Theme is a strong tool that can power your writing. Identifying your Personal Thematic, is a concept I first learned from producer and screenwriter Meg LeFauve, and story consultant, Laurie Hutzler that can impact your entire writing process.
Themes add meaning and resonance to your story. That which moves you has the power to move others.
Writing a piece that speaks to your Personal Thematic is motivating and energizing. It gets you excited and keeps you going – even when the going gets tough – long into the tedium of rewrites. It brings focus to the story that enables you to make choices faster and more effectively. And it powers your work because it taps into core concepts and beliefs that you desperately want to express – to share with the world.
That is how important Personal Thematic is to elevating your writing.
Screenwriters Speak on Themes
Over the course of my career as a film industry exec, and as a producer, it has been a great privilege to work with truly talented writers. What I have learned has been invaluable.
I wanted to bring this kind of knowledge to the students in my online seminar, Screenwriting Elevated. So I started featuring a Surprise Guest Speaker each month. I choose a writer whose work they class has read as part of the monthly assigned scripts. I might show a clip or read a scene from their work. And, admittedly, I like the added reveal of the students not knowing who the speaker will be!
Some are easy asks for me. Some are my Screenwriting Fangrrl idols, and just “the ask” made my heart pound a bit. All are incredibly articulate and very generous with their time, eager to answer any and all questions.
After the introduction, I ask just one question to get the ball rolling:
What themes – a character type, a dilemma, or a conflict, an idea – do you find yourself drawn to, again and again, in your work?
Of course, this goes straight for what fascinates me the most about the creative process.
I love hearing their answers! And I think you will too.
This show I’m working on right now that is my first foray into TV and streamers – I reached a point where I said, ‘I’ve got to do something that is just mine.” I literally took a year and half off during Covid, and worked on this on spec. I can think about this project, and I think it probably would echo in a lot of the other things that I’ve written as well.
What makes a human, human? What makes a human being a human? What are the aspects of us that are the best of us and worst of us? Is being human doing something noble in the face of danger? Or is part of humanity betraying supposedly everything you believe in to achieve some kind of goal?
These types of conflicts, these moral or ethical issues that exist in yourself, in each person, those are themes that intrigue me.
Issues of integrity. What is heroism? What is admirable in people?
There’s a western that I love, an early Sam Peckinpah western, Ride The High Country, that featured two aging actors, Joel McCrae and Randolph Scott, at the end of their careers, who had both been in a lot of westerns. They’re playing these older gunmen. In some ways it’s like the Unforgiven of its’ time. The Joel McCrae character has a line about the type of life that he’s lived, “I just need to enter my house justified.”
To me, it’s those kinds of issues: What is the code that you live by? How do you treat people? These are things that are important to me as a person too, but I like to explore those issues in stories.
Even in terms of someone trying to do the honorable thing, but also I’m totally fascinated by people who the exact opposite and who are capable of doing awful things for their own pleasure or greed.
That human dichotomy, that’s the stuff that fascinates me.
Mark Protosevich: The Cell, I Am Legend, Thor, Oldboy, Sugar
There’s something about humanity and human behavior –why people act the way they do, and feel the way they do – that always intrigues me.For Fisher King, it was the 80s. I thought it was a really ugly decade. A decade of great narcissism and cynicism. And I saw this out there and so I decided to write something about that. About a character that was narcissistic and then, by the end of the story, committed a selfless act.
The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, Beloved
The other day, I was coming up with a plot, and I suddenly thought, this is exactly the same basic structure as eight other things I’ve written! The idea of an innocent person caught between other extreme factions. I would say that that’s a biggie. It’s totally unconscious, but I find that person likeable.
Also the idea of people being able to communicate or connect with people despite whatever is separating them. That is sort of our main job as writers – is to find something that you can connect with in every single character. I think that makes for better writing.
I am particularly not in a genre. I tend to think that’s because whatever I see, I want to do. If I go into a plumbing supply store, I want to build something. So if I see a comedy, I want to do a comedy. If I see a thriller, I want to do a thriller. Partly because my model was William Goldman. When I was growing up he was really cool. And he would say, “Ok, I’m doing a western. Now I’m doing a political thriller. Now I’m doing The Right Stuff.” Now a war movie.” He was always changing genres. And I thought, that sounds like so much fun!
It’s my instinct to go to different genres and yet, I find the same themes in all the different genres.
Fracture, Mad Money, Disfigured
I recently heard playwright, screenwriter and director John Patrick Shanley, interviewed by journalist Katherine Brodsky and had the opportunity to ask him my favorite question about themes. His answer was immediate and succinct:
Characters who won’t give up, who are going to find a way.
Moonstruck, Joe Versus the Volcano, Doubt
When you get a chance to do what you love to do as a writer, especially in screenwriting, where you can come up with any story and write it – obviously the business is changing – but when I broke in in 1983, it was wide open. You really could dream up a story and write anything you were passionate about. That’s how I approached it.
When you do that, you tend to draw from ‘what made you.’ Whether it’s things you were drawn to as a child – what molded you. Things you watched as a child, what stories you read at a young age, what you did with your free time.
All of those things combined, at least for me, to create a theme that I find runs through a lot of my work, which is man or woman’s place in nature, or man or woman against nature. Mainly it’s our relationship with nature. I’ve always explored that theme. It’s apparent in Last of The Dogmen. It’s apparent in Gorillas in the Mist.
I grew up camping and loving the outdoors and spending a lot of time outdoors. I love wilderness. I love wild places. I love the idea that there are places in the United States where you can still hear a wild wolf howl, or where grizzly bears roam.
This informed a lot of what I chose to write early in my career, and what I ended up writing later in my career. It still runs through my work today.
Forty years later, I’m still writing about the same themes. Because they’re important to me. And because they’re relevant to the world we’re living in today. Our relationship with nature. You can connect that to climate change. You can connect that to indigenous people that are disappearing, languages that are disappearing. What’s our relationship to that?
That’s essentially what turns me on thematically in storytelling.
Gorillas in the Mist, Last of The Dogmen, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Brother Bear
Paige pops by to present Pet Peeves readers proclaim particularly pesky.
Dear Doctor T,
I’ve got a good script. I’ve been entering it in contests and getting nowhere. No wins, no placing, not even a “show” to show for it.
I’ve shelled out big bucks for coverage and gotten a bunch of picky notes.
Readers seem impossible to please.
What gives?
Yours,
Peeved
Dearest P.O.’ed.
I love writers. Truly. I respect the challenges of the medium and admire the art of storytelling. There’s nothing more exciting to me than diving into a script to find a well-written screenplay and a story that envelops me.
Total turn on.
That said, you can drive your reader wild – but not in the good way.
Are you guilty of rubbing your reader the wrong way?
Specifying songs. What if the reader doesn’t recognize the song? First, it makes us feel kinda stupid. Do you want to evoke that reaction in your reader? And it completely defeats the purpose if your goal is to convey something in the song choice – which, naturally, should be your goal. Your job is to communicate. When a song is integral to your script, specifying the tone and genre is your best bet. “A classic rock and roll song” or “country heartbreak ballad” speaks to everyone. Nope, not even including the lyrics will let you slide by with this one kiddo.
Using exact ages. Specifying an exact age for a character, unless it is essential to the story, undermines you by limiting our ability to visualize casting choices. An actor can be in his forties, but still play thirty-something; while 31 seems like a stretch. If your heroine’s goal is to find a husband before she turns 30, then of course, it’s essential to know that she’s 29. Character ages are best revealed through description, where we learn that they are a high school senior, in their 30s or 40s, middle aged, elderly, etc. (Ages listed in parentheses are particularly annoying.) (And distracting too.) Major exception to the rule – children. The difference between a 5-year-old and a 10-year-old is a million, so you must tell us the exact age of kid characters for us to understand them.
The Back and Forth. Nothing – I mean absolutely nothing – frustrates me more than a script that is so weakly written, that a few pages in, I must turn back to Page One to try to decipher who’s who, where we are or what’s going on. You may know your story up, down and sideways, but your job is to introduce the reader to the characters and draw us into the world you have created. Any time I have to flip back, I know I’m in for a bumpy ride and not looking forward to it.
Don’t talk to me. Description speaking directly to the reader is unsettling. Only to be used if you are conveying essential information about what we will see on the screen that cannot be communicated in any other manner.
Acceptable:
[NOTE: Spanish language dialogue appearing in italics will be subtitled on the screen.]
Unacceptable:
Paige appears cranky. Believe me, if you were trapped in a car with her stuck in traffic for an hour, you’d agree.
Don’t write self-referential description. You are drawing attention to yourself, but not in a good way. It’s a rare writer who can pull it off successfully:
Riggs smiles at him innocently. Strokes the collie’s fur with one hand. With the other, he reaches into a paper sack and produces a spanking new bottle of Jack Daniels, possibly the finest drink mankind has yet produced.
We readers see this enough to give it a label – writing that is “Shane Blackish.”
I have met Shane Black. You are not Shane Black.
So Peeved, maybe you’re not the only one who is annoyed. Ticking off your reader is the wrong way to get us hot and bothered about your script.
Give us a good read instead of a hard read, and we are both more likely to wind up with a happy ending.
Can your First Script Sell? Getting Your Foot In the Door
You’ve finished your first script!
Now what?
According to Wikipedia, Foot-In-The-Door isn’t just a moniker applied to pushy salesmen and census canvassers; it’s an actual behavioral phenomenon.
“FITD technique is a compliance tactic that involves getting a person to agree to a large request by first setting them up by having that person agree to a modest request.”
“FITD works by first getting a small ‘yes’ and then getting an even bigger ‘yes.’”
Once a person has agreed to the small request, they’re more likely to go along with even larger requests.
Here’s how:
Aim low.
Hunt for people who are hungry. They need you! They’re looking for you. They’re starving for that great idea or talented new writer. Be the needle in a haystack Grasshopper.
You have the best shot with assistants eager to be promoted to development execs and newly minted development execs, as well as agency assistants hoping to become agents and the brand spanking new Young Turks. They have the most to gain from “discovering” your project.
Target your query letters to them. Aim carefully. Know what their boss/company likes – whether from reading about their projects, sales, online interviews or job announcements – and pitch that to them. Do your homework!
“The best way to get an agent is for someone in the business to recommend you to an agent” seems like a vicious conundrum for aspiring writers. If you find the hungry exec at a production company where the company principal, aka 3000 lb. Gorilla, might be interested in your project, they are THE perfect person to get you an agent. Asking the right person to read your script can lead to asking them – or them offering – to get you an agent. FITD!
Young Exec gets points for finding a potential project and a promising writer. Since she has been busily building relationships with new agents who are moving up the ranks side-by-side with her, she knows Eager Agent who needs clients. Young Exec offers him a known quantity, not a script that was just “thrown over the transom.” She’s pitching the agent a writer she thinks is talented, possibly with a project that’s already getting some traction.
It’s the film industry version of matchmaking.
If Eager Agent and Aspiring Writer “hook up,” Young Exec is everyone’s darling. She will likely get a little special consideration: an early look at Aspiring Writer’s next project, and will be “on the list” when Eager Agent goes out with Aspiring Writer’s next spec. It’s a win-win-win. This is how career-long industry relationships are cemented.
I was fortunate enough to work as a development exec for writer-producers Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon (Starman, Stand by Me, Mr. Brooks) early in my career. They landed their first agent when she was a young agency assistant. They stayed with her for decades while she became a mega agent at CAA until she left to run a production company for a 3000 lb. Gorilla.
Hire yourself to be your own agent.
The agency business is all about information. That’s why those folks are going out to breakfast, lunch, drinks and dinner, sometimes all in one day, not to mention “running the lot” – heading to a studio and meeting with everyone they can. They’re building relationships and gathering info on who is looking to buy what so they can sell it to them, as well as open assignments they can fill with the agency’s clients. That’s what agents do, hunt and gather info, then use it to make money.
As your own agent, think of yourself like a relentless shark gathering info on who wants to buy what. Never has information been so readily available as it is now via the Internet. What (and who) did well at the box office last weekend? That’s what the studios are looking for.
Whether you’re reading Variety, The Hollywood Reporter or Deadline Hollywood, take note of the genres that are selling and who is buying. Just like an agent, pay attention to the announcement of new studio deals. The studio is highly motivated to buy for a new company whether it is producer, star or director-driven. The studio made the deal because they felt it would lead to making movies that, based on the producer/director/star’s track record, would make money. If the company and the studio don’t start developing projects together, then there’s zero chance of the studio making money and they’re already spending money to fund the production company. Likewise, at the end of a deal – typically anywhere from 18 months to as long as five years – the studio is less motivated to buy.
The late Tom Jankiewicz was a substitute schoolteacher when he wrote Gross Pointe Blank. He was probably the gentlest and tallest person I have ever met. He described to me how he read the trades religiously, using the information he gathered to send out countless queries. When he read that an actor, Kiefer Sutherland, had a deal and studios were buying things for him, he sent a query to his company. Kiefer was attached for a time and, even though he ultimately wasn’t involved with the movie, it got the ball rolling and Tom got his movie made. FITD at work!
STOP thinking about selling the script; think about the script selling you.
Selling a first script off of a query letter is an extreme long shot. Nearly impossible. What’s NOT impossible is having a terrific script launch your career.
Think of your script as a description in an online dating service. You like long walks on the beach at sunset, your genre is high-concept comedies, and you write distinctive, dimensional characters. Your script introduces you to us.
According to Shane Black, one of the most successful spec script writers of all time, “It’s a difficult spec market. Practically nonexistent. But my advice would still be, if you’re going to get in, get in with a spec script – and this is my experience, said Shane in a recent interview in anticipation of the opening of Iron Man 3 which he co-wrote and directed. “The first script most people write probably isn’t going to sell – mine didn’t! People might be interested in it, they might like the writing, and that encourages them to hire you for something else. They might say, ‘Yeah, he’s pretty good. Let’s get him in to do the next draft of our film that’s in production.’”
If I read your script, even if I don’t want to produce your script, if I think you’re a talented writer with marketable ideas, it’s in my best interest to build a relationship with you. We all need material. You create material. We need to know talented new writers. Hopefully that’s you. It’s in my best interest to get to know you and to find out about what you’re writing next. That might well be something I am excited about producing.
That script doesn’t have to sell to move you forward.
One of the most amazing FITD stories I know is from Glenn Gers, writer of Fracture and Mad Money. Glenn wrote his first script in 1984. It got him an agent right away. “People liked it. No one would make it, but they liked it,” says Glenn. “They offered me jobs writing other scripts.” Five years later, it was optioned by a major producer for a year. Five years after that, it was optioned by a studio for A-list stars. “I was then fired off it,” explains Glenn. “Three years later I got it back. More stars and directors have wanted to do it since; one got a company to finance it but then the company went out of business.” Here’s what blows my mind, according to Glenn, “A producer and director I think are great are currently trying to cast and finance an indie production.”
The Energizer Bunny of FITD scripts! Almost 30 years and still going.
Wikipedia has one more piece of advice for people trying to get a “yes.” The reverse approach – “making a deliberately outlandish opening demand so that a subsequent, milder request will be accepted – is known as the door-in-the-face technique.”
I don’t recommend it as that’s exactly the position you’re likely to find yourself in!
