730 - A Frank Conversation About Screenwriting

21:49John August:and I will have forgotten every single thing about it, but it will still read like me. And that's essentially, you do develop a voice at a certain point and there's a fingerprint to it. It does feel like me. So the thing I was writing this afternoon versus 15 years ago, they're very similar in terms of the words I'm choosing and sort of how, what it looks like on the page. You develop a style. I should say if anybody, if you want to read any of my stuff, I have my website, johnaugust.com. There's a library there. And so basically everything I've written And all the scripts I've written are there.

22:20John August:So if you're curious to read Big Fish or Charlie and Charlie Factory or any of those things, that's there. So are you an outliner or right by the seat of your pants kind of guy? Classically, I'm more of a pantser. I'm more sort of figuring stuff out as I go and sort of feeling my way through it. I do have a sense of what the overall shape of the story is. But I will write whatever scene is appealing to me right in the day. And so I'll write out of sequence. I'll do all that kind of stuff. increasingly I've had to I've been doing stuff where I've had to turn in an outline first sometimes in animation or other projects and I kind of resented it but it is really handy when it goes like oh actually the story problems are solved and now it's just about the scene work so I do appreciate that this project I'm working on right now I turned in a 45 page outline and so at that level you really do know the story there's no mysteries and it was it was a required step for this project but it was really nice to be able to have conversations with the studio.

23:20John August:And they knew exactly what movie I was writing. And so when I delivered them that movie, they weren't surprised. They weren't shocked. It was just a better version of what they had in the outline. And that felt good. Any differences between... You've done original features, adaptations, big budget films. Is there crossovers or certain tips that you could give us on working with those different types of stories? I do a lot of adaptations. and crucially an adaptation, the idea is coming from someplace else, but it has to be a movie first and foremost. And so you really have to look at like, what does this story want to look like on a screen?

23:53John August:And that can mean radical transformation of the underlying narrative to make it fit on in that two hour block and with sort of the, just what an audience approaches with expectation for a movie. So Big Fish is a collection of tiny little short stories. The book is very different from the movie and yet it tracks, it makes sense. Charlie and Chocolate Factory has kind of every single word I could keep from the original book and get onto the big screen is there, but it's actually structured a lot differently. And in the movie version of it, Charlie is the antagonist and Willy Wonka is the protagonist.

24:32John August:Willy Wonka is the character who changes throughout the course of it because I needed somebody to actually have an arc over the course of the movie. And Charlie Bucket starts the movie as a really good kid and ends as a really good kid. And so I needed to have him be the one who sort of created the change and created the nervous breakdown that was happening for Willy Wonka. So it's incredibly close to the book and yet also incredibly different in terms of the character dynamics you're seeing there in the story. So it really depends on the needs of what it is. The movies I'm writing as originals, listen, I'm writing an original right now and it's great, it's liberating.

25:05John August:It's sometimes a little scary not to have the backstop of the material you're adapting. Sure. So what's a piece of advice that you just keep giving writers again and again and again they keep ignoring? I sort of alluded to it first, which is basically write the movie you would pay money to see. And I said to pay money to see is, I think, important because it distinguishes between commercial, like big C commercial, like, oh, everyone's going to go see that movie. But what's the movie that you actually would want to see? If you love low-budget, grisly horror, you should write that because that's a movie that you wish you could see, that you'd actually pay your money to see.

25:44John August:And by the same token, don't write a football movie if you don't like football movies. And so often I see people who have spent a year of their life writing movies like, you would never go see this. And there've been a couple of times in my life where I've come in and done a couple of weeks on movies like, I'm never going to see this movie. It's just not my movie at all. But as a craftsman, I was just coming in to help them out. I think most of the movies I've worked on are movies that I'm genuinely excited to plunk down my money on a Friday night to go see. And that is an important distinction.

26:14Good advice. So after all these years, what still, what do you love about screenwriting?

26:20John August:I love the adventure. I love just the sort of like, the chance to sort of just build out a whole new space in a world I've never seen before. I'm very much a writer who, so my experience of writing is, I close my eyes, I put myself in the scene. I see everything. I hear everything. I sort of let it loop through. And then I quickly scribble down what I saw and then go back through into a clean version. I've always been just very good at just imagining and imagining myself in a place. I love going to that place and imagining it. There's a series I'm hoping to do next. And if it happens, the good part, the bad part, is I look at to be in a place for years at a time writing those episodes.

27:02John August:and that's really exciting to me. It's a little terrifying, but exciting to me to get that chance to sort of stay in a place and watch it grow and develop and change and interact with the realities of production. Fantastic. Good answer. So you mind if we take a few questions? Sure, let's go for it. Linnell, you still with us? I'm still with you. We have a number of questions, but this one has stood out to me. This is from Luke Rankin. He says, we've talked to good routines, but what bad habits were you able to kick that helped you become a better writer? It's a great question. And I'm going to fall back on a thing I've said other times before.

27:40John August:So Google it and I've probably said it before. But I used to have bad habits and then I decided to just label them habits and not define them as good or bad. They're just the ways that I work. And so as I recognize myself falling into a less productive habit, that's just me. I'm wasting times in the ways I'm wasting times or I'm doing that thing again. And I'm not as harsh on myself when I see myself doing it. Bad habits are the classic procrastination or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle when I know I should really start first. And if I don't get work done in the morning, I'm not going to get as much work done over the course of the day.

28:15John August:If I don't start that first sprint, which is that first hour of really concentrated work, I'm not going to get as much done in the course of the day. But also, stuff will eventually get done. And that's okay too. I can ruminate too much. I can sort of fixate too much on stupid things, but that's also a part of my brain that's involved in my imagination. So that's also the muscle I use for writing dialogue. So I have bad habits, but I just choose not to label them as bad anymore. Okay. Connor O 'Farrell says, what matters to you more when you write? The process of writing or the prospect of the finished script?

28:54Is it the journey or the destination that drives you?

28:57John August:Honestly, it's the destination. I love having a finished thing. I love reading through something that I really like, but the outcome of it, the getting there sometimes is bloody and messy along the way. There's moments where you enter what we call flow, where it's just like, oh my God, it's just, it's natural and it's easy. And you just sort of lose time. You're like, wow, this is going so great. And it can be addictive. And you can sort of start to kind of chase flow in a way that is unhelpful. because if you actually go back and look at artists' best work, it didn't always come while they were in their flow states, while everything was good and easy.

29:32John August:Some of their best work came when they actually were sort of grumpy and resentful. And as long as you're getting stuff done, that's what really sort of matters most. But getting stuff done and finishing things, I love it. Love it to death. Okay. Hanif Bahati asks, how do you think that Hollywood has changed in terms of non-Hollywood writers, the talent outside of America or Hollywood? So there have always been international writers who've worked in the Hollywood system. And so obviously a great number of British writers and Australian writers as well, who are writing in English, but writing sort of from overseas or who sometimes they come here.

30:13John August:I have friends, Kelly Marcell, who's a terrific writer who came from the UK and made her career really in the US. And what's changed most over the course of 15 years is that with the rise of international streamers, there's a lot more local language production that's happening with approximating Hollywood budgets and series, but there've always been great features made overseas. And that's giving exposure to a lot of international writing that US audiences would never have seen before. So the globalization on that front is terrific in terms of the ability for non-English language media in particular to be consumed as primary media in the US.

30:52John August:It's a great change. Claire June asks, you worked hard to be an in-demand industry insider. What draws you to a project to say yes or to say no? Great question. There's the underlying material itself. The first question is, is it a movie I actually pay money to see? Is it something I feel like I could do and that I could do well? Are there good, interesting people associated with it? And so if there are people I've always wanted to work with, fantastic or I have worked with them before great but I will also call around and find people to work with them for and and get the the download like are they an asshole because there's life is too short to be working with a bunch of assholes sometimes sometimes it's worth it but most times it's not worth it so those are the things I'm also really mindful of the opportunity costs and as I said before I think I was over parts of my career I've been chasing a little too much and doing the thing that I feel like I should be doing rather than the thing I really want to be doing.

31:49John August:And so I will ask myself, am I just chasing? Is this actually a thing I really do want to do? Here's a question from Joe King about the Prince of Persia. Yeah. You're on IMDb page or in your library on your site. He doesn't see it. There are things he admires about that script. Is there a version you wrote that could be available? I never read Prince of Persia. So I was an executive producer on Prince of Persia. Jordan Mechner wrote it. And so Jordan Mechner created the original game of Prince of Persia. We got partnered up through a friend and he said, I really wanted to do a movie of Prince of Persia.

32:21John August:He and I went around town over the course of two days. We pitched it to every place. Disney bought it for Jerry Bruckheimer. Jordan wrote it in a great, great script. It got sort of Hollywood studioed a bit. And I think the movie that Jordan wrote was better than the movie that came out, but I'm happy that some people like the original movie, but I never wrote it. And it was a good lesson for me in that producing a movie seems like, well it's easier than writing a movie but it's also very frustrating as a writer because i love jordan to death and yet as we were going through the draft i kept wanting to just like fix things myself rather than sort of suggest how he could uh fix things i likened it to being an airline pilot and you're in the cockpit but you're not allowed to touch the controls it was a little bit frustrating on that front so that's a reason why i've not done a lot of other producing of other people's stuff um over the years is that i learned like i'm not a great creative roommate when it comes to screenwriting.

33:16Okay. Combining a couple of questions, I'll just paraphrase. Does age matter? If you are, say, over 50 or 60, does that make you obsolete?

33:28John August:It doesn't make you obsolete, but I think age does matter. And age matters to the degree that you have different possibilities at different moments in your life. And so if you are just graduating from undergrad and you can live on very little money and eat your ramen and scramble and do things, you're going to approach the start of your screenwriting career differently than if you are a parent with two young kids. You're going to just make different choices and that's understandable and right. Both ways can work, but I think it's naive to assume that everyone's going to have the same opportunities at every moment in their career.

34:02John August:Screenwriting is about writing a screenplay that people can then use as the basis for making a movie, but it's also about being able to sit across from somebody and convince them that you really can deliver what they need in order to shoot that movie. There's a large psychological component, a social component to it, which is important. A 22-year-old is going to have a harder time doing that than a 30-year-old sometimes because it's just hard to get people to trust you a little bit. And if you are a person who's not living in Los Angeles, it can be harder still to sort of do that stuff. So the logistics and age and things like that do matter, but it's not because there's like some hard, bright line that you can't cross.

34:43John August:It's just the nature of physically doing the work with other people as a factor. Here's a sort of a loaded question from Jermaine Reed. For writers building original films instead of IP, what's the smartest way to make the script undeniable on the page? Undeniable on the page. So if you're writing an original thing and it's going to be a calling card movie, a thing I would strongly encourage you to do is see if there's a way that the main character, the protagonist can read as a reflection of you. It can read as a reflection of your own experience. So as you're picking through all the things you could possibly write, the thing that most speaks to...

35:25John August:Someone read this script and then they met you like, well, of course, Jamal is the person who wrote this script. It makes so much sense. And because they talk to you about like, oh, where'd you come from? Where did this... They're like, oh, I see exactly why you and only you could have written this script. And that is incredibly useful and helpful because not only do they like the script, but they understand, they get a sense of who you are as a person. And they can be thinking about like, even though I don't do this script, how can I get this very talented writer to write something else for me?

35:54John August:So that's incredibly useful. And so listen, you want to sell that script, but it's mostly going to be a sample. and if that sample is not just of your writing talent, but your voice, your personality, like who you are, that is incredibly helpful. So that undeniability is not just that it's commercially viable, but that like, oh, I get what this, I get why only he or she could have written the script. Here's one on, what's something in younger writers that you're really excited to see in the future? Is it style or is it theme? Something that Gen X and Millennial aren't quite doing. listen a theme is the theme is too esoteric but style the style and voice if i'm writing a script i want to have a sense like the characters are speaking with interesting voices but also the storytelling style on the page is engaging i i that if i'm i keep flipping pages and i'm excited to see what happens next that is a great read and that is a person i want to meet and it's really of any age but if i was looking for somebody who was specifically was writing for younger characters, writing for people currently in their teens and 20s, that's the kind of thing I would look for on the page.

37:03You personally have a goal of how many pages for yourself you write a day?

37:08John August:Three pages is great. Three pages is about an hour or two of writing a day. And so that seems like that's not actually a lot, but it's diminishing returns after two hours of actual writing per day. Just like the amount that you actually get done sort of tends to decrease. There are days where you will just crank through 20 pages. And they're actually like a pretty good 20 pages. But if you start to think like, well, that's the normal, you are going to burn yourself out. And so in the bonus chapter we put out with getting stuff written, we really sort of dive into that is basically find whatever is the sustainable amount of writing that you can get done in a day and aim for that.

37:46John August:And don't beat yourself up if you're not hitting that because otherwise, you're going to start resenting writing, which is not the goal here. When I was writing, I've written some books. I've written three. I have a three-book series called Arlo Finch, which is middle grades or Harry Potter age. And for those, I had to write 1 ,000 words a day because I recognized that if I wasn't hitting that target, you're just never going to finish the book. And so 1 ,000 words seems like a lot, but when you actually look at the screen, it's a scroll, it's not that long. It's a frustratingly small amount of actual page count, but it gets the job done.

38:19Personally, I wrote a novel and did eight pages a day. Great. And it was exhausting. It is exhausting, yeah. It was tough. You think only eight pages, but it was exhausting. This is an interesting question from Hannah Lehman. She says, what is the best time of the year to go out with a script realistically? Meaning taking into account festivals and holidays. When's the best time to present your script?

38:45John August:I am not an agent or manager and they would have much more experience with this. I would say back to school feels right. September feels right. Your instinct is correct that the holidays are just... This is a terrible time of year for everything. January after Sundance can be good for a while. I think there's a fear of the film festivals and stuff like that, overwhelming stuff. But the people who are reading scripts coming in aren't quite the same audience for that. So there's some time in the spring. Stuff can happen in the summer. It's just that people are gone more in the summer. It's just tough.

39:21John August:And so I think that's why you see so many things happening in the fall. But scripts sell every week of the year. It's just there's times you tend to avoid just because you know fewer people are going to be around. Arthur asks, they'd love to hear about pushing through when working, when your world or your environment is not conducive to writing. Oh, it's tough. We have two episodes with a counselor, a psychotherapist named Dennis Palumbo. Episode 99, there's another episode. The second episode, I don't remember the number, but it's... The title of it is like Writing While the World is on Fire, which was specifically this past January, which was coming out for the elections and Los Angeles was burning.

39:59John August:And it felt incredibly hard to be thinking about doing meaningful creative work while it just seemed like the world was crashing down around you. And sometimes it's bigger outside factors. sometimes it's personal factors. It's your financial situation. It's family. It's illness. There's other reasons why it's hard to do. What I would encourage you to do is to think about let writing be a time where you do have some control in this out-of-control world or life situation. It's like, can you take 20 minutes and write a scene and put in your headphones and write a scene and just go off the corner and do that?

40:37John August:You will probably get some stuff done. it will probably feel a little bit better. And let writing be an opportunity to manifest some order and structure in a place that's otherwise very tough to do. I've had to do some writing during some really difficult family times. And it wasn't always great or pleasant to be doing it. But in the end, I can't tell you... If I were looking back on which pages I wrote during which time, I couldn't tell you what I wrote when. It ultimately is still my writing. But now let's do two or three more. Okay. Stacking your projects, what type of workload do you have?

41:15Just curious. Is it two specs and one assignment? They're wondering about the workload of a professional writer.

41:22John August:So writers who are working pretty consistently, I don't tend to write specs. And so I've written probably three specs over the last 10 years, just because I'm generally moving from assignments to assignment, things I pitched to set up versus I wrote from scratch. But generally, I have one first draft that I'm working on. So I'm doing that. And then if I hand that in, I have a rewrite or some other project I'm going to. Very rarely are two things underneath my fingers at the same time that will happen. There's been situations where I've been on a first draft and rewrite and a straw polish all at the same time.

41:59John August:And people just... Based on the needs of what people needed to do. I was doing all three things. But it's not great for your brain to just be shifting back and forth between all these different things. You're not going to get story confused, but there's just a habituation time to put yourself back in the place of what that is and enter into that movie. Okay, what do I need to do in this space to make this make sense? So I will rarely do more than one creative project over the course of the day. But as I said earlier, I'm probably only writing two hours of script during the day, but I'm writing other stuff.

42:35John August:I'm writing blog posts. I'm writing other initial draft things on stuff. So there's other writing that can be done, even if it's not the all-consuming brain work of screenwriting. One more question from David Pimentel. He's writing and directing an animated movie and they've screened and tested well, but the main character keeps getting the lowest scores. Yeah. Any thought on the matter for that would be awesome. Yeah, David, sorry. It's a really common thing. And so hopefully the other people involved in the project understand it's a really common thing. You're running into the sidekick problem, which is that the sidekicks in movies, especially animated movies, they're just more fun because they're more fun because they don't have the burden of carrying the plot.

43:23John August:People love them because they're happy and free and get to do things that say crazy stuff. If you have an opportunity to change things all this at this point, it may be looking for how can you get that psychic energy into your hero? And are there moments where that hero could actually do a little bit more of that, especially in the very start of the story? So we're clicking and engaging with them more as not the responsible character, but as the wild character who is a little bit more unpredictable. But what you're running into is super, super common, particularly in animation. And that's just the reality of it.

43:57John August:I'm sure if you actually were to test the characters in Inside Out, for example, Joy's character probably tests low because she is responsible for sort of carrying the movie on her shoulders. She's a great character, but I think everyone else probably scores higher in their boxes because they're so jokey. And that's just the difference. You're getting lots of compliments on script notes. So they're all in the chat. And personally, I just wanted to say, I know last year, you all went through the fires in LA. I'm from LA and so my heart's there. And I hope that you're all pulling through well. It seems like the industry is coming back after such a difficult time.

44:36John August:No, we're in a much better place, but thank you for asking. It's improved a lot. Any closing thoughts? These are all the right questions. It's tough because it's not like there's one way to do anything, but I can hopefully just share my opinion on what works for me. Thank you, John, for taking the time out of your schedule. Have a good night, everyone. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, John. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much. All right, we are back in the present. I have one cool thing that I want to share. Julia Turner is a guest who's been on the show before. She was at our live show, and she interviewed us about the Script Notes book.

45:14John August:She's formerly editor-in-chief of Slate Magazine. She's a person who knows her journalism. She has launched a new thing called LA Material, It's a website. It is a podcast. It is a newsletter. And it's great. It's not unsurprisingly, it's terrific. It's very specifically about Los Angeles. And so some of the articles you can read that are up there right now are about five days to change the LA mayor's race. A deep dive inquiry in how many cars should turn left on a red light, which is a very specifically LA thing. And Drew, what's your instinct? So you're at an intersection. There's no left turn signal.

45:50John August:how many cars are allowed to sort of creep across before? What's the acceptable number of cars turning? Ooh, maximum of three. Once the light turns, three is the maximum. And then any more than that is too much. Yeah, I would agree with you. But the article goes into the wide range of opinions of what that is. Three seems to be where people tend to stop. Four is incredibly aggressive. The idea is that, of course, you know, one car has crossed pretty far into the intersection during the light still being green. And a second one is probably inched into that space too. It's a question of whether that third one can kind of gun through.

46:25John August:Four is crazy. Four is crazy. But if that second one doesn't go, that's a problem. Oh, it is a problem. Yeah, because you've blocked the crosswalk. You've made a bad situation. And so you can tell people who've only been in Los Angeles a short time because they don't know that they have to actually clear that intersection. Have you ever been in the car with someone who's born and raised in LA and follows all the traffic lights to the T? is like polite at left turns. I haven't met that person. Have you? I've met, I've sat in the car with a few of those people and it always blows my mind. I'm like, I thought you were baked on this.

46:57I thought you knew what we were doing.

46:59John August:And the weird thing is like, LA drivers are not particularly aggressive. They're not particularly smart, but they're not particularly aggressive. And like, we will tend to like stop for people in crosswalks and do that kind of stuff in ways that people in other cities might not. But you got to learn how to make the left turns. And so you will see, when I go back to Boulder, where I grew up, there was an influx of California people and native older people were like ah they're doing these crazy things on the left turns it's like because that's where they came from that's the culture yeah gotta understand the culture but we don't honk that's the whole thing no we don't it's not a honking it's not a honking town well I'm excited for Julia because I remember her mentioning we teased this at the last live show yes and so now it's launched it's LA Material I got to see the list of all of the beta names and other things they were considering but I think LA Material makes sense for what they're doing So there's Hollywood news, but it's not mostly Hollywood.

47:48John August:It's really about just sort of being in Los Angeles. I love it. That is our show for this week. Special thanks to Mike Johnston and everyone at the Northwest Screen Artists Guild for hosting this event. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today in this forum, but we usually answer your questions. so send those in to ask at johnaugust.com. You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

48:23John August:Of course, the Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. Thank you for continuing to buy the Script Notes book. We look every week to see how many we sell and God bless us, we're selling a lot of copies. You'll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Again, thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net.

48:51John August:We get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on sketch comedy writing. Drew, it's good to see you. And thanks again for putting together this episode. Thank you, John.