Sandy Frank - The Inner Game of Screenwriting: 20 Winning Story Forms

H OW CAN YOU USE THIS BOOK? If you're a screenwriter novice or pro you probably picked this book up because you'd like to learn more about writing a screenplay. But why is that? If you're like most screenwriters, you've taken courses and read books on the subject. You may even have gone to college to study it.

So why don't you already know how to do it? Why is screenwriting so hard?

Let's start off with a metaphor. A guy who knows absolutely nothing about golf, has never played it or even seen it, hears that it's a fun game and decides he wants to play. So he goes to a local golf coach and asks for lessons.

The coach is happy to take him on. He tells him that he has boiled the game down to the essentials. Lessons like Keep your head down and Keep your left elbow straight.

The new student dives right in and works and practices harder than anyone ever has. His drives at the range get longer and straighter and his putting gets more accurate. He just keeps getting better and better.

Finally, he goes out on his own to play his first game, and shoots a 160. (If you're unfamiliar with golf, that's really, really bad.)

Why did he do so badly? Not because of anything the coach told him, but because of something the coach didn't tell him that the object of the game is to get the ball into the holes in the fewest number of strokes.

Now that may seem silly, because everyone knows that. But if you think about it, there could be other objectives to hit the ball as high as possible, or to use the clubs in numerical order. Or think about a game you're unfamiliar with, maybe the Japanese game of Go. It's not inconceivable that you could take Go lessons for a while, learning how to make moves, but without learning how you win the game. The point is that the hypothetical golf student never learned his objective, what he was ultimately trying to accomplish.

I sometimes feel that the same is true for us screenwriters we've never been taught exactly what it is we're trying to do. So we write and we write, and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't, but we often don't know why.

Ask screenwriters what they're trying to do when they sit down to start their screenplays, and what kinds of answers would you expect? Some, especially if they're getting paid, will say that they're trying to fill 110 pages with properly formatted description and dialog. I remember years ago, a friend of mine he wasn't a screenwriter, he was a bond trader told me that he had just written a screenplay. At the time I was a television writer thinking about tackling a spec feature, so I asked him how he went about it. His bemused answer: he started typing on page one and stopped when he reached 110. Not exactly the advice I was looking for.

Others might tell you they're trying to tell a good story, but that just changes the question to What's a good feature story? After all, there are plenty of amusing stories I've heard at dinner that wouldn't make good features. There are plenty of gripping news stories that wouldn't, either.

There's a lot of information about screenwriting out there, and we all learn things like: keep the dialog snappy, start scenes late, hit your act breaks around pages 30 and 90. But few authors or teachers explain to us our ultimate goal: what, in simple terms, are we trying to do?

Not because they're trying to keep it a secret, but because they don't know either. After all, if somebody knew really knew what made a screenplay good, wouldn't word get around and then wouldn't every screenplay be pretty good? Instead, even the best screenplays, the ones that actually get bought and shot on film and shown in theaters, are still hit-or-miss. Even a screenwriter who writes one great screenplay can go on to fail at his next. So there's something that remains mysterious about the process.