TRAVELING SCRIPT

Julie Gray, multi-talented scribe and reader, host of "JUST F*ING ENTERTAIN ME", had a recent post about her travels. She hit Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Ecuador in one month, for different reasons. In Ecuador she taught a writing class to a group of students.

I can't put the story into a nutshell, it's a wonderfully inspiring post about seeing the world and how it opens a different set of eyes (read it at her link above).

What I would like to address is how travel and your life experiences fit into screenwriting. If you're age fifty or so, have grown up in a rural area, and are new to screenwriting, I wouldn't say you need to hit the road for the next few years to gather experiences. You know how people talk, what they do, the quirks -- write your story.

But if you're in the same situation and say, age 20, there's a "road less traveled" ahead, and you can take it, and gain a lot of experiences that will add more to your writing than you could ever learn from watching film or sitting in class.

A lot of kids in Europe are great at this -- they will live in other countries for a few months as exchange students, or go some place with a group of friends. Many hit the road for a year, "jobbing" where they can. It used to be an integral part of an apprenticeship -- as a "Wandergeselle" in Germany you would take to the road for a year, working for other companies within your trade, gathering experience.

As Julie mentions, the feeling of being at an actual armed checkpoint is moving. I can tell you firsthand that it's not as exciting as in the movies, yet so utterly surreal that it's hard to put into words. But if you live it, you'll have a different way to write about it in your film.

Here's to getting out there!

WRITE A GOOD SCRIPT

Find something to write about, anything, just do it.

If it's humor, make it funny, with interesting characters that have quirky traits, a story that is going somewhere, give it a theme. A plot is good, essential, but give us a theme we're interested in, something we can relate to or admire.

Be the expert, in your area of expertise. You're probably more interesting than you think, but only in certain ways. If you're a stock clerk, I want to know what goes on between the aisles and behind that door that says "Staff Only". I really don't want to read your script or see your film about a guy who builds an incredible weapon we've never heard of before, because we probably heard of it before. And if you just have to write that thing, do your research, lots of it.

Keep the action and description short, I've got an imagination, you know? If I have to draw a diagram to figure out how the "x-machine" looks then you've lost the point of using that as a prop in the first place. Just make it look like an ordinary pen, and when you click it, you're transported in time, I can vision that, plus it's cost effective for production.

Give us some dialogue, meaningful stuff, don't just write it to fill pages, don't waste our time. If you're hurting for material just go somewhere and strike up conversation with a stranger, and annotate their traits, how they speak, what they talk about. People will usually try saying something important, or make an observation that is no new observation, and that alone is interesting or funny-- not in the way they think it is though. We like to poke fun at people in this manner, it's human nature.

Make it a good ending. Some people say that's the hardest thing to do but if you have a good outline you should know where it's going. If you don't know, then tell someone your logline and ask them how they think that would end, because people will usually tell you what they want to hear.

Enough? Good. It's not that hard, is it?

Now go write something, something good.