Screenwriting 101: Garson Kanin

“I have no objective sense of what I do. I do it deeply and automatically, which is a result of the teaching I got from Thornton Wilder. When I sit down to write, I don’t have any idea what I’m going to write. As I told you, when I sat down to write Born Yesterday,it was going to be a serious play. It turned into a comedy.

What makes people laugh? Only one thing, not two: surprise. That’s the only thing that ever makes me laugh, or makes anyone laugh. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds for a writer, because there are perhaps 200,000 different kinds of surprises and variations on surprises. But any time an audience laughs, it is because it’s been surprised by the use of a word, by a piece of business, by a look.

So the question is, If you’re writing and you suddenly laugh, if it is true that you only laugh at surprises, how can you laugh at something you yourself have written? The answer is, you didn’t know you were going to write it a moment before you wrote it. You were writing along in an unconscious way. Your conscious mind observes it, your eyes see it, your sensibility digests it quickly, and it makes you laugh, because you really are surprised at what you wrote. That’s one of the most important lessons of writing anything. People who write strictly on a conscious level do not write well.”

— Garson Kanin

How They Write a Script

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