . maker of. I know that in the vocabulary of the arts are terms like
inspiration and the Muse, but I am very nervous about all that. I mean, a play is a made thing, and
the crafting aspect of it is something that gives me infinite joy.
Athol Fugard

When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost-and will produce
its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.
T. S. Eliot

Writing a script is like removing layers of paint off a wall in an old house-you keep uncovering things
that couldn!t be seen until you removed the layer on top. It!s a constant uncovering and revealing
process. And with every layer uncovered, your dramatic premise has to be looked at anew.
Buzz McLaughlin

The first draft of anything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway



Character is the essential foundation of your screenplay. It is the heart and soul and nervous system
of your story. Before you put a word on paper, you must know your character.
Syd Field

There is one basic dramatic circumstance: Somebody wants something badly and is having difficulty
getting it.
David Howard

Without conflict there is no drama. Without need, there is no character. Without character, there is
no action.
Syd Field

A script!s success can often be measured by how well and how quickly it captures and maintains an
audience!s attention.
Mark Axelrod

Movies to me are about wanting something, a character wanting something that you as the audience
desperately want him to have. You, the writer, keep him from getting it for as long as possible, and
then, through whatever effort he makes, he gets it.
Bruce Joel Rubin

The film experience is like a seamless dream.
David Howard

Drama is life with the dull parts left out.
Alfred Hitchcock

My task . . . is to make you hear, to make you feel--and, above all, to make you see.
Joseph Conrad

Never fear [the audience] nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if
you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all. . .never, never, bore the living hell out of it.
Noel Coward

Information gleaned indirectly by an audience is far more effective. Important information should always be
conveyed at least twice.
Alan Ayckbourn

You can take a movie, for example, like Angels with Dirty Faces, where James Cagney is a child and says to
his pal Pat O!Brien, "What do you hear, what do you say?!cocky kidand then as a young rough on the
way up when things are going great for him, he says, What do you hear, what do you say?! Then when he
is about to be executed in the electric chair and Pat O!Brien is there to hear his confession, he says, What
do you hear,
what do you say?! and the simple repetition of the last line of dialogue in three different places with the same
characters brings home the dramatically changed circumstances much more than any extensive diatribe
would.
Robert Towne

The screenplay is only secondarily a written thing; it is an elaborate notation, or, put another way, a kind of
codified visualization.
Larry McMurtry


Screenplays are structure.
William Goldman

You shouldn!t begin writing a script if you haven!t mastered the craft of writing a scene. And you can!t write
a
scene without knowing something about how actors work and what the writer has to supply so that they can
do
that work.
Jeffrey Smart

For script analysis, action is a very particular entity. Action occurs when something happens that makes or
permits something else to happen. Action is two something happens,! one leading to the other.
David Ball

Things on stage should be as complicated and as simple as in life. People dine, just dine, while their
happiness
is made and their lives are smashed. If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in
the last act.
Anton Chekhov

The conflict in a stageplay comes out in dialogue. That!s the strength of the stageplay form. A novel may
focus on the thoughts and feelings of each character. That!s the strength of the novel-inner conflict.
However, a screenplay will focus on the visual and emotional aspects of a scene-on the action-because
movies
are primarily visual.
David Trottier

Give me the same thing, only different.
Sam Goldwyn

The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: But it actually happened. Everything
happens;
everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere
occurrences bring us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about
what happens.
Robert McKee

You have to know everything about structure in order to move beyond it. It isn!t possible to reinvent the
process without knowing it in detail.
Jeff Rush and Ken Dancyger

No matter how rudimentary or primitive or unlikely, if an idea comes to me, I keep it in a notebook.
Horton Foote

Man is but a network of relationships and these alone matter to him.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

Do not remove a fly from your friend!s forehead with a hatchet.
Chinese proverb

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
James Taylor


A pro is someone who can do great work when he doesn!t feel like it.
Alistair Cook

Close the door. Unplug the phone. Cheat, lie, disappoint your pals, if necessary, but get your work done.
Garrison Keilor