How To Break Them Rules
100 Rules and How To Break Them
Introducing my new series “100 Rules and How To Break Them!” Each post, I’ll be analyzing one of the so called “rules” of screenwriting, and exploring both why they exist, and how to break them in interesting ways that make your writing better and your stories more powerful.
RULE #1 – WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW
One of the most misleading ideas in screenwriting is that as a writer you should “write what you know.”
On its surface, this is a brilliant idea. After all, writing what you know means you’re a whole lot less likely to get into trouble in your writing—and even your fiction is a whole lot more likely to be rooted in truth.
As anyone who’s ever told a lie can tell you, building on pure fiction is like building on quicksand.
Things might look so much easier for awhile, but pretty soon one fabrication piles upon another until you’re spending all your time trying to keep your story from from collapsing on itself.
Writing what you know makes things so much easier. Rather than reinventing the wheel, you get to focus on something you know profoundly well, conjure it for your audience, help them to connect with it, and take them on a journey in relation to it.
But of course, if great writers truly only wrote what they knew, some of the greatest works of fiction would never have existed.
I think it’s safe to say George Lucas never spent much real time “a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away”. Nor were JRR Tolkien or Peter Jackson ever abducted by Gandalf.
You don’t have to be a serial killer or an FBI agent to write “The Silence of The Lambs”. You don’t have to be a mobster to write “Goodfellas”. And you don’t have to be a pet detective to write “Ace Ventura.”
As writers, we know on some level that our job is to invent. We are creators of fiction… So how are you supposed to write what you know, when you’re conjuring a world you never lived in, or a character whose life you’ve never experienced?
The trick with writing what you know is not to write what you know literally—it’s to write what you know emotionally.
George Lucas may not have known Darth Vadar—but he was deeply connected to the idea of the Force. That’s what makes the early movies so powerful—and its absence is what makes the later movies so easily forgettable.
JRR Tolkein may not have dwelled in Middle Earth, but he clearly understood the nature of addiction: the irresistible urge to put on the precious ring of power—even knowing that it draws the dark lord closer. And the way the end of that addiction—with the destruction of the ring by the ultimate addict, Gollum, also means the end of the age of magic, and the beginning of the age of man.
What a great writer does is not simply to write the literal truth of what he or she knows. What a great writer does is to translate what she knows into a fiction that tells the truth even more powerfully than the literal truth ever could.
If you’re a writer, at some point you’ve probably heard yourself say some version of the following sentence:
“If I could just get (one day/one week/one month/one year) off from my (day job/kids/spouse/everyday life) to focus full time on my writing, then I could actually finish my (screenplay/novel/other creative project) and finally feel like a writer.”
At some point, maybe you even went for it. Took a leave of absence, called out sick for a week, locked yourself in the library for a weekend and resolved to focus 24/7 on your writing…
…Only to find that your writing life didn’t change in the way you expected.
You imagined yourself writing every minute of every day, but instead found yourself unable to stick to your deadlines, blowing those precious hours on Facebook or solitaire, and creating new and inventive procrastination techniques that robbed you of your precious writing time.
You imagined the words flowing effortlessly onto the page, and instead found yourself staring at a blank screen, lost somewhere in the middle of your screenplay or afraid to even start.
You imagined being at one with your creativity, and instead found yourself alone in a scary place, feeling even more blocked, more overwhelmed, more stuck, and more frustrated.
Perhaps at that moment, you started to ask yourself “do I really want this?” or “do I even have what it takes to be a writer?”
The Journey and the Destination
Building a healthy relationship with your writing is not about teleporting yourself to an alternate universe where everything changes overnight.
Rather, it’s about embarking on a journey with your creativity, through which writing gradually becomes so naturally integrated with your daily life that when you finally reach your destination, you may even find yourself wondering exactly how you got there.
Understanding The Power of a Single Drop of Water
Dump 100,000 gallons of water onto an arid desert, and you don’t get a river. You get a terrifying flash flood that overwhelms everything in its path and then disappears just as quickly into the sand.
Let that same stream of water trickle slowly and steadily over time, and gradually a channel will start to form, getting deeper and wider until it becomes a mighty river, which can carry that water all the way to the sea.
This is how you build a writing life. Not with a 100,000 gallon flash flood. But with a small, steady trickle that gradually grows stronger and more powerful. For most of us, the time to create that trickle already exists in our lives. It’s just about making it a priority, and getting the support you need to make the most of the time you have.
How Much Time You Really Need To Write?
One of my most prolific students writes for 90 minutes a day. 45 minutes on the train ride to work. And 45 minutes on the train ride back.
One of my good friends, Christine Boylan, a highly successful TV writer, writes in chunks of 48 minutes on and 12 minutes off-and forces herself to stop writing after 48 minutes no matter what in order to train her subconscious mind to follow her impulses and make decisions quickly.
The truth is that it doesn’t matter whether you have 5 minutes or 5 hours to write. If you train yourself to set achievable goals, and then force yourself to stick to them, you will notice that your writing time, and the ease with which you generate material, starts to expand naturally.
5 minutes of writing in the morning gives rise to a whole day of thought about your screenplay. During your coffee break, you jot down a couple of notes. Instead of updating your Facebook status, you suddenly find yourself pounding out a scene.
That night, you don’t go home and turn on the TV. You find yourself back at your computer, putting on the finishing touches on the work you’ve done. You go to bed dreaming about your script, and you wake up the next morning racing to get everything out on the page before you leave for work.
You’re no longer writing because you have to write. You’re writing because you want to write, because you already feel successful as a writer. Not because of the huge goals you dreamed of, but because of the 5 minute goal you stuck to.
Create The Steady Stream of Writing that Changes Your Life
If you wrote one page a day for a year, at the end of the year, you’d have written three screenplays. But getting that page written, day after day, can be a real challenge.
Our lives are filled with so many “urgent” demands from so many people, that sometimes the things that are really important end up falling to the wayside, simply because there is no one but ourselves to demand it from us.
If you’re going to succeed as a writer, you need to find a way to make whatever writing time you do have as urgent and non-negotiable as showing up for work in the morning.
You need someone to hold you responsible for hitting your goals, to let you know when you’ve done well, and to demand more out of you when you’ve fallen short.
If you’ve ever gone to the gym with a personal trainer, you know that even 45 minutes working out with a personal trainer can give you ten times the workout of hours spent working out on your own.
That’s why I’m introducing a new service to help you keep your focus on what really matters to you. It’s called Personal Training for Writers. And it’s just like working out with a trainer in the gym.
