I want to thank everyone for their questions, their queries, their insights, and, of course, the work. Keep it all coming.  It’s never easy to ask for help, especially in the beginning, but as a writer you’ll learn it truly takes a village.

So my final gift of the New Year to you is something that someone gifted to me:  The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  If you have ever felt that you needed a psychological kick in the pants, this is it.  Budget friendly, a fast read and you’ll come away feeling both settled and revved up in a way you can apply in the real world.

So be safe, be happy, get out of the way of your creativity, and sit down and get to it!

As we worship at the altar of the writing gods who look down upon us, laughing, yet encouraging, we pray for rich characters, compelling story lines, and the ability to create something that is both the same yet mind blowingly different.

There is a magic formula.

Relatively speaking, it’s quite simple.

Here it is:

Hard work.  Plus discipline.  Over time.

If you sit down and do your work every day, believe me, the magic will happen.  Maybe not on your first try or fifth try or perhaps even your fiftieth try.

But it’ll be there.

Cuz if you show up, so will it.

And that will require some changes to my approach to this Tips and Tidbits column.

To that end, I will no longer be posting twice a week for suresies. 

However, I will continue to post.

And to make things easier, for those who are now used to visiting Tuesdays and Thursdays (and I thank you very much for that), WhyTheFace has an enabled RSS feed connected to this column, which will deliver future tips and tidbits right to the reader of your choice (ie. Google Reader), whenever a new column is posted.

Thank you for your continued interest in WhyTheFace!

As much as I love writing, I also love helping others better their own scripts, so keep the enquiries coming!

Try it this way: most smart phones these days come equipped with audio recording apps.  Instead of merely listening and trying to remember what you’ve learned to use later, let your friends or family or whomever know you’ll be recording some of your conversations so you can transcribe them when you get home.

This allows the exercise to become more cemented in your head and can make it easier for you to implement when you need to.

So when you’re out in the world, on the subway, in the coffeeshop, at the grocery store, with your girlfriends, make a point of listening to how they talk.

Speech has also developed many affectations as time goes by.  ‘Like’ has become ingrained as a breather or a place for us to gather our thoughts before continuing on, and it’s grown with us into adulthood.  Teens use abbreviated text speech, and I personally find many seniors are much more succinct in putting their thoughts together.

People use words to avoid, to manipulate, they frequently forget their points, they stutter and can’t find the right word, they justify mid thought.

It’s a fine line to walk, because you need to keep your script and your dialogue tight, but if you take this step, it will serve you in the end.

Your actors will love you for writing dialogue that lets them speak the way people actually talk.

And it will flow for the director/producer/agent who’s reading your script.

A shortened one.

A deadline raises the stakes of your story, now there are automatic consequences for your hero or your other characters if said deadline is not met.

The Hangover leaves three buddies scrambling to remember what happened to the missing groom on their wild bachelor night in Vegas. With the wedding next day, they’re left with no memory of earlier events, but, somehow, a tiger and a baby in their hotel suite.

Brilliant.

The title 48 Hours says it all, and 24 used the convention of using each hour in real time.

But a deadline doesn’t always have to cover the entire movie to help up your drama:  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off gives him only one day to goof off, however the last ten to fifteen minutes of the movie is a literal race for him to get home, not just against his parents, but his sister and high school principal who want to catch him skipping school.  Using the element of slow motion puts it through the roof.

Kidnappers have deadlines, so do contests, high school sign up sheets, job applications, races,naturally.  Don’t just have your couple with relationship problems moving to a new place, what if their new apartment falls through and they’ve got one day to find a new one before various movers and new tenants show up? Talk about pressure. Or maybe your new writing intern is now given a week to write a full biography on a recluse who can’t be found? 

And for people running out of air, the stakes are pretty high.

A deadline is a way to force your characters to deal with situations in heightened emotional states.

Which is fun to watch.

I read a novel recently where I hated the timeline: Sweet Valley Confidential.  For those who need a catch up, Sweet Valley High was a serial book series popular when I was a teenager.  Good twin Liz and her boyfriend Todd, plus the not really bad twin, Jessica, and a cast of other kooky characters. 

I loved it growing up.

Sweet Valley Confidential takes place ten years after the first series.  And, after ten years, it turns out that the affable Todd began cheating on Liz with Jessica when they were in university.  The novel begins eight months after Liz found out about the affair and fled Sweet Valley.

Okay. 

However, as I continued to read, it turns out that Jessica really, really, really wants her sister to be her maid of honour at her wedding.  To Todd.  Which is imminent.  Eight months after Liz first found out.

Eight months? 

Now, I get that Liz and Todd had been on again, off again since high school.  They had gotten back together at the start of university, and university is where the affair with Jessica first began, so that’s been going on and off for about five years.  And out here, in real life, stuff like this happens.  However, I would assume that Francine Pascal wants us to root for two of her main characters, so how can I do that when it appears that Jessica and Todd are heartless enough to announce their engagement on what must have been the same day they tore her twin’s heart asunder?

And yes, there are hints of the ‘scandal’ and not wanting to go to parties because people will talk, but the girl’s own mother is trying to get them back together. 

Really?

After eight months?

And I’m supposed to like these characters?

It took me completely out of the story. 

I had absolutely no sympathy for either Jessica or Todd, and no respect for Liz when finally agreed to be Jess’s maid of honour.

Give me a year and they were announcing their engagement, I’d have been reluctantly on board.

But as it was, not a chance.

And there’s nothing wrong with the way she wrote it. 

However, for me, it was jarring and alienated me as the reader.

And the last thing you want is to put off your audience as your movie begins.

So pay some attention to your timeline of how things unfold.

We count on the audience to set aside their disbelief, however we don’t want that itch of ‘really?’ tingling for a long period of time so as to disrupt their enjoyment of your well written movie.

So here’s a moment to stop and think:  what’s the best format for your idea?  There are so many options out there and just because you’re comfortable with one format doesn’t mean it serves your idea the best way it could.

Example:  I had a disagreement with a professor once about my family genre half hour period piece.  He felt it was more of a film than a tv show.  I felt there was so much story it could carry a show over at least five seasons.

He was an established tv writer.

Who the heck was I?

But, my idea, so I’ve kept it the way it was.  However, that didn’t mean I didn’t sit and give the film idea serious consideration.  And you know what?  It would be possible to make it a film.  But I believe it would sacrifice a lot of potential story, growth and exploration. 

A movie is an hour or two. 

A series is hundreds of hours.

I still think it works better as a tv show.

And don’t be shy about trying your hand at a different format just because you haven’t worked with it before.  You will always, always learn something. 

So take one of your ideas and think about it in a few different ways to see how your thinking and your approach to it might change, for better, for worse, or indifferent:  could it be a sketch?  As in, four, five minutes long?  What about a short film?  Is it a feature?  Could it be a tv series?  Would it be a dramatic series or a comedy or a dramedy? Movie of the week? Is it maybe a play? A one act play? Or, perhaps, a radio play? Musical? What about a viral video or a character who operates soley out of Twitter?

You’re not going to buy a three bedroom house just because you grew up in one. You could have seven kids and a dog.  You don’t want to force the three bedroom on them, you’ll see what other options are available to you and how they may fit better.

See what fits.  You might surprise yourself sometimes.

Not terribly helpful if you’re writing on deadline. 

Or if you find you have an eternity laid out before you to work on your own projects and you just can’t seem to get your butt in gear.

The stress involved in anxiously trying to find the ‘motivation to’ can be awful.  And it’s a vicious cycle: we’re anxious about not feeling motivated, so we try to figure out ways to find motivation and then we can’t, so our anxiety grows and so on and so forth.

But this is the trick: 

You’ll never be able to find motivation.

Because it’s a by product. 

It’s a by product of inspiration.

And, luckily, inspiration is everywhere.

All those times you wanted to watch Jaws or read Picasso at the Lapin Agile or listen to Queen or take a walk in a new neighbourhood?  And you berated yourself because you were being lazy and just trying to avoid the work that needed to be done?

Entirely possible. 

But also entirely possible that you were seeking your inspiration to kickstart your motivation to get the work done in the first place. 

If you’re writing a horror, why wouldn’t you envelop yourself in Stephen King or M. Night Shyamalan?  If Bridesmaids just keeps your creative energy up, why not watch it once a day?

We all have our own, unique way of getting into gear.

And a tendency to be hard on ourselves.

So cut yourself some slack and let yourself read some Calvin and Hobbes if you gets your mojo going.

Then get back to work. 

So how do you choose who to approach?

First and foremost: due diligence.  Do your research.  Find out what agencies are out there and where they fall on the ‘legit’ scale.  Also find out who they’re already representing.  If an agent already has someone who’s shopping around a Harry Potter genre similar to yours, do you really want to be with them?  Or, if they represent a lot of teen lit, they may be the place to be because of the particular connections they’ll have in that realm that may be of use you.

Agents and agencies are individual things.  An agent who works well for one person may not work well for another, so it’s important that you feel the two of you are on the same page.  You’re a team, after all.

And as much as larger, well established agencies may have a killer reputation, find out how they’ll relate to you and your projects.

It’s always better to be with a smaller agency who’s passionate about you than a larger one where you’re one of too many.