Tweetstorm: Ed Zwick on Screenwriting

“Periods of great creativity are often punctuated by barren stretches. The worst thing is to stop writing. Keep plugging away: it may be shit but it’s your shit. ‘All good ideas start out as bad ideas,’ says Steven Spielberg, ‘…that’s why it takes so long.’”

Twitter can be a gold mine for writers. Case in point, when pro writers generate a tweetstorm about the craft. A few days ago, Ed Zwick (@EdwardZwick1) put together a series of tweets about screenwriting. He knows what he’s talking about, not only as a screenwriter, but also producer and director with such credits as thirtysomething, Once and Again, Glory, Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, and The Last Samurai. Reprinted here by permission.

There’s a lot to like here including this:

8.LET’S GET PERSONAL 
All good writing is personal. That doesn’t mean autobiographical. Whether a period piece or a sci-fi space opera, characters aren’t created, they pre-exist and must be found within you. Imagine yourself as a sinner or a saint and you’ll find their voices.

That reminds me of this from Joseph Campbell:

The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward — into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world… [Now] it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery.

Here is where the hero’s journey matches up with the writer’s journey. For just as a character’s outer journey in the physical world of space and time is “fundamentally” an inner journey into their psychological world of hopes and fears, so, too, ours as writers. As Zwick suggests, the characters in our stories “pre-exist and must be found within you.”

That is the key to writing personal stories. And that is the key to engendering an emotional connection between the audience and our story’s characters.

Here is the tweetstorm as saved by @threadreaderapp.

Twitter: @EdwardZwick1. I definitely recommend following Ed as he pretty regularly tweets threads about filmmaking, directing, screenwriting, and the film and TV business.

For more screenwriter tweetstorms, go here.