What Being in the Hospital Taught Me About Writing Screenplays

Start in the middle

Seriously. We’ll catch up. When you’re stuck in the hospital with people coming in every twenty minutes to shove another needle in your arm or hang another IV, you can’t exactly set your schedule around the TV Guide. And there’s no DVR, so you turn it on when you turn it on.

Not once did I start a movie at the beginning, and not once did I suffer for it.

All that stuff that leads up to the middle? You don’t need it. We’ll catch up. I certainly did, and I’m the dumbest guy in the room. Even dumber at the time because some of the chemo gave me brain fog thicker than a layer of lard on refrigerated stew.

Don’t worry about establishing who’s who. We’ll figure it out.

James Allen said, “Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.” Start your movie in the middle, with people boiling in crisis, and we’ll figure out who’s who pretty quick. Your characters will be revealed by adversity.

Get rid of the ending

Not the end, the ending. All the stuff after that is a waste of time. And I’m saying this as a guy in a hospital who has all the time in the world.

When the story is over, it’s over. Stop writing. I don’t need Hank and Zeke to ponder what they’ve learned. I don’t need the lead’s best friend to explain what it all means. I don’t need the writer to interpret the story. That’s my job. Your job is to write it.

Forget the theme

Here’s the problem with theme: It doesn’t matter. Whatever you think the theme is is not theme. Not to the audience, anyway. The audience will bring their own life experience, personal history, and unconscious biases to the film. Your work will be interpreted through the lens of the viewer. Don’t try to cram in a theme. Just write the story. Trust that you have your themes within you, and they will come out naturally as you write. And trust that the audience won’t get it. Because they won’t. They will intuit their own themes from the film, and become your partner in creating something bigger than you imagined.

Most movies start too early and end too late. Begin at the beginning, which is somewhere near the middle, and stop at the end, which is somewhere before the ending. Cut all that other stuff and you’ll be left with a tight, compelling story.