Interview by Lisa England

We met recently with Lisa England, an accomplished writer and former mentee, who interviewed us about Notes to Screenwriters for her blog.

Read the interview here: 

Thanks for the interview, Lisa! You inspire us, too.

Film Courage 'Notes to Screenwriters' Full Video Interview

A couple months ago we sat down with the producers of Film Courage to talk about our book, Notes to Screenwriters. The whole 70 minute interview is here:

Thanks, Film Courage! We enjoyed talking with you.

Seven Reasons Why You Need A Writers Retreat

1. You're a writer.

2. You need space to create.

3. Beauty awakens creativity.

4. Rest awakens creativity.

5. Travel awakens creativity.

6.  The company of other writers sharpens you.

7. Your writing will thank you.

Looking for a retreat? Check out our Notes to Screenwriters Cruise to Alaska! We sail May 18th.

The Screenwriter's Prequel

If writing for the screen is what you want to do, this is where you need to be this August 1st.

CURRICULUM: 

• What are the basic skill sets of screenwriting?  How do your skills rate?
• What is your writing process?  How can it be more productive?
• What are the essential elements of a story?  What makes a story cinematic?
• What makes a story matter?  What makes it unforgettable?
• Do you have a feature idea? A short? A teleplay? A web series?
• How do you make a character better than the real?
• How can you make the audience care about your character?
• How is formatting a screenplay an art and a science?
• What is the right structure to support your plot? To highlight your theme?
• How do you find and work with writing partners, producers, investors?
• (Extra for writing teachers) How do you develop a syllabus for an effective screenwriting program?

Each writer will have the opportunity for an introductory and exit interview in which we tailor particular help according to their career hopes and plans. We will help each draft a “What Comes Next?” plan for after the program.

Post-Workshop Mentoring: Writers who complete the eight-day workshop will have the opportunity to contract with Catharsis at a special rate to continue a mentoring phase on a project or projects for the next ten months. Mentoring will consist of monthly page number targets for the writer and feedback from Catharsis on the student’s work. Writers will complete two projects during their mentoring period: either a short film and a feature or two TV projects; We will also consider proposals for web series.

The One Thing You Need To Be A Screenwriter

There is really only one thing that you need to be a successful screenwriter. Drive.

I don't mean the cheesy, Hollywood-stereotyped, cocaine-laced, Alpha-person, short-fused, high burnout, megalomaniac version of Drive. That's the mask of ego that can only be worn so long before a person self-destructs. The Drive you need is a slow, steady burn. Drive is what keeps you writing long after the fickle Muse leaves you for someone else. Drive is the still, quiet voice in your soul that whispers, in spite of all circumstances, "Keep going."

Lots of people start screenwriting projects, but very few finish them. Many screenwriters loathe and fear the inevitable rejection that comes with the territory of being a writer, but in fact, it's not the rejection of others that stall out most screenwriting careers. Most screenwriters don't even make it far enough to send work out to be rejected. The greatest threat to a screenwriter's career is abandoning one's own project. Many writers simply give up. Many writers lack Drive.

Drive means that if you have an opportunity to learn or grow in your craft, you do it. You don't wait. You don't second guess it. You don't hope that some profound ability will manifest via osmosis or magic without training and practice. If you have Drive, you know that you must constantly invest in your education.

Drive means you write. You write when you don't feel like writing. You write when you know it's not working. You write when you don't have time to write.

Drive means you are in motion. You take steps (like writing) every day to further your goals. As the metaphor goes, you may not see far down the path, but so long as you put one foot in front of the other, you will go somewhere.

Drive means that you take charge of your own life. You don't blame circumstances for getting in the way of your goals. Drive means you work with the challenges you have. You find a way to make it work in addition to your other life responsibilities.

All writers have productive days and not-so productive days. Even the best succumb to what Steven Pressfield describes in his book, The War of Art, "The Resistance." The difference for writers who have Drive is they know that one unproductive day is just one lost battle. Drive means they are still winning the war. Drive is an accumulation of grace. So keep going. And when you're tired, keep going. And when you doubt you can go any farther, keep going. And when you feel like quitting, keep going. Just keep going.

Write What YOUR SOUL Knows

What does it mean, “Write what you know”? I come from an Italian-French family. I worked in a fish market in RI for a Mormon minister fisherman. I lived in the servants quarters of the Marble House in Newport. I have worked in Hollywood for twenty years. I have a family member who is an alcoholic. Does that oft-used exhortation to writers mean that I can only write characters whose lives dovetail with mine?  Wouldn't it be like saying that a doctor can only cure cancer if he first had cancer?

The expression, "Write what you know," first means, DO YOUR HOMEWORK. "Write What You Know" refers to the part of the writer's task that precedes the actual writing. On this level, editors and producers have a right to bemoan those writers who literally aren't filling their place at the table. The writer’s job is to do the research. It is to fill out a new world, or to add fresh details to a world we thought we knew so that we now see it in depth. 

Research is always doable. It helps me to set a script in Newport, RI because I have already done the research by my life experience. But part of the crafting of a screenplay is to enter into new worlds through research and make them tangible for the reader/viewer. Don’t set a script in a scuba diving school near the Great Barrier Reef unless you have done your research in the kind of people who become divers, intricacies of scuba gear, diving education approaches, ways divers die, how cool the underwater thing is, Australians, and the Great Barrier Reef. So, the first sense of "Write what you know" is WRITE WHAT YOU HAVE COME TO KNOW ABOUT.

But editors and producers and readers mean more than this too. "Write what you know" is an appeal for you to basically write what your soul knows. I was tempted to say “heart” here, particularly because it sounds warmer and fuzzier to say, “Write What Your Heart Knows,” but I mean more than just your emotions. Animals have emotions. Your soul, in the classical sense, is where your intellect, will and desires reside. Your soul is the place where your essential humanity is. Write from that place. It is where you brood from – as opposed to just reason. It’s where you dream from. It’s where you suffer from. It’s where you feel remorse from. It is where you choose from. It is where you love from. It is where you pray from. If you write from that place, then you are speaking soul to soul with your reader. And hence, what you produce will transcend mere demographics.  

A great writer doen't write to “young adults” but to “young souls.” Not to aging Boomers, but to weathered souls.  Not to children but to “baby human souls.” Speak to their fundamental condition not to their particular situation. What is it they yearn for? If you write to kids as if they are yearning mainly for the newest skinny jeans, or the latest iPod, you are dehumanizing them and they will disdain you. Rightly so. These are not truly the things for which a human soul yearns.  They are the manifestation of that deeper yearning.

You speak to human souls through beauty. Using words to achieve wholeness, harmony and radiance is the primary task of the writer. We have to remind ourselves over and over, with Dostoevsky, that it is beauty that will save the world. Not cleverness. Not cuteness. Not the mere witness to social justice. 

The philosopher Etienne Gilson says that beauty is in more than just wholeness, harmony and radiance. He says there is also style, originality and universality. Style has to do with talent. Originality has to do with a new thought. Universality has to do with the fact that it speaks to thoughtful people beyond their time or culture. Don’t write a jealous character until you have something unique to say about jealousy. Or at least, a fresh way of showing us how it looks when it is asking for the salt shaker at dinner. Don’t write about the power of art. Write about the way the purple paint feels on the fingers of the three year old as she smears it with wonder across the new white carpet in the living room. Don’t write about heartbreak until you have something profound to say about heartbreak. Or at least, how it looks on Joe’s seven year old face the first time his best friend, Mike, opts to throw the ball to Matt the fourth grader instead of Joe.

If there is anything that is clear, it’s that writing is more than any other art form, an attempt to communicate in an articulate way. The sole color on the pallet of the writer is words. Great writing moves immediately from being a rambling monologue, and becomes a dialogue with the reader’s heart and mind. The pictures you create with your words get matched to the reader’s memory and imagination, and he or she begins to edit and highlight and fill-out what you offer from his or her own experience. This happens more or less according to whatever level of history the reader brings to your work. When your experience connects with the viewer's experience they feel a wave of delight - part of which is the sudden comfort of knowing they aren't alone. But this can't happen unless you are really recreating what your sol has learned first.

Great writing is basically just great communication, great communication means you are speaking to the receiver’s humanity, not to their particular moment. Flannery O’Connor was great because she mastered the art of writing from the inside of her readers. She was very conscious of human psychology and the dynamic process that a reader goes on in a story. She wasn’t thinking about writing for Southerners, or for academics, or even for Christians or unbelievers. She was writing to any one who was engaged in the activity of dodging moments of grace. Basically all of us.  Write about the way you dodge your moments of grace.  That will have an authority that will speak to the reader soul to soul and make your work fascinating and healing for them.

A Good Visual Image is Worth a Thousand Words

Poetry is the most respectful of art forms.  The whole reason for a poem is the acknowledgment that reality is too complex and mysterious to be reduced to the limits of wordy definitions.  Poetry searches for metaphors to reveal facets of reality by likening them to other things.  In the famous poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe, we laugh to hear that an elephant is alternately like a wall, and then, like a spear, and then like a snake, and a tree, a fan and a rope.  The poem assures us that an elephant isn’t any of those things, but is something like all of them.

Poetry is also eminently respectful of the reader, because it has to have faith in his or her intelligence, sensitivity and imagination – an act of faith basically in the reader’s humanity – to succeed.  The poet is a riddler who crafts a puzzle for the visual imagination and hopes that someone will be enticed to go through the difficult process of unraveling it.  If they do, the labor they have expended will make the solution valuable to them.  You know what I mean if you have ever been driving along on a country road, and then suddenly understood what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote,

                                     I had been hungry all the years-

My noon had come, to dine-

I, trembling, drew the table near

And touched the curious wine.

Suddenly, as C.S. Lewis said about the purpose of literature, you know you’re not alone.

So what happened to us?  Why is so much contemporary art and literature banal and lacking in meaty metaphors?  Why do our works not only not cause the world to brood, but leave them feeling unsatisfied and even resentful for the time they spent with us?  Along with the general lack of artistic rigor that characterizes so much of contemporary artistic efforts, part of the problem is that so little work today has any powerful lyrical imagery.  All of art is basically metaphor, but the most evocative and resonant art offers metaphors not only in the general, but as the key to the deepest meanings meant to be communicated from artist to audience.By leaving out metaphor, we separate ourselves from storytellers like Homer and Dante and Hawthorne and Poe, all of whom were masters of visual paradox.  My sense is that many contemporary writers couldn’t even say what a lyrical image is or why it is important in a story. 

At it’s basic level, a lyrical image is sacramental in a story, giving the reader something to see in their mind’s eye that points to hidden realities. Imagery should come into play particularly to get an audience to brood over a project’s theme, but also can be very helpful in making a character’s motivations and choices more resonant.

The primary virtue of a metaphor is that it is clearer than the underlying truth you are trying to explicate.  

The second necessary quality of a metaphor is that it applies. As Naval scholar Alfred Thayer Mahan noted in his work of training officers, "A great leader is the one who knows all the principles from history and then knows in the situation before him, that a principle applies when it applies and doesn't apply when it doesn't apply."  It's the same with a great artist.  

The third quality of a metaphor is that it provides the emotional resonance that is harder to access in the simple unaided truth.  Consider the most famous allegory in philosophical literature, Plato's Cave.  

Plato could have simply said that the movement from double ignorance to wisdom necessitates many bracing shocks along the way as one is wrenched out of one's comfort zone, stripped of illusion and slowly is able to encounter reality.  But that statement washes over most hearers without any urgency and makes no connection to the life of most heaers.  But tell people that they are prisoners in a cave chained and deceived.  Tell them that they experience terror when the light first strikes their darkened eyes and that they have to be dragged forcibly out of the place in which hey feel safe.  Tell them that that moving from blindness to sight is a slow process but that finally the presence and light of the sun will become their dearest and most cherished gift.  There is energy and passion and fascination and attraction in the metaphor that the simple truth lacks.

In her story Good Country People, the great one, Flannery O’Connor, created a character who was a PhD with a wooden leg. O'Connor wrote about the device to highlight an important aspect of utilizing metaphor in narrative writing.

“She (the character, Hulga) believes in nothing but her own belief in nothing, and we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg. Now of course this is never stated. The fiction writer states as little as possible. The reader makes this connection from things he is shown. He may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and it has its effect on him.” (Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners)

The truth is, it is easier to tell people what you think, then to entice them to think on something, which is what a good visual image does.  Coming up with a good visual image for a story requires a double portion of the intelligence, sensitivity and imagination that a reader will need to unravel it.