“I hate writing. I love having written.”–Dorothy Parker

How does one find a voice? How does one cultivate style? Answer: You work at it. Sorry to tell you, but this is work. Are you up for this? If it takes writing a million words, are you ready to do it?

Longevity, tenacity, determination. The willingness and hunger to outwork everyone else. That’s one way to develop a voice.  Another is actually having something to say, which takes living, which is another discussion.

Cliché? Maybe. But tell me, could you write with the voice needed for Casino?

Here, voice is style. And how about switching the POV, Ace and Nicky both with Voice Overs. Scorsese also did that with Goodfellas. Some would say this is his voice. Here’s part of the ending sequence of Casino with the same interchanging V.O.’s:

Casino: End Sequence

When one thinks about a writer’s voice, you’d be hard pressed to think of another more original than Chicago’s own, David Mamet.

Here’s a passage from Glengarry Glenn Ross:

Even without the f-bombs, what voice could be more identifiable than Mamet? Voice here meaning nobody in the real world talks like this, yet it sounds completely grounded in reality. The best writers mesh style and substance, as original as a Van Gogh. When you look at a Van Gogh, you know it. Nobody paints like that.

Sure, the ultimate goal is to make movies. To get paid and make a living at this. To say something and leave a legacy. How does one get there? I would suggest that you develop a style, a voice.

There are lots of talented people out there writing movies. What will set you apart is the hunger to simply outwork them all.

Commence the journey of writing a million words.

Begin today.

Glengarry: Pacino Rants

“The big difference is you can always fix a play, especially a comedy that’s playing before an audience. You’re trained to go home and rewrite. You figure out the texture of what’s comedic in front of an audience. In films, you have no audience response. Screenwriting is very spare. In a play two people can sit down and say how unhappy they are, and they can talk for two hours with each one saying, I’m more unhappy than you, and the other saying, Yeah, but let me tell you about my mother. In a film, you literally have to move from scene to scene, you have to pare everything down. The emphasis is on telling the story, moving it forward. What I learned is that you can learn something about a character by going in on them with a camera.”–Wendy Wasserstein

Blame MTV. Blame Attention-Deficit-Disorder. Used to be, you had 10 pages to blow the reader away. Today, you get five.

You have five pages to establish:

• World
• Tone
• Key Characters
• Conflict

The first five pages are valuable real estate. If you don’t demonstrate enough skill in the first five pages, chances are the reader won’t read past it with any level of seriousness. You need to set up your world now. Look at this opening scene, from Bad Lieutenant:

Damn! You get the world from this car ride, in a page! Interesting that the director—in the movie—chose not to have the twins cursing. Everything else is intact including Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant dropping the kids off at school, doing cocaine, setting up the degenerate gambling angle (radio broadcast), thus in a single scene setting up the character of Keitel, the tone, setting, even what will be the conflict of the world.

Bad Lt.– Shoots A Radio

Let’s look at another example, from Bad Santa:

Great setup! Tone. Humor. Willie’s hatred for his “cover” job as Santa. The script disarms the audience with black comedy, puts them right in the character’s head. Do I need the camera direction? Absolutely not. Does it wreck it for me? Are you kidding? The voice of the screenwriter is so assured; it takes you on a journey right from the start.

Bad Santa–Trailer

Here’s one way to work your characters:

Outline the major characters first, work down to key secondary/subplot characters. Try an INSIDE/OUT approach. People in life are never as they appear. How does the character appear to the world? What’s the façade? Write it down. Then write the inside.  The underside. Please tell me Dick the Happy Mailman, clearly an excellent guy—pets all the dogs, helps housewives with their grocery bags—doesn’t go home to become…Dick the Happy Mail Man! Does the dinner dishes, helps the kids with their homework, etc.

People are not as they appear! Do you want to bore the hell out of your audience? If you do, go ahead and picture Dick The Happy Mailman with no density or dark side. He’ll look like this:

Might I suggest an alternative? As Tom Waits said: “What’s he building in there?”

Rumor has it Dick the Happy Mailman has been downstairs in the basement all week. Downstairs in the deep, dark, rat-infested basement. He brought his steelrubber mallet with him because there’s been hammering. A hell of a lot of hammering. And what’s with the industrial-size lock and padded steel door? What the hell is he up to? Who is this guy? For me, he looks more like this:

Believe it or not, I also think of classic French poetry here, Baudelaire’s Spleen and Ideal. What’s your character’s Ideal? What’s the Spleen? What’s at the heart of the character? What is unique about their look, or how they sound? Who are they when the movie starts? Who are they when it ends? Is there enough of an arc? What prevents them from becoming what they want to be? What do they love? Basic questions you want to consider when you draw up a character.

Some writers are big on doing “character interviews” where you and your character actually have a conversation. Others like to write pages of character biographies. I’m ok with these biographies, to a point. When am I not a fan? When these studies run four or five pages long, with questions like…

“Previous illnesses? Arthritis, allergies, tennis elbow?”

“Important highlights of the character’s first sexual experience?”

“Describe the character’s general competence with children?”

Tennis elbow?! I would say when you’re down to questioning whether a character has tennis elbow, you’ve got enough detail. It’s time to—please!—start writing.

Concerning character biographies: Write out the basics, only what you need: How do your characters look and talk? Personal history that concerns plot? Relation to subplot characters? Inner and outer life that concerns plot? Character arc?

You want characters that generate empathy, who capture our sympathy, who get caught in a conflict and have to fight their way out. We want characters that fascinate, be it Amelie or Hannibal Lecter, Tony Montana or Ghandi. It helps if your characters have a sense of humor, or anger, or political outrage. To strike a chord in people, to synthesize the personal into the universal, have your characters react like real people. Pour yourself into the character. This is especially important with plausibility. Always ask, what would I do?

Who is the audience taking a ride on? Rooting for/against? Why am I paying $10+ to see your movie? Are your characters grey, not black and white clichés? The audience wants characters to take an emotional ride on, to relate to, to invest in, otherwise, why bother making the movie?

Have you examined, by the way, exactly why it is you want to write this movie? I spoke of this last week but I’ll repeat it, because it’s important:

I remember going to hear Judith Malina (founder of the Living Theater) speak. Her theatrical credits are without peer, but her face is little known on movie screens. She was Grandmama in The Adams Family, telling the audience that the movie paid for a year of her theater’s expenses. More interestingly, when someone asked how she picked creative projects, she said something so simple, it stays with me still:

”First, I ask: What is it, exactly, I want to say? Then I go about saying it.”

The internet is filled with how-to’s on character development, but I don’t think better advice exists. Characters are the sums of their wants, needs and conflicts…yeah yeah, that’s all well and good, but how does that help you write better characters?

• ALWAYS ask yourself: What am I trying to say? When you figure it out, sketch out the protagonist/antagonist and subplot characters that allow you to say it.
• ALWAYS pour yourself into the character. Plausibility. Every moment in every scene. Ask: Would I do that? What would I do in the same situation?
• ALWAYS remember: Just because it happens in real life, doesn’t mean it has to happen that way in your movie.

Oh, and the kissing cousin of the rule above: Just because it happens to you, doesn’t make it a movie!

Keep the lesson of Dick The Happy Banker close…

“How Do I Write A Great  Character?”

“I don’t write screenplay character biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.”– John Sayles

“Character arcs always seem to be a big issue with film studio executives . . . so the inevitable questions were posed: What was her emotional journey? How does she change? Is she a rich little snob who learns to embrace the less fortunate when she becomes penniless or is she a racist who becomes more liberal when she . . . yawn yawn.”–Elizabeth Chandler

One of the highest compliments any writer can hear is: “Your movie brought back memories of my brother.  He died last year….” Or, “Your movie meant so much to me. My mother was the same way…”

Strike a chord in people. Write something that resonates. Synthesize what resonates with you, personally, into something that resonates for an audience as universal. This is—as the Bard once said—the crux of the biscuit.

Sounds crazy, but this is exactly where great characters are found, very near to this proverbial biscuit. Why?

Consider this: In all moviedom, there are only three types of characters:

1)    Characters that exist in the real world.

2)   Characters that are wholly invented.

3)   Characters that are a combination of 1 or 2.

As the writer, you are God. You decide every breath every character in your movie will take. Characters based strictly on people you know in the real world can sometimes turn sentimental, can lose perspective. Then again, if you base them entirely on fiction, they may be stiff, lack real-life passion, dialogue, or humor.

My choice is Column 3. The Frankenstein monster of part creation, part reality.

Often times what happens in real life cannot be believed, let alone invented. Ever see anyone eat baby back ribs like Uncle Rocky? How about your pal Mickey who works graveyard shift at the porno bookstore and feeds you dialogue no human being has ever uttered before. Grab a pen, write down every word Mickey says because…

It’s Life: Use it all.

Sunday afternoon on line at Target. 2 A.M. Saturday on the Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line. You hear someone say something and it’s good. Grab a pen, get it down on paper. Assuming it’s not a passage from a published novel, if you hear it and get it down, you just wrote it.

Someone at the Post Office looks exactly like the antagonist you imagined in your story? Grab a pen; write down every detail of his look; the way he moves, even what he says. Stranger than fiction, you cannot make up what the real world offers.

More to follow. In the meantime, here’s a couple characters that stick with me, a bit more fiction than non, but seriously real…