My First Mistakes

I can not believe that it's already 2010. It's been nine years since I tried to make my first film. And failed miserably.

Looking back on those days and reading those old scripts make me want to cringe. Did I really write that crap?

My goal with this blog is to help fellow writers. Help guide them though the hell that is screenwriting. What better way to do that than to tell you about the hell my own scripts went though?


Here are the five bigges mistakes that I made back in 2001. Five things I would never do today. Learn from me.

5) Only write what can be filmed - It seems so obvious to me now. But back in 2001, I had no idea. I had people "realizing" all over the place. Backstory in the descriptions instead of the dialogue. And worst of all, chatty asides that I put in there to make the reader smile. Really get a connection between me and the reader you know?

Turns out, not good.

It was the rule everyone knew except me at the time. Only write what you can see or hear on the screen. A screenplay is a blueprint for a movie. Not a novel. If it can't be filmed, don't write it!

4) I wrote well beyond four lines at a time - It didn't seem like that big of a deal to me. Why would it matter how many lines I had? Or how many words I have on the page?

What kind of jerk would not read every little word I type? How else are they going to experience the essence of my art?

We writers are so vain.

So why only four lines? Let's do a little experiment. Let's pretend this blog was all just one big paragraph. Would you read it? I wouldn't and I wrote it.

Spoon-feeding the reader is the single best defense against skimming. If you keep your paragraphs no more than four lines, allot more of it will get read.

You wanna hear something really crazy? Like really, really, really crazy? Dialogue is the same.
I know, insane.

Excluding the occasional speech, most blocks of dialogue should be no more than four lines.

It's all about the white space. The more white on the page the more black will be read.

3) I didn't understand present tense - This one took me forever to figure out. My writing history started out with writing novels where I wrote mostly in past tense.

In screenplays it's always present tense. It's not:

"The man is playing piano."

It's:

"The man plays the piano."

In fact, the word “is” should rarely show up in a screenplay outside of dialogue.

Remember, when writing a screenplay, every line you write is suppose to be a shot in the movie. So making sure that everything is happening in the here and now (present tense), makes the reader think he/she is actually watching the movie.

A very good sign.

2) I didn't buy Final Draft - I can’t even imagine it now, but at one point I was writing all my scripts with Mircosoft’s Word. Word?! I don’t think I could ever do it again.

The day I finally bought Final Draft was the day a creative weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more worrying about my dialogue being too long. No more pointless macros. And most importantly, no more hitting TAB seventeen thousand times!

If you are still writing with Word, please do yourself a favor and get some screen writing software. It makes everything so much easier.

1) I didn't read Save the Cat - This is the book that changed my writing life. The problem is, it took me forever to actually pick it up and read it.

Back in the early 2000's I thought I knew everything about writing. I knew my act one, two and three. What else did I need? It turns out allot. There were midpoints and turning points and other basic structure moments that I had no idea about. That was until "Save the Cat".
If you haven't picked this book up for whatever reason, do yourself a favor and head over to Amazon right now.

It'll change your life.
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Well, those are the first mistakes I ever made. If you are currently making any of these mistakes, I’m glad I could help you.
And if you have any mistakes of your own that you look back on and couldn’t believe you did, drop me a line and let me know what it was.