Positive assignment

Random thoughts after completing an enjoyable first draft:

A few years back, Pål and I wrote a couple of stageplays more or less on assignment, meaning that we pretty much wrote them for someone else to produce. Most writers will find themselves in this situation sooner or later. After all, we don’t usually get to write scripts for ourselves to produce. So whether it is writing a script for a producer, in collaboration with a director, for a theater troupe to produce, or in a workshop situation of any kind – be prepared for the job to quickly turn into a negative assignment.

Few people are good readers and responders. Most people naturally focus on what they don’t like or what they would have done different themselves, and forget that they are not the ones writing it. If production is imminent, fear can easily seep into the process too, with directors and actors more or less unwillingly focused on what they don’t want to do. I certainly know that I am capable of this behavior myself, and I’ve had to train myself not to act that way. And you can’t force anyone to understand this, you can only lead by example:

The bottom line is that you’re not going to get what you want by telling people what you don’t want.

But your readers are sometimes going to insist on exactly that. Pål once likened the experience of discussing a first draft to discussing kitchen utensils. It becomes really hard to deliver when your partner, boss or whoever tells you: “I don’t know what I want you to find, but it’s not a fork.”

You’re clearly on a negative assignment, and it’s draining your creative juices really quickly.

This sounds obvious and perhaps a little childish when I read it back to myself, but I think this negative approach is all too common, from amateur theater and all the way to professional filmmaking.

What to do?

With our current projects we decided that we needed to nurture ourselves a little, and thus agreed that we were going to be hardcore about what we would love to write. We were going to give ourselves a positive assignment. Our early meetings and discussions on the period scripts we’re now writing centered on what sort of visuals we would love to see, and what sort of themes we felt were resonating with us, without any thought of structure or practicality or indeed whatever anyone else might think about what we are attempting to do.

We then spent a few months writing a first draft that’s now done, where we joyfully threw anything we wanted to see into the mix. We ended up around 150 pages. Some good, some not so good, but at least there’s a surplus of pages and somewhere to go. And I believe the script communicates a positive approach to the storytelling.

We’re not going to lose that when we start revisions.