I intended to write at least 2.5 hours per day  in the last one year. If I don’t reach that target, I will not access the internet for that particular day other than to check my mail. I am glad I didn’t succumb to the urge to peek into the net even once in the last one year without reaching the target.

So how much did I write?

Well, I will simplify the math here. If I just calculate the hours based on days I have reached my target and also the days I overshot my target, it would be around 370 odd hours. That is slightly more than 1 hour per day.

Wait, not done yet.

There are at least 72 days where I have worked but didn’t reach the target of 2.5  hours. Most of these days, I usually would have crossed 1.5 hour mark. There are many days where I fell short of the target by half hour. Still to keep it at the lower side, if calculated at the rate of 1 hour each of these days, it would be a total of 442 hours of writing in the last one year.  That would be around 1.2 hours of writing per day.

I am proud of this even though when rounded into average figures, it is very conservative even for some one with a day job. The reason is that, there were times where writing ground to a halt for weeks due to some academic assignment. At the personal side also, this was one of the toughest periods for finding the atmosphere to write (which is going to change in a couple of weeks). Also there are two 2 week vacation periods in there where I took a sabbatical from writing. And I am going to go easy on my rules in the last week of december even though I will continue writing.

Now what is the output? Did I complete the tasks that I had set out to do in this year?

All I can say is that I almost got an equivalent work done. Almost means around 80%. Why equivalent? Due to a variety of reasons, mostly the projects I planned to do in 2011 were not the ones that I ended up working on. Also a (co-writing) project concept was abandoned midway into the 1st draft because it was not going any where. Hopefully, we will approach it from a different angle later on. Anyway I covered more ground with my collaborative projects than my personal ones for obvious reasons.

I am happy with my writing in 2011 except for one single thing. It is all over the place. I need to concentrate on specific projects with the objective of finishing them rather than developing a number of ideas in parallel. I need 2-3 finished products in my platter rather than 10 half finished ones.

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I am trying to figure this out even now. It is an interesting movie by Steven Soderbergh. But then why is it so boring? Can a movie be good and boring at the same time?

Contagion traces the aftermath of a highly infective, lethal viral epidemic. Economic inequality, greed of corporations, media frenzy and paranoia, selflessness of health workers, political games, man’s sheer brutality when his existence is threatened… everything is thrown in. You have seen so many zombie movies which explains the zombie phenomena with some viral apocalypse that it is a relief that this movie doesn’t resort to cheap thrills to maintain the interest quotient. The film maintained the scientific accuracy and the realistic feel in every scene.  At the same time, I personally feel that you don’t have to shun drama to maintain that feel. Soderbergh himself has shown with Traffic and Erin Brockovich that it is possible . It is all about being able to strike the balance while writing. For me, Contagion tipped a little too over to the other side.

Co-writing is an exercise every writer should try at least once. May be you feel that you are not a ‘team person’. You may have certain fixed priorities and personal preferences in mind and you don’t want to be steered away by a writing partner. But still, you should try co-writing on at least an experimental basis. Reasons? I will give you 5.

The learning curve is steeper

Believe me, we all have our own strengths and weakness. Having a co-writer helps to improve that self awareness. What you would learn by writing 3 scripts by yourself, you would learn by writing a script with a friend. It is because many mistakes we make, we know in a instinctive manner that we are doing it wrong. But the problem is, to openly accept the judgement of such an unconscious ‘shit detector,’ it takes us more time. But with a co-writer who is honest regarding the worthiness of your concepts and process, the duration to enlightenment is cut short.

You will feel guilty if you don’t write

Almost all of us believe that we have some ‘great’ ideas for movies in our mind. But an average idea which you have put down on paper is better than thousand brilliant ideas that you are never going to write. With co-writing, you actually improve your chances of really getting things done. Writers are notorious for their tendency to procrastinate. But if you have a co-writer, it is much more likely that you will keep the ball rolling as otherwise you will be wasting the time of another person.

Learn the team game

What really makes scriptwriting different from other forms of writing is the collaborative process which is the crux of film making. Even if you wrote a screenplay which was wrenched out of the intimate parts of your heart, it is going to undergo scrutiny, invite comments (including many outrageous ones),  and you will be working and modifying it relentlessly until the point it becomes a film. It is all about taking feedback with composure, defending what you really believe in, examining your own ideas objectively and being able to articulate the abstract issues in the script. Now if you have a co-writer, you are a step ahead. You have some one to engage and challenge your ideas even at the concept level. There is a lot of back and forth which gives you time to sharpen your axes and be ready. Also it teaches you to accept disagreement, realise that some one out there may be able to contribute a better idea than yours and to work towards a consensus by bringing in a third, even better idea.

Throwing more darts

Every co-writer brings something unique to the table which is not only about plotting or dialogue or characters. Some may be good in networking and some in getting the work done. Also the catchment areas of different people may be different in terms of pitching your finished screenplay. Some may have technical expertise or past experience which may be helpful in getting your script made. The trick is not in writing your screenplay but being in a better position to really make it into a film. With co-writing, you are widening your net.

There are many roads to the same place

Different writers use different processes in writing. Some outline a lot. Some like to plunge into the first scene and let the characters surprise you. Some believe in structural templates while some love to experiment. Some like to know their characters while for some, attributes of a character develop according to the needs of the theme and plot. Some research while some doesn’t. The problem is, for most of us, our process is set within one or two screenplays. There are different methods in writing a screenplay but it is unlikely that a person will experiment much. But if you have a co-writer, it is much more likely that you will be exposed to a different method, which who knows, may be even better than that of yours.

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(Major spoilers…)

How do you dramatise the malady of modern relationships? When I read the synopsis of this short – ‘Marriages are made in heaven… what happens to it by the time it materialises on earth?’- I was curious about this. But after watching the short, it  appears that the logline is a little too generic for what happens with the couple in the short.

Had the typical writer’s nightmare 2 days back. The idea I have been outlining for more than a month is similar to the one-line of a film which is already out there. I came up on this while browsing through IMDB. Now comes the important question- what to do? Continue outlining it or abandon it? Or watch the movie and decide how much execution is similar to what I have in mind? But I got an interesting advice from a writer-friend- don’t watch it. If you watch it, some elements are going to subconsciously spill over. Continue developing it and if you want, see it later. I feel that it makes most sense. So I have decided not to shelve one month of work but to boldly go forward. The decision is risky. Most usually a writer is judged by hearing some of his outlines and not by reading all his scripts. A very innovative execution of a commonplace idea is more likely to go waste than average execution of a high concept idea.

What I have learnt from this experience is that writers need to be constant touch with all the projects developing in parallel out there. We can’t watch every movie. But at least one can go through one-lines of movies without spending too much time. This has to be part of our routine.

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I  desperately want to get into the head of Spielberg. What does this man want with his life now? As a filmmaker, he has achieved more than what most of us can even imagine in our dreams. So how does he keep his spirit intact? After Jurassic park, Schindler’s list and A.I., what next?The world is closely watching  his next move.

…And then he decides to make a movie on Tintin with motion capture technology. Fine, if this is what he wants to do at this point of his career, there must be a reason. He would be seeing something in Tintin like what Aaron Sorkin saw in Mark Zuckerberg or what Nolan saw in Batman or what Anthony Minghella saw in English Patient or what Kubrick saw in Clockwork Orange or what David Fincher saw in Fight Club….

But if it was there, I didn’t find it.

The typical Spielbergian spectacular set pieces, intrigue, mystery, dry humour running through the action sequences- everything is in there. I don’t have a complaint that Spielberg didn’t uphold the spirit of original Tintin comics. You get in the movie what you get in the comics. The sheer boyish sense of adventure, the mystery of clues coming together, the quirky supporting characters, wild chases, Snowy-all of it is there except the fact that ‘action in every 5 minutes or less’ appears a little engineered and tiresome in the movie. In my opinion, he upheld the spirit of Tintin with a little too much faith. May be he tried to realise the potential of Tintin series. But did Spielberg try to fully utilise his own potential?

Tim Cranmer is a self retired British civil servant (and a covert intelligence operative) living in the country with his young mistress Emma, tending to his vine orchard, trying hard to believe that world will allow him to have the middle class existence that he desperately want to sink to. But the nemesis for his escapist life comes in the form of Larry, his idealistic protégé who refuses to share his cynicism about the world. Larry sets into motion a chain of events which consumes Tim and his girl friend and  propels him from the sterile suburbs of England to the conflict torn regions of Russia.

I like the world of espionage that appears in the novels of John Le Carre. You get whif fof a brutual ground reality in there. There are no heroes here. It is all about cynicism or greed or hot headed idealism. Spying is not about beautiful beaches, sexy girls,   preposterous gadgets or one to one physical engagement with adversaries. But it is something that happens during the meaningful pauses of diplomatic conversations or empty chitchats in the corridors of beaurocracy. After John Le Carre, it is very difficult to ignore the juvenile nature of the world of James Bond.

After 1st update on my strategies for 2011, 2nd, 3rd and now 4th updates comes at bigger intervals because whenever there is a crunch in writing time, frequent blogging is the first one to go under the axe. But this public display of both targets and my performance in terms of achieving them has been one of the biggest brain waves I had in 2011. Now there is an extra effort to at least have some modestly defend-able outcomes. So it appears that net can be put to good use, to increase your productivity.

Total number of days: 61

Total number of days where I finished 2.5 hours of writing: 33

Total number of days where I have not done any writing at all: 16

Total number of days where I have exceeded my 2.5 hour target: 3

Total number of days where I accessed net before completing my targets: 0

Even though the number of days where I hit the target time has increased slightly, there is something ominous in the above figures. The number of days where I have not done any writing at all has increased drastically. The key to productivity is writing something every day, however little it is. Also you lose the thread of whatever work you are doing, if you don’t go back to it consequently for a few days. So a ‘zero output’ day is more damaging than not achieving the 2.5 hour target.

Another issue has been the problem of finding time to sit in front of computer and actually type a treatment or screenplay from an outline. As I mentioned earlier, I am travelling a lot nowadays due to my posting and so most of my writing occurs during this time. Naturally outlining happens more often than writing full drafts in such a scenario. So in the last leg of the year, I am having at hand a number of rough outlines still requiring a lot of fleshing out. To rectify this problem, in the next two months, I will be trying a strategy of actually converting these ‘story spines’ to full treatments rather than searching for new ideas. Even though I was planning to develop some new strategies to network and actually set up some meetings at the end of this year, I am postponing it to next year as I would rather have some treatments at hand first.

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National award for best film, best acting, best background score, best cinematography- and also India’s official entry to the Oscars… I thought that it would be tough for this Malayalam film to keep up to my expectations… Also after hearing the story line- the struggle of an old perfume seller and wife trying to raise ‘legitimate’ and ‘Halaal’ (allowed by religion) money for doing Hajj pilgrimage- my initial reaction was- ‘is there enough story for making a film here?’ Guess I am too spoilt by a very complex concept of screenplay.

But after watching the film, I realised that however desperately I want to, I would not be able to write such a film. I would be too plagued by doubts. Shouldn’t there be more plot elements? Shouldn’t there be more plot progression? Is the story moving really well enough? Can’t the audience guess what is coming? In the process (of mine), what gets butchered is simplicity and relatability. And this movie was a lesson for me that if you have a human situation which connects well with the audience, you don’t need a complex plot to keep the audience engaged. Adaminte Makan Abu is a film where most can guess the inevitable outcome of the protagonist’s struggles before hand. But the lyrical rendering of it still makes the movie very endearing. There are so many scenes in the movie which would have ended up as cliches in the hands of a lesser film maker (help offers from different strangers, the meeting with an old enemy, the ease with which the rich practices religion etc). But in every instance, the writer-director comes up with a dialogue, a situation or something else which connects.

I liked the mystical tone of the whole story (even though I felt that the conversations between Abu and the ‘Ustad’ went a little overboard). The visuals really helped to consolidate the ambience of the movie. It also gives a certain timeless feeling to the whole story.

I sincerely hope that it makes some head way at the Oscars. But at the same time I have a feeling that it is not the kind of film the Oscar crowd is going to be particularly mad about.

Script writing theories are a big cottage industry in itself. I have often wondered why writers accept it when someone says that the first major turning point of your story should happen in around 30 pages or that the hero should reach his obstacle in so and so page but no such rules exist for a novelist or a short story writer (at least no widely accepted rules like that in script writing). Probably reasons are the much more fixed nature of the commercial screenplay with duration clocking around 2-2.5 hours, the fact that the visual elements are much more definable and dividable (you don’t have to deal with a character thinking to himself for 5 pages) and also the strict ‘hit or miss’ nature of the results in terms of financial returns.

I have written an entire article on a film based on the structure format of Syd Field. It was not out of any devotion to him but to just mix with a creative product (whose major undoing was a lack of adherence to structural rules) a format of the extreme opposite. When I think about whatever little screenplay related books  I have read, I realise that whatever I have read was not completely useless to me. It gives you a certain orientation if you don’t take those theories a little too literally. The scriptwriting gurus do help to focus your attention on certain creative aspects of the craft.

My major issue with the ‘formulas’ has been that most of the assumptions are arbitrary. And all these assumptions are retrospective. That is, you are generalising the features of some ‘successful(?)’ screenplays to all screenplays. it is just an assumption that those features that you have identified are the real reason why the screenplay is successful.

And all these assumptions start to break down once you hold them under the magnifying lens. The 1st plot point (story tipping point) in King Kong is supposed to be the film crew reaching the island. Is it so? What if some one argues that the real plot point is where Naomi Watts character is abducted? Or isn’t it where these group of rag tag film makers sets off on a ship in the first place? I can think of a number of arguments backing the position of each of these points as the first plot point. In Bourne Supremacy, the first plot point is supposed to be the overpowering of a field officer in Naples by Bourne. But what if I say it is Marie’s death in Goa? Or may be it is Pamela Landy coming to know about operation treadstone? I can’t help thinking that probably the Naples incident is considered as the plot point because it falls around page 25-30 in the script, which goes well with the theory of 30-60-30 page format for Act 1-Act 2- Act 3 described by these same gurus. If you take Marie’s death as the first plot point, you will have a tough time explaining why the first act is so small.  The same issue with the concept of ‘inciting incident’ of another guru. What is the inciting incident when the story is populated by twists and turns from the first page itself?

Another concept often described is that your screenplay is about a protagonist with a need who struggles to overcome obstacles to achieve that need. A person overcoming his obstacles is the fairy tale generated for the repeated consumption for the masses. But even these masses has shown better sense at times than the scriptwriter who tries to adhere to such a dictum. In the world of such a ‘triumph’ writer, there is no place for losers and failures and people acting or not acting without any apparent rational purpose as characters.

Also one practice that I found very strange is the use of beat sheets. I can understand the wisdom of a screenplay subscribing to specific peaks and troughs at specific points for maximum impact in the audience mind. But if you try to tell a writer that bad guys should close in at page 55 and hero should lose everything at page 75, it is a little too much. And still one thing that I noted when I tried to fit the Blake Snyder beat sheet to already written scripts of mine is that fitting of elements of your story into these beats is also arbitrary. You can fit almost any story into a beat sheet. It’s just about how you interpret every beat in terms of events of your story. ‘Bad guys closing in’ can be anything- like your hero being embroiled in financial debt, heroine’s brother coming after the hero, thugs getting whiff about the hideout of the hero, doctor reporting the lack of response of the terminal illness to treatment etc. A wide variety of human conditions fit under headings like this and naturally there will be something like this in your story around page 55-75 satisfying this definition.

So is there something that I believe in in terms of scriptwriting? Yes, there is. I believe in structure even though I am skeptical towards specific rules and formulas guiding structure. I also believe that there are no shortcuts or easy templates to find flaws in structure. One size doesn’t fit all. It is all about experience and intuition and luck.

By structure, I mean that there should be an uniformity in terms of genre, pace, elements, theme etc between various points of your story with enough sense of direction. I believe 7 Khoon Maaf failed at the screenplay level itself because of the fatal flaw of the repetition of the same story element (7 times!) which could not be salvaged by a flashback mode of story telling. Dum Maaro Dum faltered (despite good writing and great film making) because the writer couldn’t make up his mind till the end whether this should be a single character narrative or a multiple character narrative. Avatar, despite its utter predictability and high cliché density, works on screen because James Cameron is a clever writer who can hit the right emotional and intellectual plot points with immaculate timing. Among other things, that’s a victory of intuitive understanding of structure. A Wednesday works because of the discipline of the writer who could say an emphatic ‘no’ to things that may have impacted the flow of the plot. And you see in Shaitan what would happen if that self control is not in place.

In short, I feel that structure of the story where you can really do home work and save your story from disaster. Once you start writing the script from an outline, it is very difficult to address structural issues. Because you get a little myopic and often miss the forest for the trees.

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