WHY YOU CAN’T FINISH YOUR SCREENPLAY

I’ve finally, at thirty seven years old, completed a first draft of my first screenplay. My past is littered with pages and pages of false starts. I’ve finished writing shorts (ten to fifteen pages) and I think I was able to do that because I could crank them out quick enough that the little man in my brain couldn’t judge them too harshly.

MAN IN BRAIN: You Suck.

They also relied more heavily on ideas rather than character, things like The Spectacular Eighth Birthday of Anthony Tremble, “What if a thirty something year old man, born on a leap year, celebrated his birthday like an eight year old.” Or things like the Candace & Chris shorts which are really just hyper-exaggerated versions of me and my wife, so I never even had to think about those “characters.”

But putting aside the man in my brain (because that’s a whole separate issue as to why I never completed a screenplay).

MAN IN BRAIN: You can never put me aside!

The more practical thing that has been holding me back is my tendency to focus on idea over character. Or I could say, not putting enough time and effort into developing my characters before attempting to execute my idea. This is how my process would go:

I would be bopping along with my life when all of a sudden, “Hey that’s a great idea for a movie!”

I would outline the major plot points and then I would get down to writing. And inevitably…

Roadblock.

And I had nowhere to go. I was “out of ideas.” And while scouring the internet looking for inspiration or ideas to help solve my problem I would inevitably come across the advice to “just let your characters tell you, put them in a situation and see what happens.”

And I would think, are you people out of your fucking minds?! What does that mean?! Are you hallucinating? Do you think these characters that you’re creating are real? Are they whispering to you late at night?

But it finally clicked for me when I read Syd Field’s Screenplay last year (for the first time, yes) and he talks about all the character work that needs to be done before you even begin to outline.

Something I had never done before.

So I tried it! I spent a couple weeks working solely on character and spending no time on story (which was very hard for me because I kept getting anxious wanting to write some plot). There are five main characters in the film and I wrote about five full pages of backstory for each of them. Where they were born, where they went to elementary school, what their parents did for a living; everything and anything I could think of to make these characters fully formed human beings in my mind.

And guess what? IT WORKED! Who would have thought?

I had to understand it in a practical way for my brain. There was nothing magical about it, it was just about putting all of their biographies on paper so that when I would hit that eventual roadblock, I had a resource to go back to and reference to help figure out what these characters do next. I let the characters tell me what happens.

So, this film that I finished the first draft for is called, This Little Piggy, and that’s all I’m going to say for now because I’m going to make this film.

I don’t know when.

MAN IN BRAIN: Never.

I don’t know how, but this film will get made and I thought I would document the journey, so this is the first entry in my sort-of production diary that will culminate in the making of This Little Piggy.

Maybe when I’m sixty, who knows? Took me thirty seven years to finish the first draft, hopefully I can move a little faster on the rest.

BUT! I’m currently working my way through a second draft, running into all new and exciting kinds of problems.