John Q. Phats Entertainment

As I find myself writing more and more I find my process changing dramatically.  I’ve read a lot of books on writing screen plays and everyone seems to have a different process.  So I guess the best thing to do is to sort of cherry pick what you like from each book.  I’ll tell you flat out, outlines do not work for me.  I end up having this outline with no clue how to translate it in to a script.  When I’ve tried, I just end up questioning the outline and trying to go a different direction.  It all goes down hill from there.  I find myself taking the Stephen King approach more and more.  I read a great book by Stephen King, titled “On Writing.”  First off, no wonder that guy wrote horror so well.  He lived a terrifying life.  Second of all, he wrote some amazing books and made an extremely lucrative living off of writing.  Thirdly, this book itself is written amazingly well.  The points he makes and the things he points out are all reinforced through stories of his experiences as a writer.  If you start to tell me a story, I want to know the ending and I’m going to listen.  One of the main things I took from that book was something he called “writing with options.”  You know what’s going to be the final result, but in the beginning you write things that give you options along the way.  For example, lets say you are writing about a burglar breaking in to a house.  You would start off with the woman in her house and maybe she starts to boil some water for tea.  Does she use the boiling water as a defense against the intruder?  I don’t know, but it gives you something to think about.  It’s an option.  That’s how I write.  I just sit down and start to write and see what happens.  Think of that first sit down though as just laying out the ground work.  I pay attention to detail, but I don’t judge what I’ve written.  Not yet anyway.  I suppose essentially, my first draft is my outline.  Most outlines are roughly a page or two.  My outlines are 120 pages.  Sue me.  After the first draft, I go through it and delete parts that I don’t like or I rewrite them.  Then I do that again, then again, then 3 or 4 more times just for good measure.  Then again and again.  Then I’m done after I go over it a couple more times.  Each time I go over it, it goes faster and faster.  There are parts that I’m comfortable with that I can start to skip after awhile.  The final run through takes me about 20 minutes.  Now it’s time to have someone else read it.  I get their opinions and this is the tricky part.  Finding someone who’s going to be brutally honest and being able to deal with that brutal honesty is not easy.  The natural reaction is to defend yourself.  But it’s not an attack on you, it’s on your script.  Ultimately, it’s to make it better.  Whenever I start to feel defensive, I identify it, and I say absolutely nothing.  Sometimes I’ll nod and say “Hmmmmm.”  This is my alternative.  I really try to think about the criticism, rather then immediately defend myself against it.  If I can justify it, I’ll discuss it.  If the person counters and makes good points that I can’t dispute, I change it.  After about 4 or 5 people read it and I make the adjustments I need to, I’m done…..  After a couple more rewrites here and there.  And that’s my writing process.  It works for me, but it’s probably not for everybody.
I saw Shutter Island on Sunday.  Kind of predictable, but I liked it all the same.  I can’t really think of anything else to say about it.  Martin Scorsese is awesome.