In all seriousness, how can I be a better [screen]writer?

Advice: Don't be so critical of what you write, just frequently write what you want.

For a second there you sounded like Mckee. But only for a second! :)

http://www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/table.html

But as far as fiction writing in general:

Think visually. If you can't picture it happening, it doesn't happen.

Remember McLuhan's idea that most of communication exists only to establish that communication is taking place, and that whether he's right or wrong, real life conversation makes for shit-beyond-shit dialogue.

Write every day except your SO's birthday, your anniversary, your father's funeral, and the day the Red Sox play the Cubs in the World Series. If your time is cramped, then simply write briefly. It's more important to write frequently than it is to write for long stretches of time. Everyone has ten minutes a day: just pee less often.

Spend at least a year -- longer, depending on how much time you have to devote to writing -- writing whatever you feel like writing, whatever it occurs to you to write, with no consideration of market or audience or viability or "but it's been done before." If you're attracted to cliches/standards that you don't want to get stuck in, write them and get them out of your system, because you'll never get away from them otherwise (eventually, every thirteen year old boy has to write a robot story with big guns).

Look back on what you've written before, finished or not, and pay attention to what you no longer like and what you still like, and decide what that says about your strengths and weaknesses.

Be ready to suck. Everyone does. I suck about once a week, and while I'm no Fitzgerald or Updike, I do get paid for this. The more you learn, the more you take on, and the more you take on, the more you continue to have opportunities to suck. It's okay!

My suspicion for screenwriting, since the ordinary person doesn't grow up reading them as they do short stories and novels and so on, is that it's critical to read screenplays regularly -- to read them for fun, to enjoy reading them, to become so accustomed to the form that you're picking up on it without paying attention to it. That's the thing that always tripped me up (I'm shit at formal poetry for the same reason; I don't think in syllable counts).

That's funny, because when I write fiction I always try and write things that I can't picture at all.

Then again, perhaps you are more inclined to work in solitude in which case I urge you to put in as many hours as you can, save up money, and then take time off devoted only to writing. Some writers require emotional solitude as well, but I don't advocate divorcing your friends and family from your life just for the sake of a script.

Every writer has their own method of getting the words out, keep trying and eventually you'll figure out what works best for you. It can be a tortuous process, but don't let that stop you.

A) Arouse the curiosity/creativity of any potential collaborators.
B) Persuade someone to put time or money into developing it.

Generally, I just try to slowly excrete a script day by day, grunt by grunt. It's painful, and I hate doing it, but it's the only way I can get it done. Then, I like to go back to the journal and see if anything there can be of use.

Remember, your first draft probably won't be close to the last draft, so be totally willing to follow the old cliche and kill your kittens where needed. You'll hate yourself at the time, but thank yourself much later. And if you really need to use something like that, you can always find a better place for it in another script.

So, yeah.

But then I saw the movie, I realized half of what the script was getting across in the jogging-in-Africa scene was internal to the character, and couldn't be put across by the action in the movie.

I've got 4 feature length screenplays under my belt, and I'm headed to USC for my MFA in Screenwriting in two weeks.

1) Forget the software, it's shit. It's fun, but incredibly distracting. I write in either longhand or wordpad and on edit make liberal use of a few well-defined tabstops to format correctly. I say FUCK THAT to the Final Draft excuse.

2) Don't waste your time on description, especially those carefully-labored prosy descriptions you've trained yourself to accel at in other writings. A 'Dirty, dingy' kitchen is far more useful than a 50 word description of the same. By the time the thing gets to the screen, it'll likely bear little resemblence to your dirty kitchen anyway. Only describe those things which directly effect the story's emotional tone.

3) Write conversations that needn't be in the script. I often write a five to ten page conversation for a two minute scene, then edit, clip, edit, clip, edit ... until you've got the very top-tier writing skimmed from the brine.

4) So many writers are preoccupied with having /their/ music or /their/ movie references float all over the place. Don't pay any attention to that shit, because it's very distracting to be reading a script wherein screenwriter says "On the soundtrack plays XTC - Living Through Another Cuba" or whatever. This is a pet-peeve, but the spirit of the issue remains: don't TRY to interject your tastes into the script, let it it define the parameters of its own prefernce.

Judge if this sounds like shit, take a look at one of my introductions: this is from an abandoned script. If you think it sucks don't listen to a word I say, but if you think it's decent maybe this seems like good advice.

This snippit might have me seem to contradict myself: it's mostly a long, (hopefully) careful description. But it's one of three in the whole film; the story takes place /almost entirely/ in the following locale.

INT. NORTHPORT ROLLER SKATE AND PAINTBALL - 4:40 pm
A disco ball hangs in extreme foreground, spinning lazily and bearing, perhaps, an eerie resemblance of a floating mine: in equal measure precious and blinding, too endearingly engineered for its obnoxious purpose. It spins at half-speed, accompanied by the instrumental end of a down-tempo ballad.

A half-dozen skaters swish around the rink at the perimeter of which sits an elevated DJ booth. We track closer to it, across the rink surface: this is a real hero-shot, a grand introduction. The high facade of the booth blocks its occupant from view, and when he suddenly stands up we track even closer to reveal, in all his glory, OUR HERO.

He’s paint-splattered, disheveled, bespeckled, and were it not for the green and yellow pop-pommed watch cap on his head, we’d feel very sympathetic towards him. But the watch cap unifies and acknowledges his sorry outfit, and we realize that his shagginess is constructed and far less endearing than if it were a necessary product of poor circumstance.

OUR HERO
(into God-Mic)
That was ... I don’t actually remember what that was, it was from a tape that was in the deck when I got here. But here’s an album I found at a yard sale for eighty cents, and, I dunno, I mean, I really like it.

He’s quick-spoken and despite his oddly mannered speech, he’s normally
neither cynical nor sarcastic.

A scratchy recording dribbles from the second-rate soundsystem of the skating rink...

I've actually come some way since starting this thread. I am working on two screenplays at the moment, pretty much forcing myself to do at least an hour a day, and I have overcome some of the problems mentioned upthread. Your advice is very helpful indeed.

One of my main problems is that I still want to be very wordy, yes. I was a committed prose writer for much of my teens and early 20s and it is tough to break out of that. I read a LOT of screenplays at the moment, 3 or 4 a week, to try and get ideas for rhythm, pace, and structure. My other awful tendency is that I am a film studies graduate and it is very tough to banish that academic voice from inside my head.

My oither real problem is getting some sort of organic interplay between character and structure. At it's most (or least?) abstract, my current goal is to know my structure inside out, construct a well-plotted story BEFORE I start to flesh out my characters. Only, catch 22, I often find that I can't plot a credible story without knowing my characters, even though what i really want to do is bend them to the iron will of my story. You probably get the idea.

Anyway, I always feel a little self-conscious talking about this stuff so I rarely mention it online, but this is pretty much what I DO and what I want to DO in the future. It's nice to hear from someone else doing the same thing (though considerably further down the road from me by the sound of it).

And by the way, let us know how USC pans out - I'm going to be applying for MAs in the next six months and USC is going to be one of them. Good luck!

Well, I think you have to see where the characters take the plot and vice versa. They do tend to both get a life of their own if you get the juices flowing. Yes, it's pretty much impossible to write a plot w/o doing some character fleshings (I like to call them character assassinations), and the other way around. But, I think the important thing is merely to have both very well structured before doing the hard labor of writing the actual script. Which you choose to embark upon first, or if you want to go back and forth, back and forth - that doesn't matter. But you should know them both well before you proceed with the story.

For me, my problem is always that I have very good ideas for overarching ideas, big concepts, and where I want things to start and end (and maybe one or two middle-points). But then I sit there and realize that what I can write out as a general idea in maybe two pages has to be turned into a more subtle collection of somewhat vaguely linear, but not always completely tightly knotted, lines which fill up somewhere between 70 and 130 pages. Which is damn hard. Of course, sometimes I get a great idea for a scene with no idea of how to integrate it all together at first. But that's more rare. It's fucking frustrating, though.

Yes, you're absolutely right, Girolamo. The very controlled manner in which one writes prose is absolutely unsuitable for screenwriting - characters have a way of pushing against your desire and spinning into their own arcs, obsessions, what-have-you. And it seems that they're always, always, too verbal. My biggest frustration is keeping the conversations terse, worthwhile, and from skittering into cuteness.

My other demon is the PAGE 80 BITCH. Around page 80 of every script I've ever finished (and the dozen+ I haven't) I begin to think my idea is shit, that it's boring, that I wouldn't watch the movie, that it plays out like 2nd-rate Altman and can't involve anybody. Often the fear of the PAGE 80 BITCH will begin to creep in somewhere around page 60, and I'll try to write something big! interesting! crazy! to forestall my future worries. And that never works.

The solution to this, I've found, is to watch lots and lots of films while I'm writing. I aim for 7-10/week, and I try to pull in stuff that has _no_ relation to my current project. I was writing a horror script taking place in Northern England, and I ended up watching a lot of Swedish documentary films and epic African melodramas, including two (unintentionally) about deafness. I pulled this into my own script, wrote a deaf character, and felt the script ten thousand times richer. During the rewrite I read a half-dozen books on deafness, and found a way to work this character trait into the center of the story. Everything supported the horror story with which I'd begun, but at the end of the second draft I'd added a significant theme of deafness (and audio impairment I used as a tension-tightner) that appeared to have been in since the beginning. And I was able to write scenes that were half-culled from images in two other movies I'd seen. It was hard to divorce myself of the academic belief that this was 'cheating' or 'plagarising,' but once I waa able to do so I could give it /scads/ of credit for improving my script.

Also, though this has been mentioned I'm sure, write out outlines and a synopsis and get to know your characters beforehand. Otherwise they run the risk out sounding alike.

MOst important is to just write. If you want to get a 95 page script and you're on pace for 135, that's fine, because most of the time working on a script will be spent honing it and whittling it down.

A. Car Chases
B. Explosions
C. Nudity
D. "Twist" Endings
E. Serial Killers
F. Talking Animals
G. Wisecracking Kids

CGI Robots
Fart Jokes
Queen Latifah in a supporting role as the "sassy black (fill in the blank)"
The Protagonist Dressing as a Women to go Undercover

in general I think the main way to be a good writer of anything is to write a lot... even if it is complete rubbish you will gradually get the hang of writing better stuff. So why I have I not applied this simple dictum to my own life? Er, move along.