Lateral Screenwriting

Lateral

Screenwriting

Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to

Write Great Movies

Lee A. Matthias

Copyright 2012 by Lee A. Matthias

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Books by Lee A. Matthias

The Pandora Plague:

A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D.

Foe

The Sleep of Reason

Coming Soon…

The Jupe

Obsessor

Darkness Calls Me

Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.

--- Pablo Picasso

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

--- Albert Einstein

I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

---Ralph Waldo Emerson

For Andrea,

my love, my wife, my life...

who started me on this path over a decade ago.

Contents

Introduction

Part I - The L.A. Of The Land

Chapter 1 - What’s Missing

Part II – Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking Tools & Techniques

Chapter 2 - De Bono’s Primary Tools

Chapter 3 -De Bono’s Primary Techniques

Chapter 4 -Follow-on Tools

Part III – Lateral Screenwriting Methods

Chapter 5 -Title/Schmeitle!

Chapter 6 -Lateral Concepts

Chapter 7 -Lateral Genres

Chapter 8 -Summarizing

Chapter 9 -Lateral Enhancements

Chapter 10 -The Post-Draft Pause

Chapter 11 -Lateral Reviews

Part IV – Development

Chapter 12 -Structure: A Dissent I

Chapter 13 -Structure: A Dissent II

Chapter 14 -Character Interiors: Bringing the Inside Out

Chapter 15 -Sub Rosa: Dialogue and Subtext

Chapter 16 -Seize the Moment

Chapter 17 -Felonious Screenwriting

Chapter 18 -Openings that Close... the Sale

Chapter 19 -Second Acts

Chapter 20 -The Big Finish

Part V – Succeeding

Chapter 21 -Guerilla (Lateral) Script Marketing

Afterword & Onward

Appendix A - Recommended Screenplays

Appendix B - The Myth Of Three Act Structure

Appendix C - Away With the Gang of Three

Appendix D - Left Brain/Right Brain

Appendix E - Case Studies

Footnotes

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

Contact Info

Note – Footnotes are referenced in the text in parenthesis immediately after their subject, with a section identifier, followed by a dash, and a footnote number. The footnotes then appear at the end of the book, after the appendices, listed per section, in numeric order.

FILM, TELEVISION, and SCRIPT TITLES are listed in CAPS. All other titles are listed as proper object names in italics. Other than page numbers and author/editor name(s), publisher and edition information appears once in the initial listing. Book-only sources also appear in the Bibliography at the end.

Acknowledgment

The popular view of books on writing, and in particular, screenwriting, is that they’re bad for writers as they are seen to erect walls and impose rules:

They are good for getting started but have limited value. But you have to learn the rules before you can start to break them. The danger of these books…is that studios and writers end up making the same movie over and over again, which is [one] reason why Hollywood movies are predictable and boring.

---Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (CATS & DOGS, BAD SANTA, BAD NEWS BEARS); interviewed at mypdfscripts.com

While one might choose to view such books that way, I don’t. If one is offered something, one is not obligated to accept. Who among us has never learned something from a book or a class? The danger of such views (closing off to new ideas) is that studios and writers might end up making the same movie over and over again. Books are not the reason movies fail to work, studios and writers are.

So, books on writing are better viewed as voices in a conversation. The ideas offered may not help in one case. But they may in another. Better still, they may in yours.

In this book, then, I draw from a vast conversation among a great many people as I offer some of my own ideas.

I want to express my sincere thanks to all of the many voices in that conversation.

Introduction

Whenever you come to a 'Y' in the road always remember that you have a third choice… right down the middle, where no one has gone before.

---Kyle McPherson

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

---Yogi Berra

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

---Thomas Mann

This book is:

•…a book on practical yet creative approaches to screenwriting: how to generate great stories, how to make them the best they can be, and how to do it almost every time, out of the box.

•…a book about, not how to write, but rather, finding what to write. And I don’t mean good vs. bad stories. I mean how to find your best story ideas, how to fit them to the audience, not some auteurist (see Footnote 1-4) at Le Sprockette with seven readers, all academics or critics.

•…a book by a screenwriter who is in the trenches, still learning, one of you; someone who offers a host of classic film examples to demonstrate the points he makes; and someone who puts some of his own work before you to illustrate the lateral creation process in action.

This book is not:

•…another rule-book on how to write screenplays. An operative principle of this book is

that rules are made to be broken!

•…one more method tract to the exclusion of all others; if anything, this is the screenwriting equivalent of martial artist Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do: The Hell with styles, use what works! This book is filled to bursting with what works.

•…one of those touchy-feely free your inspiration tomes or how to avoid writer’s block by the gentle art of creative massage, (whatever that might be).

I love movies. No, scratch that. I love good movies. The problem is, every time I walk among the video racks, or scan the online titles, they’re almost as scarce as that proverbial honest man. There are a lot of reasons for this, and many of them have nothing to do with the ideas from which they started. When a story-premise has gone through 37 drafts, 22 different writers, 5 directors, 3 studios, the setting changed from ancient Egypt to an Eskimo village on Tahiti during nuclear winter in a globally-warmed future, and the hero was supposed to be Will Smith but has now become the 3rd studio head’s special friend. What can one expect? Good movies aren’t made overnight, after all. But all this only serves to fire me up all the more when a good one comes along. And it all starts with the script. So, to paraphrase Woody Allen’s observation about life, movies are full of misery, loneliness, and suffering. And they’re all over much too soon... some of them, anyway. This book is about writing one of those... (and some comedies, too).

Books about screenwriting cover virtually all aspects of the art. They run the gamut from how to format your writing to fit industry standards to how to make it saleable; from how to write independent films to how to write for Hollywood; from how to overcome writer’s block to how to negotiate your first contract; from how to live as a screenwriter to how to survive as a screenwriter. They tell you how to get an agent, how to get a manager, and then how to get a lawyer. It seems every aspect of the working screenwriting life is examined, dissected, challenged, revised, overturned, and definitively established... finally... for once and for all.

But are they? There are a lot of screenwriters out there. Comedians used to joke about having dinner in L.A. served by a waiter with a script under his arm. Now there are waiters bearing scripts in every city and town of the developed world! I can remember the great screenwriter, William Goldman, writing in his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, that when he had to find out in a hurry how to write a script—he already had a deal to write one!—he ran all over Manhattan one afternoon looking for a book and found only one, written years earlier! When I first went looking, there were still only three.

But now there’s a LOT of information available, a lot of books out there. Why another? Because, in all that mass of literature on how to intend to write screenplays, how to write screenplays, and how to have written screenplays, there is hardly a book available on the idea-generation process or what to write, hardly anything on how to figure out what to write, nearly nothing on how to figure out how to figure out what to write. On top of that, there are few, if any books offering systematic approaches toward such an end. Lateral Screenwriting is that book.

Lateral Thinking is a term used to describe a thought process that is an alternative to forward or vertical, progressive, causally-based thinking, the kind used in everyday life, the kind used by science to establish its rigorous proofs. Instead, lateral thinking chooses another path, one holding surprises and oftentimes solutions to problems and questions that traditional methods never reveal. It will quickly become evident that this alternative thinking approach has been used at one time or other by most everyone. In fact, I believe it is the basis for many or most of the results we ascribe to creativity.

Business consultant and writer, Edward de Bono recognized this some forty years ago. He saw that if the process could be utilized formally, systematized, in effect, it could be employed by the business world toward becoming more effective and thereby more competitive. He studied lateral thinking processes and eventually developed a repertoire of techniques that could be employed by executives in management at the world’s largest companies to improve their management and business processes. Over the years, de Bono taught his techniques to everyone from IBM to people at the U.S. Olympic Committee, with startling results.

When I became aware of de Bono’s work, I recognized immediately that underlying it was a process I had, for many years, (unknowingly) benefited from, myself. In reflection, I realized that it was how the process I called, my inspiration actually worked. Over time, I set out to study de Bono’s techniques in order to establish a system toward becoming a more effective story-teller. This book is the result of that process. It’s meant to deeply consider screenwriting and storytelling. To those looking for a quick read or a roster of bottom-line conclusions there is a lot available. This book was written to be what most of those books are not: comprehensive, full of first-hand information, a useful, indexed resource for a writer’s library, and yet, a thoroughly entertaining experience, too.

Lateral Screenwriting is arranged into five parts, comprising twenty-one chapters. Each part and each chapter begins with three (let the 3-act screenwriting symbolism begin) quotations I have come across over the years that are particularly relevant to the portion of the book they introduce. These are sometimes sober and honest, offering wisdom from sages both recent and past. At other times, they are humorous, ironic, or both. In some cases, they are even contradictory to the thrust of the material they precede. This is a signal that there are no hard rules, only rules of thumb. Thousands of books have been written about subjects ranging across the whole of human civilization, some diametrically contradicting others. And yet they each can be, in many ways, equally true. It’s been said, Life ain’t as simple as all that! In the words of one great screenwriter, It’s Chinatown. For you story-tellers at your keyboards looking for rules, I suggest you use your thumbs.

Throughout the book I employ examples and professional commentary meant to illustrate and/or buttress points, clarify meaning, and illuminate. In the body of the text, these are shorter, and generally bear directly on the text on that page. At the back of the book, however, there are other, sometimes lengthy, footnotes mostly drawn from published and cited sources. Had they been placed in the text at page bottom or chapter end, these longer digressions would have been distractions. Yet, for the interested reader, their expert testimony supports the various references, clarifing and explaining important points. Some few others are just interesting or illuminating as they relate to the material they footnote.

Part I sets out a rationale for the need to employ lateral thinking in a systematic way for better story creation and development. I discuss what is missing in the screenwriting literature. Then I show through example how using lateral thinking has worked for me both in life and in creative work. Later I establish the need for a restoration of creative thinking in the motion picture industry, a need lateral thinking can fill.

Part II explores methods of applying Edward de Bono’s own lateral thinking ideas to storytelling in general, and screenwriting in particular. I begin by looking at four of Edward de Bono’s tools designed for business application, and reconsider them for story development. Then I move on to adapt a handful of his primary lateral thinking techniques to story creation. Finally, I return to some other tools and techniques that can aid in the story generation process.

With that as a foundation, then, Part III embarks on a journey exploring lateral thinking techniques that can be used specifically in the story creation and development process. First I examine title creation and the importance of titles in communicating your story first to the industry buyer, and later to the consumer marketplace. I introduce a lateral method for title creation, and show how it can result in better story titling.

Next I move on to conceiving stories. Here lateral thinking begins to really shine. I introduce seven variations toward which one can apply lateral methods. The next chapter is concerned with literary genre and story development. I offer eight approaches.

The following chapter breaks stories down into component parts or structural elements and applies lateral methods to introduce lateral thinking to screenplay elements ranging from the story-universe and concept level, through the sequence/scene level, right down to the dialogue, word, and even the implied meaning level.

From there I expand this lateral approach out from the screenplay, itself, to the film production disciplines that are used to take the screenplay page to the production level. Lateral thinking can be used here to reconsider how stories are translated to the screen. Seven production components are discussed. I then apply a de Bono technique to the writing process that has the potential to effectively supercharge the story with lateral input.

Part III concludes in a chapter discussing the use of what might be seen as the most outré of lateral methods: using other people’s lateral ideas where possible, and, when appropriate, adding the material in unpredictable ways. These offer the chance to effectively finish the story concept.

Part IV then considers aspects of story development from more traditional standpoints, adding lateral notions into the process. The first chapter in the section examines story structure and shows how it is mostly misunderstood in the screenwriting literature. Then, in a companion chapter, I introduce a structural model that allows for this new understanding of structure and I test it against some of the most notorious structure-less films. The chapter ends with an explanation of why an understanding of structure matters, why it’s important to writers.

The next chapter deals with character development and discusses what is really needed to create and develop strong fictional characters, and it’s not, as is commonly thought, a bigger resumé. Dialogue and subtext are discussed in the next chapter, offering several strong examples illustrating the various ways subtext is used to add dimension to characters, and to engage and hold an audience. From there I discuss cinematic moments and their power to make stories hang in memory, on the path to becoming veritable classics.

After laying a foundation for our elements, I discuss rule-breaking as an explicit technique in screenwriting. Used with care and when appropriate, this has the power to make scripts stand out from the pack. I then focus on story openings, discussing lateral strategies on how to heighten their power to engage audiences and establish story momentum.

From a discussion of beginnings, I move to the thorniest section of any script, the middle, or Second Act. Here I examine lateral strategies to make the largest portion of any story propel its audience toward its finish. I conclude Part IV by discussing story endings and lateral solutions for the need to meet and exceed the expectations built to that point by a great story.

Part V moves on to making your screenwriting career a success. I offer subversive, sometimes called, guerilla, ultimately lateral techniques for the marketing process.

In an Afterword I suggest some final thoughts for students of screenwriting. The Appendices present various selections of recommended reading, two articles (or excerpts) related to the material with analysis and commentary, a discussion of the dichotomy I draw regarding left and right-brain thinking, and several case studies of my own works with excerpts and commentary about the lateral techniques used to develop them.

I should mention that this last inclusion—putting one’s own work into a book on writing—is controversial, potentially off-putting to the reader. The reasons why I chose to do this are explained below. But, potential charges of a loss of objectivity are why such inclusion is mainly in the last appendix, rather than as part of the main text. Many people never read the appendices in books, so I suggest that only those who are specifically interested should choose to explore it. Others won’t find it intruding on the book-proper. But It is my position that the entire book—other than the sourced quotes--is author opinion, and so equally subjective.

The problem with writing a book about how stories are created is that, unless the writer has evidence from the source-writer’s own testimony, there is no way to tell how a given example originated. Because of this, examples from other writers’ works can only be used as hypothetical cases from which to illustrate lateral screenwriting techniques. I do so throughout the book, and it is certainly useful. But it would be even more valuable to include examples of works conclusively illustrating exactly how lateral techniques yielded finished results. The only way to do this is to include works whose pedigree is known to me intimately, my own. So, though I include a few examples in the main text, I have saved the majority for Appendix E.

Critics complain when books on screenwriting are written by those who don’t otherwise practice the craft. But, if one of these appears, the argument then shifts, and they ask: Have the author’s works cited, sold or been produced? While that is a valid question, it does not invalidate them, particularly when held up to the light and allowed to be judged by the reader. So it works both ways: I show you my own examples, and you decide their value. For what it’s worth, some of the material discussed in these pages is agency-represented (a Writers Guild Signatory agency), and in active submission as this is written. Others have become novelized and published (or shortly, at this writing, will be, and not self-published). The concepts behind the works are put before readers to decide the various works’ market worthiness for themselves. As their writer, I can attest to the lateral processes at the source of their creation.

The bottom-line is that this book is by someone who practices what the book preaches. I’m putting what I’ve learned over 30+ years of writing, and almost every relevant piece of wisdom I’ve found across 300+ volumes (most in the bibliography), hundreds of screenplays, and thousands of films, into this book. It’s meant to help writers. So, please forget about me and my work. Don’t obsess about egos. Consider this book and the works discussed, separately, objectively, and critically, on their merits. Take what you find and can use here. Extend it. Bring something more to the table.

This book’s manuscript was never offered to a mainstream or traditional publisher. Instead, it has been independently published through a print-on-demand (P.O.D.) and e-book publisher. The reasons for this are several. Publishing is radically changing. With the spread of P.O.D. technology and the rise and, now, predominance of e-books, the standard and (incredibly inefficient) publishing business model (of printing huge runs, warehousing them, shipping to stores, accepting unsold returns, warehousing those, re-selling them for pennies on the dollar to remainder companies who then re-ship them to stores and sell them for half the cover price or less until the last copies are ultimately recycled) has now, I am happy to say, become out-moded. The economics, traditionally weighted toward that ridiculous publishing standard, result in books that have a tiny window of time in which to succeed or fall out of print, in most cases, forever. Financial pressures, including frequently un-warranted huge cash author advances, force publishers into producing books that are significantly less than their authors intended. By self-publishing, I am able to include the small stuff, such as the appendices, the footnotes, and the quotes. For me those things are not small. Self-publishing through P.O.D. keeps the book in print indefinitely, rather than for that tiny window to become a niche-market top seller. So, for these and other reasons Lateral Screenwriting, in development for over five years, can be all that it was intended to be, a reference work for every story-teller’s shelf or e-book collection.

I should also note that, except for adapting older story concepts to new genres and/or settings, I will limit myself to the discussion of original story creation, rather than adaptation of pre-existing work. While the lateral techniques presented can apply to adaptation, particularly on the more granular micro (or page) level, discussion of such application is worthy of more space than I have available.

Throughout this book my bias (admittedly) will be toward the studio-produced, rather than the independently-produced film; commercial movies rather than personal cinema. Why? First, for its stories, independent cinema casts a wider net. It is more varied in its story and character types resulting in a spectrum of examples that would be vaster and less appropriate for introducing lateral methodologies. It isn’t that they wouldn’t work, but rather that for the student getting acquainted with these concepts for the first time, they wouldn’t be as accessible, or necessarily as illustrative of the lateral approaches. Second, when it comes to commercial films, the body of accessible material available is far greater and the examples far more familiar to the average person. So, for ease of use, for the plethora of examples, and for their greater familiarity, though not ignoring independent films entirely, I have chosen to mostly limit my focus to popular, studio-produced films.

When it comes to idea-generation, there really is no difference between independent and commercial narrative film. Lateral thinking does not discriminate, unless it is toward the independent realm. If there is a difference in the basis for creative idea-generation between independent and commercial film stories it is probably in the tendency for personal-film story ideas to be sourced in (or motivated by) character more often than plot. The reverse more often is true for studio films. This is just a tendency, not a hard rule. Both types of films can and do source out of both character and plot. And, in fact, they can and do also source out of theme, metaphor, viewpoint, and even tone. The frequency of such alternative sourcing will generally be greater in independent films, but again, there are no hard rules.

So, have I a bias toward popular, commercial movies and away from personal, independently-produced films? I do not, other than to say that I do not forgive the personal film that bores or fails to engage through the subjective and personal idiosyncrasies and pretensions of its maker. So-called "auteurs" don’t get a pass when it comes to the need for the work to entertain and/or enlighten.

Concerning that reference earlier to the number three: as I will show, when it comes to thinking and the generation and development of stories and ideas, the number three has a way of recurring. Just as some primitive cultures count from one to three and then refer to more as, many, human cognition, and logic paradigms tend to organize around three components (see Chapter 12). And so it is with storytelling, generally, and screenwriting, particularly. I will illustrate this point ahead, especially in Part... well, Four. So, join me as I consider the mechanisms behind creativity. We’ll explore some of the interior sources of storytelling, apply them to screenwriting, and along the way uncover some of the deepest mysteries behind cognition itself (see Appendix D).

In cited texts, other than in the Bibliography, I will list the author/editor(s), the publisher, and the year published, the first time used, and thereafter, the title and page(s) only. As concerns use of pronouns, for readability, I will include the reader along with myself as we, or, at other times will use the male convention, no disrespect intended.

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.

---Thomas Berger

Part I - The L.A. of the Land

Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

---Marilyn Monroe

Los Angeles seems endlessly held between these extremes: of light and dark - of surface and depth. Of the promise, in brief, of a meaning always hovering on the edge of significance.

---Graham Clarke

On thinking about Hell, I gather my brother Shelley found it was a place much like the city of London. I, who live in Los Angeles, and not in London, find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be still more like Los Angeles.

---Bertolt Brecht

L.A. Los Angeles. Hollywood. Home of non-native, imported palm trees, seasonal wild fires often started by troubled or uncaring people, Rodney King, (insert name of latest "train-wreck" pop-culture star here), East L.A., the Valley, and Holmby Hills. Hills and valleys and gulfs, oh my! Have there ever been gulfs so wide? Where else might one rub elbows with the next Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker) in the grocery line before loading up the BMW with organic, free-trade produce and driving home to Malibu for a pre-Oscars lunch? Yet this is your playing field, these, your colleagues, your competitors, your subjects, and your audience. If ever there was a place that truer suited the cliché, Been there, done that! it might only be New York or Las Vegas. But in L.A., they have definitely seen it all. And your job is to impress ‘em.

For that reason alone, to write for Hollywood, you need to think differently. You need to think creatively, laterally. Coming out of left field with the new SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, the new CLERKS, the new BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, isn’t the answer. Even the guys who made THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT couldn’t do it twice. It isn’t about making something so startlingly different Hollywood can’t ignore it (I-1). Don’t waste your time trying for that next big thing, that film they couldn’t stop talking about at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s a fool’s game. You might as well play the Lottery. Instead of trying to make Hollywood adapt to you, fit your project to Hollywood. If you can show the industry a fresh way to do what it has been doing all along, you will have them eating out of your hand for a whole career rather than for one jaw-drop-ingly successful yet un-repeatable project.

This section is called The L.A. of the Land. But, while the screenwriter’s terrain may be in Los Angeles, my meaning is different. I refer, instead, to the need to come to your career equipped with the tools of lateral thinking, to bring a Lateral Arsenal to the game. With these you will be prepared to meet success on the industry’s terms. Using these you can ensure your future.

Graham Clarke’s quote at the beginning offers a hint at why, despite great effort, I could find so few positives with my quotes on L.A. In Peter Bogdanovich’s huge book of film director interviews, Who The Devil Made It, Ballantine, 1997, p. 802-3, Bogdanovich asked director, Sidney Lumet about L.A:

"Bogdanovich – ‘Many critics either lament the death of Hollywood or constantly refer to the great dearth of talent out there. Is the West Coast a cultural desert?’

Lumet – ‘...I think it goes back much farther than Hollywood. That place has no reason for being. It seems to me—as far as I know; I’m not the most erudite person in the world—but all the great centers of art have been centers of other things. They’ve either been a geographical center of the country or they’ve been a seaport—whether it’s been Venice, Florence, Rome, London, Paris, New York, Berlin—they’ve had other functions; the life of the place has been connected to the mainstream of life of that nation, of those people, and art came as a flower of that. Los Angeles (laughs)—I’m sorry, it’s not a seaport, it’s lousy land for farming, it’s got no reason for being.’"

In their critical judgments about the home of the American film industry, each of our quoted statements implies an utter sense of loss at the unfulfilled promise of L.A. Everyone wants L.A. to resonate with depth and brilliance. And at rare times it does. But, too often, all too often, it comes up short. And that’s its tragedy.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

---Fred Thompson

Chapter 1 - What’s Missing?

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.

---John Barrymore

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

---Stanislaw J. Lec, Unkempt Thoughts

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

---Edwin Schlossberg

There are a lot of folks that say you can’t really teach writing. Oh, you can teach the mechanics of writing, how it works and where to put what. But how to teach how to write words people will pay to read, pay to produce for a market? Aye, there’s the rub. So, at first glance, I tend to go with the naysayers. Books that profess to teach anyone how to write for sale are probably misguided. "You can’t teach talent," the old saw goes. At best, they say, you can only help the talent already there improve itself (1-1).

But, for the sake of argument, let’s question those naysayers. What does teaching writing mean? Certainly it doesn’t argue that we can’t teach someone how to codify their thoughts through language into written text. Schools have an excellent record of doing just that. Nearly anyone who can read is capable of writing. So, maybe what these critics of ours are saying is that we can’t teach people how to create content. But, no, even grade-schoolers are able to create enough content in their essays to get to the next grade. So, then maybe our curmudgeons are complaining that we can’t teach how to generate content worthy of a market for it, i.e., good content. While I will admit that we probably can’t teach someone which choices to make within a pre-existing assembly of potential content, I will also show that we can get darn close. Education and life start us off, and writers we admire and emulate carry us forward. Development of a viewpoint takes us further still. So, what’s missing? Maybe the most elusive element of all: our creativity. And note, I say our, creativity. It’s within every last one of us. All we have to do is to learn how to access it, how to use it.

It’s the position of this book that teachers of writing can offer many pathways upon which to find good material, worthy content for those portfolios. Creativity, however, is a beast. Amorphous and unreliable, it comes and goes, seemingly on its own schedule, offering us a mixed bag even on good days. Why is that? I submit it’s because we don’t understand how to access it. If we could tap into it regularly and consistently we could be more assured of results. And with more results, odds are there will be more good results.

Anyone reading this book already has the necessary pieces of the creative puzzle: a point of view, a facility with words, a belief they can write, and desire. And that makes improving their writing talent possible. This book isn’t about teaching someone how to become creative. As I’ve said, we’re all creative. Some just use it better (or more) than others. This book is about how to find and apply your own innate storytelling creativity. It’s about getting more consistent in using your creative muscles every time you need them, rather than casting about anew each time, unsure even of how to find your muse.

What’s on First!

Perhaps the single-most overlooked aspect of screenwriting is the process of determining what to write (1-2). This encompasses screenwriting both on the overall conceptual or macro level and on the specific detail or micro level, from the choice of what stories to tell, right down to the manner of telling and the details used in the telling. Over and over, when I have worked with new writers, I’ve encountered scripts whose story-concepts amounted to pedestrian premises with plotlines we’ve seen countless times before: common concepts that failed to offer anything fresh. Their writers spent so much time and effort trying to get to having written that they blew right past deeply considering what to write. They settled for the first ideas that came to mind, wrote what they could, never asked themselves if they should, happy just to have a project, and perhaps fearing they may never have another one. In fact, they may not.

First, a caveat: the following goes into the abstract for a bit. I’m essentially setting up a syllogistically-styled argument—if [this – the Major Premise], conditioned by [that - the Minor Premise], then [the Conclusion]—in order to get us to a solid foundation for introducing certain methodologies which will yield professional-level work. If writers write for audiences, but audiences come away unsatisfied, then writers’ works ultimately do not succeed (1-3).

The Audience is Numero Uno, Baby!

Just as discovering and choosing what to write are the most overlooked aspects of screenwriting, the most common failing I have found when evaluating new writers’ works, is that, in crossing from the consumer to the producer position, the new writer immediately loses touch with the audience. This is because the inexperienced writer, in hoarding the necessarily substantial and unfamiliar creative energy and wealth of knowledge to tackle a long-form project, has researched widely, and has gone deeply inside him or herself in order to mine everything relevant and appropriate that can help to develop the work. Inevitably (almost), any original audience perspective the writer has can be (and very often is) lost. The writer, now brimming with story-universe minutia, idiosyncratic story preferences, and writerly interests, has allowed these to become greatly over-emphasized, all at the expense of the work, and so the audience.

I am not suggesting writers ignore the wealth of unique information unearthed about the subject of the work, nor the deeply-personal about their stories. These, in fact, give the story its uniqueness. I am merely saying that the perspective an audience person would have, the perspective the writer once had, is lost as the result of too great an emphasis on elements which tend to leave audiences behind, either for want of universal appeal, intellectual interest, or plain unfamiliarity with them.

By regaining their original audience perspective, by developing material that connects with and holds an audience, while balancing it by simultaneously mining their own unique viewpoint, writers can produce works that satisfy their own personal creative goals. And they can produce them while also resonating with and succeeding in the marketplace.

Connection with the audience, then, becomes the single-most important key to marketing writing. With the audience solidly back in place as an essential partner to story conception, writers are on track to accessing buyers of their work. For the story-buyer, after all, has never lost proximity to, nor dependence-upon, the audience consuming produced stories. This is true, be they novels, movies, or even interactive multimedia. Re-gaining the audience gains writers the marketplace.

One thing we need to discuss related to this, however, is the question of personal versus commercial cinema. Many writers and directors (and many critics) take the position that to be worthwhile, narrative film must be personal. At first glance, this may seem to be filmmaker’s code for artistic expression in the same sense as used with paintings; for example: films about a single artist’s personal concerns. And, in fact, many filmmakers see it that way. But I believe it must necessarily be seen in a broader sense, if for no other reason than to include cinema that is legitimately designed for a wide audience. Despite all the damage to writers that it has done, the auteur theory (1-4) has shown that mass audience films can be personal, albeit universally personal, or resonant with the wider audience. So, at least for me (and those pesky auteurists), personal means the film has elements and ideas which are specific to the concerns of the author of the narrative, components that may be unique, and yet also things that resonate with an audience.

A Parallax View

With these things in mind, we can, then, explore an approach toward story development which acknowledges the presence of, indeed depends upon and makes use of, its oft-lost and forgotten partner, the audience.

I find that I don’t just write stories as they initially come to mind. I am always thinking about how the story will be received, how it will succeed with its audience. Some call this commercialism, or worse, pandering, and eschew it, ostensibly for a higher moral or artistic purpose (1-5). I take a more down-to-earth, yet sanguinary, and so commercial view. Someone must, of necessity, pay for the produced and presented work, and unless they waive it, they have the right to expect a return on their investment. My approach is a pragmatic one: to succeed in that marketplace and return a profit on that investment. It is also an approach in service to what attracts me to the particular stories I prefer. If I’m not interested, if I’m not discovering things as I write, then the effort does not serve that initial attraction, and I will not take it further. I prefer working in the established genres, but my rule is: while I work in them, I must make them fresh. And not just a little bit.

In analyzing what I do in developing a story, I have found that when my writing has worked best, it was because, while it was in an established genre with its own niche in the marketplace, it deviated from predictable paths. It was as though, with an otherwise conventional idea, I looked for and chose the road less taken. Every time I did this I found it energized the work and offered unpredictable and fresh things that made the premise new again. And yet, there it was, still squarely in its genre.

Some people view genre as clichéd: cinematic forms done to death. And while they can reach such a point—the western genre by the mid-1960s, for example—they can be re-invented, and emerge again, fresh and capable of great stories—THE WILD BUNCH, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, UNFORGIVEN, LONESOME DOVE, to name a few. Genre can be viewed as offering new writers a leg up with their careers, as it is a well-established form with which an audience is already familiar. It is a proven success. And it has stylistic conventions and a kind of narrative framework already in place upon which to hang a story. Compared to straight drama, most genres contain a more powerful narrative drive—we need to know how they come out in the end: how the hero wins the day; how she gets her man; how they avoid death. It isn’t just a matter of resolving some intellectual need: the stakes are higher in genre, physical survival is threatened, and the truths are sharper, if sometimes broader. Working in genre can help writers get started in what is a fiercely competitive industry by offering established market niches, powerful dilemmas, dynamic resolutions, and satisfied audiences (1-6).

But genre isn’t enough. The market has high expectations. On the one hand, writers must provide the familiar. On the other, they must surprise. And surprise is the one element most lacking in new writers’ works. It is as though new writers have settled for merely duplicating what they like most about a type of story and have not bothered to provide justification for their own tale’s presence, nor their consumer’s precious time, by offering more. Meanwhile, the audience which has been there, done that is left to accept it or not. It’s no surprise to me, at least, that when the audience isn’t (surprised), the writer is: his story fails either to sell or to advance his career.

I use an approach that is an analog to the technique used in business (as originated by Edward de Bono) known as lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is no momentous discovery. It is not some revolutionary method only now bursting forth as the result of steady progress within the neuro-sciences, the arts, or the business world, not some systematized approach to a chaos theory of the mind. It is, I believe, the very method all creativity is and has always been dependent upon (1-7). De Bono recognized this right-brain process at work in all things creative (1-8), and has, over decades, developed left-brain techniques to formalize its use for the primarily left-brain world of business.

Essentially, de Bono’s technique is to apply various methods to the basic lateral thinking notion of examining a starting point, recognizing the next step to be derived from it, and rejecting that for alternatives. Lateral thinking takes the position that traditional (vertical) thinking leads to common and/or predictable results. And while these results can and do make sense in many or even most cases, opening up to alternative pathways can and does offer unexpected, non-traditional, surprising, and occasionally much better results. With business, the manager that is open to such pathways can find competitive edges where the competition restricts itself to the standard path. With creative endeavors, such as story creation, the writer can find whole niches from within which to build careers (1-9). Story creation, as I’ve pointed out, is and has always been open to the lateral approach.

Consider the movement of painters in the 19th Century from the Realist style of painting to what became known as the Impressionist style. It was originally theorized that the movement was the result of poor vision, in turn, causing painters to regress from accurate reproduction of real objects and people, to fuzzy, or liquid depictions of the same subject matter. But this is obviously specious in that the same painters would be seeing their fuzzy works as even fuzzier—not to mention a whole sub-group of painters all having similar vision problems, yet painting in various, dis-similar styles. Let us note, their vision will not have temporarily improved to allow them to see and paint the painting as representative of the way they saw the source.

Others evaluating the reasons for the arrival of Impressionism have recognized the parallel development of photography in the years prior to the advent of the style. They saw that one of the primary markets for painters trying to make a living, portraits, was displaced by photography. Painters suddenly needed to create a new desire for their work. They cast about, saw that the camera could see everything perfectly and hit upon seeing things imperfectly, in a way to heighten the less-apparent visual qualities of the subject. This was a lateral move, and (as I will amplify and extend in Chapter 17) it has continued within painting ever since. We’ve seen Cubism, Dada-ism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Abstract, Op-Art, and even Pop-Art, where realism returned, but the object painted became non-standard, such as an ordinary can of soup or a comic book page. Art, it’s clear, is where one finds it.

So, de Bono’s message is to get lateral. Seek out new, alternative, and non-traditional paths. From there his method is to find variants of that basic approach: recognize the need, move any way other than the standard, vertical way, and see what might develop from the new position, a parallax view. One takes a step to the right (or left), sees things somewhat differently, and ideas result. As this is potentially painting every picture with a very broad brush, de Bono recognizes the need for a variety of methods to accomplish what amounts to the same lateral movement. This is to keep the process lively; to find other approaches to problems to which such approaches, it turns out, are best suited; and to find methods that different people can find to work best for them.

I recognized lateral thinking’s home back in the right-brain world of expression, and noticed that artists mostly don’t recognize nor care "from whence (or how, in this case) their inspiration springs." It occurred to me that artists succeed to the degree they do in direct corollary to how much they allow lateral thinking into their working process. So it took little further effort to see that writers could greatly benefit from employing similar techniques specifically for story development. Let me emphasize, there is no newly-patented idea here. This is how creativity has always worked. I only offer various formalized approaches in order to take it from the erratic, almost accidental, manner in which it has been utilized by many in the arts, and apply it consistently for a surer aesthetic result.

So, having explored this process, I’ve developed a methodology I will call Lateral Screenwriting. Standard story-telling is a method that constructs stories vertically, or progressively, in a mostly time-forward manner, from logical event to next logical event, in an obvious causal line, beginning to end. Lateral story-telling, instead, takes a left turn with a scene or a sequence (indeed, sometimes big-picture with the story-premise itself; other times page-level, with a mere line or word of dialogue). It resolves the progression laterally, accessing less obvious aspects of its story’s world, rather than just the standard and common, forward direction. It is no less causal, just unexpected, and so less obvious. The result yields a quality of reality, surprise, and, in turn, offers the work a freshness that makes all the difference.

For example, with the western, the genre had become stale by the middle-to-late 1960s, done to death by decades of movie, and later, television dominance. It suffered from having exhausted its potential story sources, both from historical events and also societal and cultural analogs. It had descended into parody with (admittedly entertaining) comedies like PALEFACE, BLAZING SADDLES, and RUSTLER’S RHAPSODY, kitsch like JOHNNY GUITAR, musicals like PAINT YOUR WAGON (Clint Eastwood, singing, does not constitute any sort of laterally-induced freshness), hybrids (or, as they’re now called, mash-ups) like BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA, THE WILD WILD WEST, and television shows like F-TROOP. In short, it had come to be seen as overly familiar, and even worse, dishonest. Its depiction of the west had, more and more, become mythic in the worst sense: full of stereotype, convention, ringing false. Only when it edged anew into areas of truth (as announced in the screenplay for BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID’s opening line, Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true.) did it begin to regain its audience. Only when it offered depictions of minorities that were well-rounded and not mostly negative; only when it began to show a more accurate America, warts and all, by putting an honest face on things like Manifest Destiny, U.S. Government policies, and societal biases; indeed, only when it put its sexist, racist, and genocidal heritage center stage, did it re-attract an audience that had written it off. When UNFORGIVEN effectively completed the destruction of the myth that had begun said destruction with films like HIGH NOON, THE GUNFIGHTER, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, and CHEYENNE AUTUMN, the western was again able to emerge as a viable, if still diminished genre. So, it was this new direction of honesty, effectively a lateral (because it was non-traditional, non-vertical) movement, that refreshed an otherwise tired genre.

This formalized lateral notion has parallels throughout the arts, and even in the cinema. Famed Soviet silent film director, Sergei Eisenstein designed and assembled his films using a process he called the collision of ideas. He related it to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectics: thesis plus antithesis produces synthesis (the result becomes greater than the sum of the parts). This was also noticed by Arthur Koestler in his book, The Act of Creation, wherein he related such creative acts to Hegel’s concept of the dialectic.

The Russian, Lev Kuleshov, whose experiments and cinematic theories greatly influenced Russian directors Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, famously illustrated this with what became known as The Kuleshov Effect. Kuleshov intercut shots of the expressionless face of an actor with various other shots such as soup, a coffin, and a pretty girl. He discovered that the film audience interpreted the actor's single expression as hungry, sad, happy, etc., according to the images with which it was associated. The Kuleshov Effect was an important contribution to montage (image assembly) theory. It demonstrated that meaning was held exclusively in the audience, but, more importantly, it showed that the collision of ideas was powerful, profound. It also reveals a third component in this dialectical model: the audience, which by its presence adds the additional element making the sum of the parts greater than the combination of only the first two (1-10). Lateral construction is necessarily