Originality

For most starting screenwriters, the only thing they know about the craft is what they have seen in other movies. Inevitably, their early work is littered with characters and scenes that resemble those in popular films. The first goal of a screenwriter, then, is to break from cliché and start creating original work.

An idea becomes cliché when its imagery (in the broadest sense of the word) gets separated from the meaning behind it. Take, for example, a protagonist who was abused as a child. A beginner writer may see this in another film, be moved by it, and then decide to give their character a similar background so that the audience will have similar sympathy for your character. This is cliché. Rather than creating sympathy within their own story, the writer copied a convention used in another film and presumed that the sympathy would translate with it.

If this copied element is not integrated into the story, it will remain disjointed and the audience will immediately recognize it as disingenuous. Therefore, using the example above, the character’s personality must be shaped by their tragic past so that the knowledge of their past informs how we interpret their every action. Do they struggle to connect with others? Do they aggressively confront firm parents? If this trait does not manifest throughout the story, then the writer failed to invoke that sympathy. If it is fully integrated, then the writer has successfully created an original story.

In a nutshell, every element of a story must serve and be supported by the rest of the story. New writers often try to be original simply by being quirky. They think, “real people have oddities, so if I give my characters oddities, then they will also be real.” Wrong. Just because the writer tells us that his detective plays the cello and has an obsession with Thai food doesn’t give the character any depth. Left alone, these quirks are just as disingenuous (or cliché) as a detective who went into law enforcement because someone murdered his parents and got away with it.

To give the example above real depth, the detective might play the cello as an escape from his stressful job. Thus, this “fact” about him becomes intertwined with the story and symbolic of an internal tension. Perhaps his skill at the cello lands him an undercover assignment in an orchestra, where the extreme stress of a dual life pushes him to virtuosity on the cello and now he must choose between completing his assignment and following his dreams to be a professional cellist! Viola! An original story.

While another film may be a source of inspiration, before too long, you must cut all ties with it and let each element of your film stand on its own; it is far too easy to cling to an idea and ignore the fact that it weakens your story. Cutting something that doesn’t work and moving on is one of the hardest lessons to learn in screenwriting.