“We rarely know where we’re going: writing is discovery.”
Robert McKee
Story, page 113
“I think Julius Epstein—not about Casablanca—but somebody asked him about structure, and an outline and whatever and he said, ‘You know, I write page one, if I like it I’ll write page two. If I like page two I’ll just continue to the end. But that school of thought seems to be lost a little bit in the current culture of [screenwriting] books and seminars.”
Mike De Luca The Dialogue Series
If you’ve ever wondered why there is so much great screenwriting information out in world, but so few great films made one place to examine is the analytical verses intuitive side of screenwriting. It’s a hard to do justice to the topic in a blog post, but I’ll try to keep the discussion going.
Mike De Luca once asked Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls, “When did you first feel when you had what it takes to be a screenwriter? Did you have a specific moment when you felt the confidence of, ‘I can do this.'” Ulhs said;
“It was when the analytical side and the intuitive side merged together, worked together as a creative unit.”
Much (most?) of what producers, directors, studios, readers, agents, junior agents, teachers, script consultants, screenwriting books/seminars/classes/podcasts and marketing teams focus on is the analytical side of screenwriting. Examining the finished screenplay asking a zillion questions. What works and doesn’t work? The intuitive side isn’t quite as concrete—and could even be called mystical.
“To tell you the truth, I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I really try not to do that. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts…Basically, my writing’s like a journey.”
Writer/director Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained)
Creative Screenwriting interview with Erik Bauer
I was in a writing workshop with Oscar-winning screenwriter (and playwright) Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and asked him why he wrote a certain line and he said he didn’t know. When Oscar-winning screenwriter (and playwright) Horton Foote was asked why Robert Duvall’s character in Tender Mercies told his daughter he didn’t know the words to a song when he did, Horton said he didn’t know. He just wrote it. And Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarantino said of creating the Mia character (Uma Thurman) in Pulp Fiction, “I have no idea where she came from. I have no idea whatsoever.” That’s intuition.
When Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Schindler’s List) was asked this analytical question: “When you’re looking at an image do you go with the philosophy of adding light to get the image or subtracting to take away to get the image?,” he said, “I have no idea…I don’t know how it happens.”
If you listen or read many working screenwriters, the one thing that jumps out to you is how different their approaches is to writing. Take theme for example; some writers say they start with theme, others say they discover theme while writing, some say they avoid theme altogether, and some confess to not even understanding how theme fits into their writing. Conflicting views abound in just about everything including is it best to write by hand, computer, typewriter, or even transcription (which worked well for Rod Serling).
But you don’t read much where writers talk about the analytical verses the intuitive side of screenwriting. Maybe because it is hard to articulate. The analytical side is the side that informs your writing (or re-writing) by asking things like “Are the stakes high enough?” and “How can I visualize the conflict?” The intuitive side is wandering into the unknown. A place that filmmaker Robert Rodriguez says is good to be because it leads you to creative breakthroughs.
“You don’t need to know…Here’s the shortcut—just get out of your own way… You’re just opening up the pipe that creativity flows through.
“As soon as your ego gets in the way and you go, ‘But I don’t know what to do next,’ you’ve already put ‘I’ in front of it and you’ve already blocked it a little bit. ‘I did it once but I don’t know if I can do it again.’ It was never you. The best you can be is to just get out of the way so it comes through. So when an actor or crew member comes to me and goes, ‘I’m not sure I know how to…’ I say that’s beautiful because the other half is going to show up over there. They say knowing is half the battle, I think the most important part is the other half, not knowing. Not knowing what’s going to happen, but you trust that it’ll be there…You have to trust first and then it will happen.
“You only get the idea once you start. It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspirational will hit. You don’t wait for inspiration and then act or you’ll never act. Because you’re never going to have the inspiration—not consistently. You can consistently perform and act until it comes out… Get out of the way, let the pen glide where it needs to go and it will be there and you’ll be amazed. And you’ll be going, ‘how did I do that?'”
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
Interview with Tim Ferriss
Baseball great Ted Williams was once asked how he hit the ball so well and he said something like, “I pick a pitch I want to hit and swing.” Isn’t that what ever baseball player does? But somehow, someway Ted Williams did it better one season (1941) than any Major League player in the last 70 plus years.
For sure it’s a mixture of intuition, analytical skills and talent. Where to draw lines between them all is impossible. Jim Uhls didn’t explain how he merged the analytical side and the intuitive side to work as a creative unit, but I think that’s a fine goal. And my guess is it happens somewhere in the process of actually writing.
“I finally found it one afternoon when I was twenty-two years old. I wrote the title ‘The Lake’ on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun, with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my back standing up…I realized I had written a really fine story.”
Ray Bradbury
Zen in the Art of Writing
“I’m self-taught. I learn everything by doing it. I wasn’t born knowing how to write a play. You do it and hopefully you keep evolving.”
Sam Shepard
Interview with Don Showy
Rock-And-Roll Jesus with a Cowboy Mouth
Bradbury also wrote that The Muse and The Subconscious are two names for one thing. And I think somewhere in that one thing is where intuitive writing lives and thrives.
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