“When I sit down, I bleed on the page, and it’s just awful… It’s a terrible way to live. But I do it; I sit down and I do it. I can’t get out of my chair until five o’clock or five thirty… It’s the only way I can force myself to write.”
- George Lucas

Francis Ford Coppola told a young, up and coming George Lucas that if he ever wanted freedom as a filmmaker he needed to write his own scripts.

The same is true for you and me.

Not writing your script is like putting a giant barrier between yourself and your goal of making a film. It might not be your biggest strength, or the part of filmmaking you’re most passionate about, and that’s ok. But you still need a way to share the story you want to tell with your team. If you’re waiting for someone else to write it, that’s all you’ll be doing.

Waiting.

This week I want to talk about the biggest mistakes we made while writing Wild Boys. My goal is for you to avoid these pitfalls when writing your story:

• Not nailing our main character from the beginning
• Letting plot drive character
• Being boring

Writing your first feature, with the intent of making it, can be a daunting task. Screenwriting is a vast subject, and you won't become a master of the craft from reading this newsletter. But if you can avoid our mistakes, you’ll have a strong baseline to start your writing process from.

Let’s roll.

Your main character is your North Star

All the way back in newsletter #2, we talked about creating a North Star, one-page document for your film. To find your North Star, all you need is to follow your main character.

Full transparency: We went back and forth a LOT on Kate’s character in Wild Boys.

• She was a big city girl, returning to her rural roots
• She was an outgoing, local hero trying to help the wild boys fit in in the modern world
• She was a shut-in loner, terrified of the real world

Discovering who your main character is as a person is essential. Our big mistake was writing full drafts of the scripts, spending hours and hours on versions of the story that were not right.

Some writers use their first draft(s) as a discovery process, and writing helps them find their story. That can sometimes work for me, but I often find I get vision locked on the first and best ideas I have for the story. When we get our minds set on a certain structure, or plot or we fall in love with a scene, it’s hard to break away from that.

I’ve found it helpful to work as nimbly as possible when I start out.

I like outlining, listing different ideas, working in a format that’s easy to change and move around. For my process it’s become important to understand the main character deeply before I give shape to the plot. Now I start with figuring out the main character and their arch through our story.

When I do this my drafts tend to get gradually better, instead of vastly different from each other, which is what happened on Wild Boys.

It felt like we were trying to fit the main character into the story, rather than build the story around her.

Which led us to -

Letting the plot drive the character - bad idea

Even though we hadn’t quite figured out our main character, we came up with a story where she met these two guys living in the wilderness near her home. The fact is, our idea started with the Wild Boys, not Kate, and so our whole process got a bit thrown off as a result.

With each draft of the script there were plot points we loved, and wanted to keep. What ended up happening was us trying to fit Kate’s journey into a pre-plotted path.

It felt forced.

You know when you watch a movie and you can feel it in your bones that a character is doing what they’re doing because the writer needed them to. What you get is a character who serves the plot, and a story that tends to lack drive and an emotional throughline.

We struggled a lot with this, and even in the finished film I can feel Kate serving the plot sometimes, instead of the other way around. We knew we needed to get Kate out of the house, we just didn’t know how. The plot of Kate’s father dying, and Kate having to go on a treasure hunt works for her character. It forces her to face her fear of leaving the comfort of her own home, but it’s still a bit contrived:

• we never establish Kate’s relationship with her dad, and so don’t have an emotional connection to it
• we ignore Kate’s grief and pain, and quickly get on with the plot
• we don’t pay this storyline off until the very end. When it connects emotionally it gives Kate’s character purpose and she drives the story, which was lacking before.

When a main character is actively pursuing a goal, and you put obstacles in their way which are relevant to their journey, you get better drama. A lot of long time film watchers - first time filmmakers, tend to overcomplicate rather than simplify their first films. Instead of trying to show off how smart you are, focus on telling an emotionally compelling story, using this framework.

Being boring is… boring

The last big mistake we made when writing the script was to start the film in a boring way. We wanted to show Kate in her own world, aka her house, where she went about her day to day.

Looking back, the main issue was our point of view as writers. We wanted to show the audience:

Kate is living a boring life, to contrast with the fun, adventure she was about to go on.

The problem her is that this is our POV, not Kate’s. Kate is perfectly happy living her life online rather than in the real world. What we needed to show was Kate’s world from her POV. Instead we ended up with a lot of scenes where nothing happened, and the audience watching our film got bored.

85% of those scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.

It became clear we needed to get Kate out of the house, and to the scene where she meets the Wild Boys as fast as possible. As a result the setup of her character suffered, and we ended up not having a strong baseline for our main character. We don’t get to know her until she's already started her transformation.

Showing who the character is at the start of their journey is immensely helpful when you want the audience to be invested in where they’re going.

Also, side note: in today’s marketplace for indie films, being boring is death. You’ve probably heard of the concept of 3 second attention spans, where if something doesn’t capture your attention right away you move on. There are milions of films to choose from, and if you can’t get your audience’s attention from the start, they’ll watch something else.

Don’t be boring.