SWF: Spec Script Market (Part 2)
International Screenwriters Festival: 26th October 2009
Final Draft has a rather fun Reports function which can calculate for you the percentage of action directions to dialogue in your script. New writers, Simon explained, often have around 60% dialogue and 30% action description in their scripts, which is the exact inverse of the desirable 60% action and 30% dialogue that is standard for films.
Simon and Jo then moved into timeframes: both intimately knowing the timeframe in which you have set your script (one of the scripts submitted to Script Market, for instance, was set in the 16th Century but the plot was hinged around the protagonists’… watch… – like wise scripts set in the future need to reflect the believable state of technology and society of the time) and critically the internal timeframe over which your story takes place. The longer the timeframe, the less dramatic tension. The tighter the timeframe, the greater the drama and the faster and more dramatic the transformation of the characters.
Next our experts hit on target market: as writers we must know exactly who our intended audience is. Toy Story was the example at hand: the film was aimed at 7-9 year olds, and so is essentially about leaving home for school, about change and making space for new people in your life. That’s exactly what is happening to that small age group, but because we’ve all been 7-9 years old, we’ve all shared those experiences, the story resonates through children and adults alike as a universal truth.
Then they got into Writer’s Room’s favourite adage: writing is rewriting. Simon submitted about 3 years as being a good development period for a script (…phew, feeling slightly vindicated over Sienna & Rael now…). He stressed that you have to love the story and characters – enough that you can endure working with them through the good and the bad, most likely over a couple of years, and to have faith in the story you’re determined to tell.
However spending years on rewrites can come with its own dangers. Simon, who is always full of amusing anecdotes, often about his own family, bought out another one at this point about a writer he was working with, who had been working on a particular script for about 5-6 years. They calculated this to equate to about 1,400 essentially unpaid hours of labour – and Simon could not understand the script. The writer, for his part, could not understand how Simon could not understand. What they eventually realised had happened was that the writer now knew the world of the script so well that he’d lost all objectivity, and had simply pulled so many things out over the years without realising he’d damaged the fundamental structure of the script. He had made it too damn complicated, thus Simon stressed that you can have a complicated character, a complicated story or a complicated structure – but not all three in one script. The moral of the story? Don’t feel it all has to be complicated. Something has to be simple.
Finally, concluding a very entertaining hour, Simon wrapped with two pieces of sage advice for the writer.
Firstly from one of his eccentric script-writing teachers who, when confronted with a student saying he did not want to be constrained by genre, somewhat cryptically replied: The donkey who walks in the middle of the road starves because the grass grows on either side. Got to love that.
And lastly, that feedback always hurts. All writers go away and sulk when the notes arrive – the key question is: how long do you go and sulk for?