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I recently caused a minor fracas by suggesting that screenwriters aren't "writers," per se, but rather "storytellers," and that if you want to become a successful screenwriter, your focus should be on telling stories rather than writing.  I'm afraid that some of you took me a little too literally and assumed I meant that there's no actual "writing" involved in screenwriting.

Writing is, of course, an essential part of telling any story on the page.  If I write, "Jason, bloodied and wheezing, stumbles through the airplane wreckage, blinded by the smoke," that's a hell of a lot more descriptive and exciting than "Jason walks through what remains of the airplane." To that end, writing is essential.  It's our job to pull a reader into our universe, and how we weave words together to create images and moments is a large part of what makes that process successful.

However, here's the rub.  Unless you've created an interesting enough situation to write about in the first place, it won't matter how well you've described that moment, because we're already bored.  And that's what I mean by "storytelling."  One must create a series of compelling dramatic situations that pull a reader in for the writing itself to matter.

So to help clarify this, here is how I define writing and storytelling and how they relate to screenwriting.  Because this is my own theory, I'm not saying these are universal definitions, only definitions to help explain the points I'm making in the article.

Writing - When I refer to "writing," I mean the way in which everything in the story is described, the way in which the picture is painted.  While important, you can give me the greatest description ever of a character, the greatest description ever of that character's house, the greatest description ever of the way he goes about his nightly routine, and the greatest description ever of a car chase he gets into later...and I can still be bored out of my mind because you haven't preceded any of these things with a story I care about.

Storytelling - "Storytelling," on the other hand, is the inclusion of goals and mysteries that create enough conflict, drama, and suspense to pull an audience in and make them care about what they're watching.  For example, that immaculately described car chase above is boring unless, say, the character driving has 10 minutes left to get across town and save his daughter, with the cops, the mob, and the government trying to stop him.  

So how does one "tell a story?"  What's the secret to storytelling?  Well, I feel storytelling can be broken down into a couple of simple components.  The first is G.O.C.  (Goals, obstacles and conflict).  In most stories, you have a character goal - a hero who's trying to achieve something.  In order to make their pursuit interesting, you must throw obstacles at them, things that get in the way of them achieving their goal.   Naturally, because obstacles prevent our hero from doing what he wants, conflict emerges, and conflict is what leads to entertainment, since it's always interesting to see how the conflict will be resolved.  If a character wants something and gets it without having to work for it, there's a good chance your story (or at least that part of your story) is boring.  John McClane's goal is to save his wife, but the terrorists in the building provide obstacles to doing so, which creates conflict.

The other major component of storytelling is mystery.  If you don't start with a character who has a goal, you should be working to create a mystery.  "Lost" built an entire show around this.  From the "Others" to the "Hatch" to the "numbers entry." We kept watching that show because we wanted answers to those mysteries.  Note, however, that mysteries always eventually lead to character goals, since sooner or later a character will be tasked with figuring out that mystery (their goal).  "The Ring" is a good example.  A mystery is created with this video tape which kills people in 7 days.  Naomi Watts' character, then, has the goal of finding out the origins of the tape, and seeing if she can stop it from killing people.

A writer's mastery of these two components, the goal and the mystery, are often what defines him/her as a good storyteller and determines whether their screenplays will be any good.

What I often run into on the amateur level is the opposite.  I read tons of scripts where writers put all their efforts into immaculately describing their worlds, their characters, their scenes, and everything involved in painting the picture for the reader, but without any conflict or drama or suspense.  It's the kind of stuff that makes you go, "This person is a great writer!!" But in the end, there's no immediate goal, there's no compelling mystery.  So it's just boring shit happening.  Really well described boring shit happening, but boring shit happening nonetheless.  I know a lot of writers send their scripts out and get this recurring note back: "We loved the writing but the script wasn't for us."  It confuses the hell out of the writer.  "If the writing is great," they ask, "Why the hell wouldn't the script be for them??"  It's because your story is boring as hell!  There's not enough storytelling!

What you must do to prevent this is make sure you're storytelling on three different levels: on the concept level, the sequence level, and the scene level.  What I mean by this is that your overall concept must have a story built into it, each sequence in your script must have a story built into it, and your scenes themselves must have stories built into them.  The second you're not telling a story on one of these three levels, you're just writing.  You're describing shit or recounting shit or laying out shit.  You're not storytelling.  Let's take a closer look at these three levels using the film, "Aliens," as an example.

CONCEPT LEVEL - The concept of Aliens has a great story behind it.  There's a mystery: A remote base on a faraway planet has gone silent and they suspect that there may be aliens involved.  This mystery leads to a goal.  Ripley and a team of Marines must go in and figure out what's happened, possibly having to wipe out the aliens.  An intriguing setup for a story.

SEQUENCE LEVEL - Having a strong overall story concept is great, but you need to find a way to keep that concept interesting for 120 pages.  If the characters in Aliens just go in and kill the aliens, your story is over within 30 pages.  This is where sequences come in - 10-20 page chunks that have their own little stories going on.  These sequences are going to have their own goals and their own mysteries.  In other words, you must be telling stories within these 15 page segments.  For example, the first goal is to get into the base and find out what happened.  They get in there, find out everyone's gone, and discover some traces of a battle.  In the next sequence, the aliens attack, and the goal is for Ripley to get to the soldiers and save them. The next sequence introduces a new goal - figure out what to do about this.  They decide to go back up to the ship and nuke the place.  Except when the ship comes down to get them, it's sabotaged by the aliens, leaving them there.  -- The point to remember is: with each sequence, introduce new goals and new mysteries to keep the story entertaining.  If you're not doing that, you're just writing.

SCENE LEVEL - Storytelling at the scene level is where I can tell whether I'm dealing with a pro or an amateur.  Good writers work to make every scene have some sort of mystery or goal driving it.  There's a situation that needs to be resolved by the end of the scene, and the scene isn't over until that happens.  Again, we're talking about the same tools here.  Goals and mysteries.  The goal could be as simple as "making sure the area is secure," which is what the Marines' initial job is when they go into the base.  Or the mystery can be as simple as "what happened here?" which is what drives the following scene - the characters trying to put the pieces of what happened together through the clues they find.

Each of these levels of your screenplay should be telling compelling stories or we're going to get bored.  I run into really interesting story concepts all the time that turn into boring screenplays because the writer doesn't know how to tell stories on the sequence or scene level.  It's like they figure, "I came up with a cool idea for the movie.  I'm finished."  NO!  You have to come up with a cool idea for every sequence!  Every scene!  Think of each of those as MINI-MOVIES, all of which have to be just as compelling as the overall idea.  Because I'll tell you this: if you write three boring scenes in a row in a screenplay, you're done!  The reader's officially given up on you.  Try to tell a story every time you walk into a scene.

There are obviously smaller tools you can use to enhance your storytelling as well.  You can throw unexpected twists in there, suspense, dramatic irony, a character's inner journey.   But if you're a beginner/intermediate, focus on the basics first.  Goals and mysteries.  Goals and mysteries.  Always  remember: No matter how good of a writer you are, how strong your prose is or how well you can describe a scene,  unless you've set up a story where we give a shit about the characters in that place, it won't matter.  Screenwriting is not a writing contest.  It's a storytelling contest.  The sooner you realize that, the faster you'll succeed in this business. I PROMISE YOU THAT.

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“Writing Movies for Fun and Profit” is one of the more interesting books to come along in the screenwriting community in a while. Its authors, the writers of such movies as Night at the Museum and Herbie Fully Loaded, seem to take the opposite approach when it comes to writing than mainstays such as Robert McKee and Blake Snyder. Gone are long chapters on how to develop your characters. Absent is any in-depth look at structure. In their place is a single core piece of advice: Write big fun family "four quadrant" movies and rake in the dollars.

Despite the actual screenwriting advice being some of the worst I've ever encountered, the backstage insider look into the business side of screenwriting is nothing short of amazing. Basically, the book tells you what happens after you break into the club. It's funny, it's sad, it's interesting, but if you ever wondered what it's really like to be a working screenwriter or you want to prepare yourself for when you finally make that big jump, this is definitely a book for you.

Before I get into some of the more interesting aspects of the book, I'd like to warn you about its biggest weakness - its unequivocally terrible advice when it comes to writing a screenplay. You see, these guys believe it's as easy as slapping together a bunch of funny scenes and making a $1 million sale. Let me tell you why they think this and why they're wrong. As the authors point out in their book, on most big projects there are a lot of writers. Oftentimes, new writers are brought in to beef up the weak portions of the screenplay. So if the dialogue is bad, the producers will bring in writers who are good with dialogue. Once they're finished, the producers may realize that the structure is sloppy. So they'll fire the dialogue guys and bring in some structure guys. What our authors seem to understand but not acknowledge is that they’re the "comedy" guys. They're the writers you bring in when you want jokes. But the between the lines message here – and I'm not even sure our authors are aware of it – is that when the producers want people who actually know how to write a screenplay, who understand the guts, the depth, how to add heart, and all those things that actually make a story resonate with people, they bring in writers who actually know how to write. So while our authors implying that none of that "deep" stuff really matters may be true for their own specific experiences, it has nothing to do with Joe Nobody’s approach to a screenplay. Joe Nobody still has to display an intrinsic understanding of the craft to impress a reader. It would be nice if all you had to do was tell a couple of jokes to make a million bucks. But that's simply not the case.

The good news is, none of that stuff is the focus of the book. The main focus here is the business end. And I have to give it to these guys. They taught me a hell of a lot about how things work once you're a highly paid screenwriter. Here are some of the highlights.

OH NO
My favorite chapter (and probably the most terrifying chapter you'll ever read if you're a screenwriter) is the one that deals with the authors' experience writing Herbie: Fully Loaded. Now if you ask me, I'm not jumping up and down begging somebody to let me write another Herbie movie. But hey, everybody's got their thing. So these guys pitched Herbie to the studio president and she loved it. She thought it was the greatest idea ever and quickly made Herbie the most important movie on the studio’s slate. She then set them up with a producer who basically had zero interest in making a Herbie movie and therefore tried to make a version of what she believed a Herbie movie for people who don't like Herbie would be like. She then proceeded to make the writers change every single aspect of their story, even though those were all the things the studio fell in love with. And they couldn't do anything about it. When you're the writers, you can't just call the studio president and say, "Hey, this producer is making us change all the things you love.” There is a hierarchy. You're not allowed to go over anybody's head. So all they could do was stand on the deck and watch the Titanic sink.

This is what I don't get about Hollywood. It would seem to me that one of the more important decisions you would make as a president would be to match up a project with a producer who understands and cares about that project. It sounds like a producer was just randomly assigned to these guys. I don't see how good movies could consistently be made under that process (note to readers: the authors assure us rather proudly that that producer is no longer working in the business). But what should really tickle your noodle is that these guys also wrote Taxi – a movie in which the development process went as smoothly as newly churned butter. Now comparing Herbie to Taxi is kind of like comparing Jersey Shore to Basketball Wives. But in a close race I would still say that Herbie comes out on top. Which begs the question: How much does development really matter?

PITCHING
One of the big changes in your life after your first sale is that you'll now become a human pitch machine, pitching your own projects or pitching yourself as the best option for someone else's projects. This is an element of the business that very few people talk about outside of working screenwriters. And these guys do a pretty good job of preparing you for it. Probably the most important advice they give you is that whatever movie you’re pitching should have a main character a movie star will want to play. Because no matter how much movie blogs and Hollywood insiders are trying to convince us that stars no longer matter, the easiest way to get financing and confidence behind a project is to have a movie star attached. They also point out that your idea should be different but shouldn't reinvent the wheel. It should sound like a cross between two really successful films (they use the example "Die Hard" meets "Home Alone" but I'm pretty sure they were joking – although it's hard to tell – these are the guys who wrote Taxi remember). The rest of their advice about pitching is rather practical – be excited about your movie, don't be afraid to act out some of the parts, and keep it short (a typical pitch is 15 min. long). But the point is, this is the part of Hollywood that most screenwriters have no clue about until they're thrown into the fire. It sure is nice to get a look at the logs before the match is lit.

PAGE LENGTH
One of the more amusing chapters I ran into was in regards to page count and page formatting. For everybody who thinks that the length of their screenplay doesn't matter, wait till you start writing for a big studio. The studios are so obsessed with page length that they actually have their own specific formatting requirements. They give you specific indents and formatting rules you must enter into your screenwriting software when you write drafts for them. If you turn a script in that doesn't follow that formatting data, they will chop off your fingers. The reason for this is, obviously, every page is roughly equal to a certain amount of screen time, usually 1 min. And each of the studios have perfected a formatting template that allows them to best measure the length of a movie based on the length of the screenplay. So for those of you freaking out about page length now, wait until you have to start formatting a studio script. That's when shit gets real.

GETTING PAID
One of the most enlightening chapters in the book is the chapter about getting paid. I can't tell you how many writers have asked me how much they should expect to make selling their first screenplay, and then, if the screenplay gets made, how much they should expect to make on the back end. These are the details I've always wanted answers to and the book goes into as much minutia as I've ever seen on the matter. So how much is the minimum one can make from selling a screenplay? The short answer is, the Writers Guild requires a writer be paid at least $110,000 for an original screenplay. However, you aren't in the Writers Guild. And that means somebody could pay you 200 bucks. Where things get interesting though is on the backend. This is where the writing business gets messy. The reason that those writing credits are so coveted – even on total pieces of shit like Paul Blart 3 – is because as long as you have an official credit on the film, you'll be getting paid for the rest of your life. All those writers who worked on the script but didn't get credit? They don't get diddly squat outside of their rewrite fee.

The fight for that coveted credit has created one of the most highly controversial arbitration processes in any union. Without getting into too much detail, in order to determine who gets the credit on a screenplay, a bunch of your fellow writers read all the drafts from all the people who worked on the project, and decide who to give the credit to. Each writer is also allowed to give a written argument as to why they believe they should get the credit. Oftentimes, credit is given to the writer with the most persuasive argument. So Writer A may have done a lot more work on the screenplay than Writer B, but Writer B came up with a much better argument, so he wins. This has become such an intense process, that there are actually arbiters out there that you can hire for thousands of dollars who'll write your argument for you to give you the best chance at getting written credit on the film.

This has also led to some really shady practices in the screenwriting community, some of which actually encourage writers to sabotage a good script. If you're hired to rewrite another writer, and you want to make as much money as possible, it's in your best interest to rewrite as much of the story as possible, regardless of if that new story is better than the current story. If you know that the movie you're working on is already getting made, then it's practically demanded of you to change as much as possible so you can get final credit on the film. This is at least part of the reason why there are a lot of bad movies out there. The system is rigged to encourage writers to change what's working. There are actually standard tricks of the trade – like changing all of the characters names – to help it look like you've written the majority of the story. Arbitration is one of, if not the, most heated topic amongst professional screenwriters. I can't say I know how to fix it but from the way these guys lay it out, it's clear that the process is broken. Maybe some savvy Scriptshadow readers have some ideas on how to fix it and can share their ideas in the comments section.

IN SUMMARY
What I've highlighted above is just scratching the surface. There are a ton of other topics that the book covers (including how to take notes from Martin Lawrence – well kinda). Despite some of the worst pure screenwriting advice I've ever read (please, don't listen to anything these guys say when it comes to the actual writing), I have to admit that I've never seen this kind of insight into the professional plight of a working screenwriter. Not all of us are going to hang on long enough to become screenwriting superstars, but for those of you who are in this for the long haul and expect to be looking at real estate in the Hollywood Hills at some point in your life, you'll definitely want to read this book. For those who have already bought it, feel free to offer your opinions in the comments section.