| [BACK]
Young or beginning screenwriters tend to have problems finding stories to tell. More often than not they fall into the trap of writing what they know. Despite the numerous books on writing novels, plays, short stories and screenplays that tell you to "write what you know" this is misleading.
Writing what you know is often interpreted to mean "write what you have experienced." Well, that's cool to do, as long as you aren't writing about something EXACTLY the way it happened.
I recall one particular student who was incapable of writing anything that she HADN'T experienced. She was divorced so she wrote about her divorce. She had an abusive mother, so she wrote about her abusive mother. She had an affair with her boss, so she wrote about having an affair with her boss.
When she would bring pages into class and certain scenes or bits of dialogue were questioned by me or other students, she would say "But that's exactly how it happened." This would lead to a discussion on just how much of what "really happened" should make it into the script.
I said to her (and many other students who made the same mistake) that if you write it too close to the way it happened, you aren't writing a screenplay. You're making a documentary.
The best advice I ever heard on the topic came from a wonderful book on playwriting called "Write That Play" by Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, published in 1939. He said, "Life should be transformed not transferred."
Enough said. |
