From copywriting and journalism to screenwriting

Those who write for commercials are very used to relying on the power of the image. Their medium is the strength of suggestion, the acquisition of meaning through allusion and association, the eloquence of the perfectly chosen shot. Their handicap is that they think 45 seconds is a very long time.

Screenwriters – where do they really come from?

Screenwriters very seldom leap fully-formed into the world. They slide and squeeze into it. They are usually refugees from other forms of writing.

My own background was writing for theatre, which might be a good starting point since it deals with character, with dialogue and people with big egos.

But it has its drawbacks.

Telling stories on screen requires a great deal more than getting a number of characters to waffle entertainingly and with some semblance of spontaneity for an hour and a half. It requires that you think visually; that the story you tell is fundamentally told in images. This is hard for people with a theatre background, when all your skill has been directed at getting by without pictures and relying on the evocative power of a well crafted phase to transport an audience to a myriad of fabulous destinations.

Advertising

Which brings me to advertising. It seems that writers on commercials often seem to feel frustrated by the intensity of focus (often from people who know very little about writing) on what is really just a small fragment, a highly concentrated collective effort to achieve one single, short-lived effect.

What they enjoy about the long-form medium is that here writers have the time to build character, to let effects reveal themselves over time, to tell a story that has a numbers of strands and themes. And there are far fewer people looking over your shoulder.

While copywriters might have their familiarity with the power of the image, journalists are often drawn to screenwriting too; and bring different strengths with them. They are used to structure, to the power of the individual story to encapsulate a complicated argument or circumstance. They are used to boiling the general down to the particular, to finding the telling detail or gesture that will bring a story its human dimension. These are all crucial instincts when writing for the camera.

Deadlines, rewrites and collaboration

Something that journalists and copy-writers have in common is their enslavement to the deadline. This too makes them far closer to the world of screenwriting than they might imagine. Speaking as someone who has repeatedly had to lead teams of writers in tackling drama series' for TV, I am very grateful for this professionalism when I encounter it.

It is often ignored that screenwriting has a very highly developed structural aspect to it. Scripts pretty much always have to be finalised by a given date, rewrites done on demand, creative solutions to practical production issues (such as the almost entire absence of a budget) have to be forthcoming.

There is seldom time to retreat to the hills, or to the bottom of a bottle, and think about things; to wait for the muse to answer your anguished cries of need. The muse, or a fair facsimile of her, needs to always be on speed-dial. People who come from theatre, or novel writing, or any of the more subjective corners of the very wide field covered by the description ‘writer', often find this pressure-cooker-creativity very difficult to accept.

And you need to let other people in. This is something else copywriters and journalists are used to. Television is a very collective process. Feature film making even more so. You cannot be precious about the sanctity of your words.

This inclusiveness is a very difficult skill to develop, since writing is often this solitary and subjective pursuit where your characters become like a much-loved circle of drinking companions. But you have to develop the ability to knock them on the head in a dark alley without a second thought; something which often needs a thick skin and a strong stomach. Poets don't make good assassins. Writers who get paid by the word are better.

So, to those copy writers and journalists who grow tired of “being bounded in a nutshell and counting themselves the kings of infinite space”… fear not. There is another world out there, and your passport to that world might already be in your hands.