Be an expert

I was talking to an aspiring screenwriter the other day who is, quite frankly, a hack. I was polite and agreeable as could be because it was a brief moment at a party, but the whole time she was talking, I just kept thinking "Wow, you represent the worst kind of writer."

She was proud of herself because when she couldn't figure out how to tackle Act 2, she just thought of a movie that had a great sex scene in the middle and copied it. She was really proud that nobody else noticed her theft. Seriously, she said this to me like it was a great accomplishment.

I know this happens a lot. You don't know how to proceed with your script, so you think "What did other movies do?" and if they did them, then it's okay for you to do them. That way, you don't have to work as hard to figure out how to solve your story problems.

Well, kids, I have the solution to all your hacky moments right here - RESEARCH.

When you look stuff up, you learn neat things. Things that will help you as you write.

Writing a story about CIA agents? Read a fucking book by one. There are actually quite a few out there. Want to know what an archaeologist does? Don't just watch Indiana Jones movies. Talk to a fucking archaeologist. Professors have office hours during which they'd rather do anything other than grade papers. Telling a young screenwriter what they do for a living sounds awesome to most of them. You can buy all the technical expertise you want for a price of a cup of coffee.

There's also a website or two where experts on just about any topic you want will answer you. This is a good one:  All Experts.

I'm lucky because I chose a mate wisely. My husband, aka The Beefcake, is law enforcement, and a lot of his buddies are in different branches. Chances are, no matter what branch of law enforcement I want to write about, he knows someone who has worked there. He also knows fighting techniques, general tactics and weapons. Any time he's home, you can hear me holler for him, or, if he's playing Halo Reach, running down the hall to interrupt his vital game time to demand a strategy on how a trained military professional would clear a two-story house.

He is also capable of beating people up and lifting heavy things. It's pretty sweet.

Anyhow, my overall point is, when you know your topic, it gets a lot easier to figure out what your characters would do in certain situations. And when you know that, not only can you properly advance the plot, but you can make your scenes more interesting as well. You can find little anecdotes to squeeze in there, or neat personality quirks you can give your people to make them more individual.

You don't have to copy what's on film if you know how real people act.

So don't be a hack. Go look some stuff up.

I have awesome friends

I have been working on a project that genre-wise is right up my alley, but it's in a world I know very little about and takes place in a location I barely know. I have been abusing the hell out of my friends in my pursuit of research, and they have been nothing but awesome.

Every day for the last week, I have emailed one of my friends to ask her geography questions. "Hey, do you know of a building where I can have a fight scene that has some security but not too much security...?" Sure enough, she comes back with a place. "Do you know of a cool place where my villain can put his lair?" After a few minutes of discussion, she gave me a location and a link to more information about the place. I don't know what she was doing at the time - probably cleaning because she's obsessed with cleaning - but I took her away from it so she could look up crap on her city and get back to me.

Another friend knows the world I'm playing in, and he has been amazing. I know when I email him he's probably either at work or writing his own material, but he's never hesitated to get back to me. He even busted out all his books and started searching through them to find the answer I need. He even helped me solve a big story problem in the planning stage. In fact, I probably owe him my nonexistent firstborn at this point.

I also have a group of non-screenwriter friends who love to jump in and offer up suggestions when I'm stumped, and their insight has been the key, sometimes, to figuring out a stuck point. They are awesome.

I've been doing my own research on the old web. I've gotten to be as much an expert on this area as you can be in a few months, but nothing beats someone who's obsessed over a certain subject since they were a wee child, or someone who's actually spent years living in the place you've set your story. I am so lucky to have these guys willing and able to help me, even though they probably have things they'd rather be doing.

So thanks, friends, for all your help. You're going to make me look a whole lot smarter than I actually am.

Homework

I like the research part of writing. I'm currently working on a historical project again, but this time the story totally writes itself. As I'm reading a biography I'm highlighting like gangbusters because the character I've chosen to write about just happens to be naturally PERFECT for the story I want to tell.

I'm going to have to devote a lot of time to reading over the next few weeks because aside from reading two biographies of this person, I also now have given myself job-related homework.

I just assigned my 11th graders to choose a novel from a list of American authors, and by the time they were done selecting they had all convinced me to do the assignment with them, and somehow they convinced me to do a different book in the two classes, and of course I had to choose books I haven't read before, since I'm making them do the same.

So now I will be reading Their Eyes Were Watching God AND Gone With the Wind and doing presentations on both authors in January.

I tried to be all "But that's two books" and they all held up their copies of A Tale of Two Cities they've been assigned in history class and said they also have to read two books.

It's hard to argue with that logic.

Easy research

I don't like calling people on the phone and I don't always trust the Internet for research. So I think for the rest of my career I'm just going to keep writing about shit I can research by asking my loved ones. Burnside is a historical script about a period of history in which my mother is an expert so every time I needed to make sure my story was accurate or I needed an idea I just called her up. Then I asked her to read my script and give me notes on inaccurate stuff. I did read a couple of chapters of a book she recommended, but I got most of my good ideas from her.

The project for the producers is rooted in what The Beefcake does for a living, so whenever I come to a point in the treatment when I'm not sure what happens next I just ask him what someone in his position would do if someone else did this other thing. Then I go add whatever he said into the script.

I gotta tell you, it's a great way to go. If you know somebody who's an expert on something cool you should write a script about it so you can just be like Hey, what would you do if this thing happened? It really helps if that person is currently in the backyard weeding.

It saves time.

Research

Starting a new script means research. Unless you're writing an autobiographical number, which nobody should ever do EVER unless your name is Antoine Fisher, you're gonna need to look some stuff up.

I wrote a script once about these brothers who were all thieves and they had to pick locks and crack safes. I tried to find as much info as I could but it's some very technical stuff and I'm not so good at technical stuff. And then I wrote about three brothers but I don't actually have any brothers, so I really didn't know what the hell I was writing about. I tried to write another script about an assassin for the mob but I don't know anything about that and I tried to research but it's pretty hard to find anything accurate about being a hitman. I read this one book that claimed to be accurate but I'm not so sure, so most of what I know comes from other movies. And we all know what happens when you base a movie on other movies.

Not Dead Yet worked because I needed to research only one thing: the Great Lakes. I put most of my events in familiar settings, but the route my characters had to take to get from one place to another was not one I have taken. So I met with Ex Boyfriend at the now defunct Doughboys and we went carefully over how canal locks work and what cities are on the route my characters needed to take and whatnot.

And because I took the time to make certain I knew what I was writing about the story was easy. It was sort of an epiphany of common sense. Hey, there, if you know what the characters know you can probably write them better.

Lucky for me, my new script is on a subject in which my mother is an expert, so when she visited I plopped down on the couch with her and got out my notebook. I explained my story and she immediately jumped into action. A little too immediately. She practically wrote my whole story and now she's probably going to sue me for story credit.

Now I'm just going to read this book I got from Amazon and let the rest of the story jump out at me as I read. And as soon as I feel 100% confident with my level of knowledge on the subject, that's when I know it's time to crank that sucker out.