Broadbrush details

I have a day job. And as part of it I've spent two days on a project management course. Which I actually quite liked, this is not a bitch about work or vapid corporate training,

But what it did remind me of is the difference between people who care about detail and those who are about the broad sweep. I'm very very broad sweep. My life is a constant stream of small mistakes stemming from having no eye for detail. I've learnt how to manage it but there's no doubt that it's not my strength.

And I was wondering if writers are detail or sweep people. On one level you'd like to think that writers have a vast range of personalities and take all types.

But on the other hand, writing is a specific activity. One that you do generally on your own. I have found writing so much easier since I felt I was doing it as part of a team but even as a team most of the stuff you do is still on your own. If it's a team sport it's cricket not rugby.

And that means that I suspect that in working patterns, writers are people who value their own company. The level to which that seeps into the rest of their life will vary but if you need to talk to people as part of your work day, I suggest you don't try writing.

So presuming there are similarities, I'm going to suggest that writers are strategic which makes them unlike almost everyone else in film except the producer. Directors I feel I can't say either way.

If you are interested in every little detail then being a writer for the screen would drive you crazy. You don't get to decide what your characters look like, what they wear, their intonation. You don't get to decide how long each scene, how it looks, the tones and rhythms.

You're creating a blueprint and hoping others run with it. You can announce the key details of a character, a scene, a general look but you've got to let a lot of it go. So I reckon it helps from a negative point of view to be strategic. You're not in a position to be detailed in 90 sparsely written pages.

But moreover you do need to be strategic. You need to know how it fits together. You can craft the most wonderful scenes but unless it flows from a to b then it's no good. You have to have that overview of your world. How it connects to itself, its internal logic, what truths dictate how things pan out.

I have a feeling that I'll come back to this in a month and disagree with myself massively. Which is fine, you can never quote walt Whitman enough 'Do i contradict myself, very well i contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes'

Plus this is a broad sweep question I don't want to quibble over the details.

Tools not rules

I realised something yesterday. A friend of mine was asking if I adhered to the 3 act structure. It felt a slightly weird question 'of course I do, what do you take me for?' and then he asked me if I felt restrained by it.

And I realised that it was a very long time since I'd felt that. When I first read Story I railed against it but while he overdoes it he doesn't seem much more than obvious now. I feel almost as perplexed as if you asked a footballer if he feels constrained by the fact he can't use his hands. It's a pretty fundamental part of the job.

So what's changed? Well first I think my aspirations have changed. I would like to make broadly commercial fare, mostly in the romantic comedy genre, rather than paradigm shifting works of art.

Secondly and this is probably the cause of 1 - I've discovered screenwriting is hard. Writing a scene is often easy. An intriguing and entertaining 1st act can be put together without too much difficulty. But a 90 page screenplay which works coherently as a whole and ends in a way that fulfil the promise of the premise? That's really hard.

And now I fully appreciate this fact I'm looking for things to help me. If you're struggling to put something together in a coherent way it's not a hindrance to try and get it to fit a 3 act structure it's a massive boon.

I think the book that switched my attitude to it (because I used to be dismissive of it) was the theoretically even more prescriptive Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, which talks not just about 3 acts but 8 sequences.

Its introduction talked about tools (dramatic irony, exposition as ammunition etc.) and then it just talks through a bunch of films and look at how you could break them down into 8 sequences.

It admits that some films have more sequences than 8 so it starts from the premise that it's just a tool. And what it does is make you do a bunch of short films each with setups, tension and payoffs. And it is by the far the easiest way of dealing with drift in 2nd acts that I know.

So there you go a plug for the sequence approach and an appreciation that I'm now an unquestioning adherent to the rules. And it's made life easier.

Friends in films

Most films where the protagonist isn't taken completely away from their world, have minor supporting characters who are 'the friends'

The friends are not the cause of the protagonists problems. Jeremy Renner in The town is not a friend in the sense I'm talking here. He's clearly an antagonist.

Friends aren't the cause of the problems in the protaganist's life. Nor are they the solution.

They are there for a number of reasons. To add comic relief. To act as confidants when otherwise dilemmas would be too internalized. To show other sides of a lead's character. In TV they often have counterpoint stories which act as a foil or contrast to the lead's story.

And sometimes they're there because you feel a need to make it clear that the lead has friends. I've just written a scene which essentially does this. I've never had much else I've wanted them to do so they get a scene like this. It's like those dreadful scenes in Bridget Jones with the friends but at least they're essentially a Greek chorus of her neuroses.

It's a romantic comedy which I'm trying to have each lead relatively equally focused on. Yet the lack of real friends for Lois, the female lead, makes it feel lopsided. She has some sort of sidekicks but the point of them is that they're not her friends. They're younger.

Her friends are starting to drift into a different life stage (her best friend Beth has a kid). So from a plot point of view she has sidekicks in Vicky and Tabitha but they are not confidants in the same way that Seb is for Toby.

So the way I see it there a three possibilities:

Don't worry about it. Make the script lean and get people along for the ride so they don't stop and go where are Lois's friends

Have the scene but make it very funny and watchable

Make sure Lois has a genuine friend and thread her through so she has an important role to play.