The gardener and the detective
Another July 4th is here and as we lurch from crisis to crisis the idea of Independence takes on more meaning than it has in many years. In times like this it doesn’t take much to find an idea for a compelling human story, ordinary people are struggling to keep food on the table and find meaning in the word Independence. In order to get us through we need stories that inspire us, that spark courage, as well stories that afford us the necessary pleasurable few hours of escape. It goes without saying that there is a high demand for good scripts and that we as screenwriters have our work cut out for us.
So you ask, what is the connection between a gardener and a detective, got to do with anything? The answer is because a screenwriter is both. We are like detectives. We find our characters and finding your character generally leads you to story. We find who’s who and how they relate, and who wants what from whom and what the conflict is and after copious note taking and writing short riffs, a scene here, a scene there, we have a puzzle that we have solved. Now, we write it all down… but backwards. We write it as we discovered it. And like a gardener, we plant seeds along the way, that lead the audience to an unexpected ending.
Find silence and you will find your imagination.
A mother who is scared for her son who has been protesting the ICE raids, a border patrol guard whose brother is an undocumented farm worker, a news reporter suffering burnout from the endless horror stories she has gets assigned to, a swimmer who volunteers to salvage plastic from the ocean floor. Or go back 60 years to tell the story of a child who came here as a boat-person from Vietnam and who now as an older woman who has given refugee to a woman from Ukraine with her two children.
But a word of caution. Writing takes stamina and you won't find it in any software or with AI. Writing a succesfull screenplay is to invest your particular human sensibility into the telling. All too many times I have seen writers think ‘oh this is easy, I’ll just use the software or AI and plop all this very rough idea of a script down and it will take care of the progression, the characters, the shots and everything else.’ Here’s the rub; without knowing the basic craft, why you write what you write, who your characters are, what cuts to call for, what all the terms mean; you will simply have a hodgepodge that on flipping through might look like a script but as a story doesn’t make any sense. Then in variably, many hours of frustration follow trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Basic: the key in developing your story is to collect all the material you have in various forms and in notes and in random scenes, from which you create a step outline, a skeleton a road map, stepping stones, that have an emotional logic and a logic to the action on which you can rely so you can BEGIN to write your screenplay. “What comes next” rarely works.
Well, lovely people, summer is here which is a fertile time for ideas to take root, it’s a time when daydreaming frees your imagination and a time when stories unfold.
So happy summer all and keep writing…