[…] Recently I was struck by five personality traits and five skill sets that keep popping up. So I thought it would be helpful to do a series, a checklist if you will, of …read more […]

Hollywood's also one of the few places where a high school dropout video clerk or a guy moving your furniture can end up living a life beyond your wildest dreams 6 months later. I remember that recent Oscar telecast where the host was stressing how important a college education was and then went around the room and most of them didn't. Amy Adams giggled that she didn't. Last week, I guessed that persistence and openness might be 2 of the traits. I think persistence might have to be the #1 trait. It's probably connected to the traits passion and courage.... It takes courage to be persistent...persistence might just be the action pattern of being courageous over and over again.... and if you're passionate it'll probably drive you to keep going. I wouldn't mind another expanded version about Persistence, pulling through failure, etc as it's a topic that could fill many pages. Sylvester Stallone was talking about it the other night with Jimmy Fallon.... he mentioned how sometimes art is created through desperation and that you can make things happen. He quipped that with his face, no one was hiring him for anything other than roles where he mugged people. If you think about it, 3 of his biggest roles were created by himself: Rocky, Rambo and the Expendables.

I think college can be a liability. I keep hearing advice like from Tarantino who said he didn't go to film school, he went to films. Or on Cinephilia and Beyond where there are many similar quotes.

Scott, this is wonderfully inspirational. Great quotes. I especially like the note on M. Night Shaymalan's realization that Maclolm Crowe is dead. Imagine that film without that final twist. It would be completely mediocre. But how can you learn to do that? You can't. It's an epiphany. It just happens in the course of the struggle. Maybe at some point you sit back in frustration, or go to bed and it just hits you. It comes to you. All you have to do is wait and be open to some kind of major shift like that. Let the story write itself. Let the characters take you along for the ride. But I get that it took five drafts to get there.

Re college: It all depends on the writer, the school, the type of stories they're interested in writing, the faculty, and so on. I've met and interviewed writers who have had zero formal training as well as writers who swear by the film school education they received. I teach in a wonderful program at UNC, Chapel Hill. It's called Writing for Screen and Stage. You can learn more about it in this post. Considering this is a public university and the program is a minor, which means students can major in more mainstream programs, at least insofar as traditional approach to getting a job is concerned, and still pursue their creative ambitions and see how that feels. Many of my students are now involved in the business in Hollywood in all sorts of capacities. So I feel like any WSS student gets MAJOR bang for their buck. Is it possible to learn what you need to learn without going to film school? Yes. That's why with the help of the GITS community, we put together Deep Focus, basically film school on the cheap. You can go through all of those books and resources, and have a structured approach to learning all about movies and the craft of screenwriting. Each writer has to find their own way, formal education or not.

Jon, that's exactly right: An epiphany. And this goes to the heart of the writing mantra: Trust the process. And also this phrase I use to describe the process of writing a story: Wrangling magic. Stories are not widgets! All those screenwriting gurus with their formulas and paradigms, that just harms screenwriters in the end because if Hollywood types figure out a way to develop a software system which they can plug into some formula, we could all be out of a job. Fortunately, you need MAGIC to make a story special. So I doubt that will ever happen. But often, we can only find that magic when we go into the story... and find the animals.

Scott, you (and Tom) are exceptional teachers.

[…] 5 Screenwriting Traits: #5 — Persistence […]