Feed Someone.
Why successful screenwriting looks like failure.
If I’m honest the creative act I get the most actual pleasure from is cooking. A sensory joy that helps keeps you alive, cooking can tell a story about place or season that grounds you in reality. It tethers you to the people you love, especially those who live on only in the margins of your cook books, I’m never not with my mum when cooking. It’s also quick and, perhaps most importantly, though it’s something I do a lot, it’s not what I “do”. There is, after all, no better way to suck the joy out of something than to build your life around it. I’m sure that had I the same skill or dedicated the same time to cooking as I have to filmmaking, then I’d hate cooking too.
Not that I hate filmmaking, just the endlessly confounding business around it. Itself a trick of the light, filmmaking is beset by illusions. Your first inspiration is wildly compelling and tantalisingly just beyond your fingertips, but stretch for it and the whole of reality shifts around you, geography rippling out into the distance to reveal the object of your intent is actually impossibly distant on the other side of an impassable ravine.
Writing stories for the screen offers a different sort of frustration in that it is an art form designed for a very small and typically ungrateful audience. Books have readers, film and tv have viewers, screenplays only reach collaborators. All audiences have opinions but the audience of a screenplay has almost no job besides picking them pieces. Which is why writing them is so punishing, the best you achieve is the right kind of wrong.
This is not a popular opinion but screenwriters often shoot themselves in the hand by caring too much about their writing. Often your good writing is the very thing that hampers your work. A perfect piece of writing leaves nothing for the actor to add, has no space for a cinematographer to illuminate, is unimproved by the addition of a score. However a “perfect” screenplay inspires a creative response, it’s both a safety net and a trampoline, stopping the story crashing to the ground but also propelling it into the air. Really you give inspiration to other artists but expect them to act like they’ve found problems only they can fix.
All artists like compliments but screenwriters have to learn to find theirs between the lines. When an actor expresses your words without needing to say them, when a director stages a scene more elegantly in space than was possible on paper, when a producer pitches your story and it sounds alien and exciting. Great screenplays are the husks films leave behind as they grow, they are crutches you learn to walk without. It’s beautiful, putting a thought so deeply into someone else’s mind that it seems entirely their own, but it’s also an essentially thankless task.
After writing, cooking is a blessed relief. Even if half my regular audience are children who treat my work in this sphere with such disdain, fear and fury that most meals might as well be pitch sessions.
“Sausages!?“
“Yeah, I told you it was sausages”
“But I hate sausages”
“No you don’t”
“I do I hate these sausages they have bits in”
“But you ate them last week. You said they were nice. You stole them from my plate”
“CHUCK THEM IN THE BIN”
“Well at least eat the chips”
“THE SAUSAGE TOUCHED THEM! CHUCK THEM IN THE BIIIIN!!”
Still even cooking for kids teaches you something about composition. Mine demand their food be clear about what it is and be either bland or sweet. This can be the sweetness of tomatoes, though not the structural complexity of actual tomatoes. It can be the buttery blandness of plain pasta or, (for one of them) the starchy blandness of roast potatoes or the distant eggy blandness of the noble Yorkshire pudding.
More mature palettes often don’t actually stray too far from this basic equation. You can delight people by making things seem more structurally complex but at root you want something comforting that supports something interesting. The comfort will be either some starchy carbohydrate like rice or pasta or potatoes or something fatty and luxurious like cream or butter. Or probably both of those things at once like all those countless methods the French have for basically rebuilding potatoes or bread but now 90% butter.
The interest can be sweet, or sharp, or hot, or earthy, or sour and all of these things can be magnified by the addition of salt. And there lies the simple truth of cooking - if you want something to be more enjoyable, add more fat and if you want it to be more interesting, add more salt.
Of course if you want it to be healthy add less of both, which is perhaps why I’m a writer not a wellness guru. Whilst I have developed a high tolerance for thankless tasks, I don’t actually seek out misery or find it purifying. I want my writing to be full of the butter of compassion and the salt of conflict. Yes there’s always something like a meaning, like a message, something I think is important, but I’d never serve a salad without dressing. Crucially I want my writing to fill you up and though I try not to care too much about it, I do still prepare it carefully, thoughtfully, with love in the hopes that doing so reminds you that you are cared for.
‘Thank yous’ are nice but there’s no higher praise than that moment of deep consuming silence rich with surprise and satisfaction that returns you to yourself, refuelled and full of your own urgent mad brilliant ideas. Good writing, like good cooking, is a gift you give to other people to help keep them going.
My screenwriting course returns from the 24th of October in London and in your house on zoom. I’ve found that great screenplays have a clear and personal authorial voice yet most screenwriting advice wants to bend your ideas to fit someone else's shape. So my 9 week course explores the art of telling stories for the screen in a way that will empower you to tell stories in your own voice.
Demystifying screenwriting both creatively and commercially I'll show you how genre rules, structural constraint and even a producer’s mad notes can all actually be used to free you from expectation and create something unique.
Any level of experience is welcomed, whether you are a newcomer with a passion or a pro stuck in a rut, this course will provide you with a set of tools that will help you more quickly understand what your story is and how best to frame it for the producers, directors, actors and audiences you want to fall in love with it.
Book your place here.
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