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Sure, we all wanna write great scripts. Whether it's a screenplay or a ten-minute corporate identity video. New projects always begin with a flush of enthusiasm. But what happens when the first blush of enthusiasm fades?
That's when craft kicks in. Craft is what sustains a writer over the long haul. Craft gives you the stamina of a long distance runner. And just like the long distance runner-craft is only gained through training. Practice. Persistence. Guts. Sweat.
I like to think of craft as the writer's technique. Great pianists possess flawless technique. But they weren't born with it. They got it by practicing. Learning to play the piano or writing scripts is a lot different than learning to ride a bike. Frustrating as it is for a little kid to get the hang of riding the two-wheeler, one day-all at once, in a sudden rush of coordination, the training wheels come off. From then on, that kid knows how to ride a bike.
Mastery of the piano, by contrast, is agonizingly slow. It takes months and years of work to accumulate technique. But technique is what it takes to play with great passion. To make unforgettable music. Yet, it all starts with scales and arpeggios and exercises. The great ones warm up every day on those things.
It's the same with writing. You've gotta do it every day. Study in a structured atmosphere where you share your emerging draft with other writers and a master teacher is another avenue to honing your craft. Reading screenplays and literature, going to the theatre-all these experiences lead to accumulated technique.
Some of us get there faster than others. (I, myself, am a pitifully slow learner.) But with each script, the writing muscles get stronger. You can sustain quality over longer distances. You become a long distance runner, able to see a 110- page script to the end and then revise it over and over again.
As novelist John Gardner advised novice fiction writers: "If the aspiring writer keeps on writing-writes day after day, month after month-and if he reads very carefully he will begin to ?catch on.' Catching on is important in the arts, as in athletics. Practical sciences, including the verbal engineering of commercial fiction can be taught and learned. The arts can be taught, up to a point; but except for certain matters of technique, one does not learn the arts, one simply catches on.
"If my own experience is representative, what one mainly catches on to is the value of painstaking-almost ridiculously painstaking-work."
Words to work by.
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