Stumbling and Bumbling Your Way to Success

Neil Simon guest-lectured in my UCLA screenwriting class. One of the students asked him, “Do you laugh at your own jokes?”

His reply: “Yes, I do, the first time I hear them.”

I love this notion that Mr. Simon ‘hears’ his jokes, as if the characters create them on their own. I’ve never known a writer who wasn’t surprised by lines his characters seemed to create by themselves, by twists and turns in the plots that seem to evolve without serious planning by the writer.

I argue in my book Essentials of Screenwriting and elsewhere that creating a dramatic narrative is not so much an act of construction as it is of discovery. The tale and its inhabitants are dis-covered, that is, the cover is withdrawn and they are thereby revealed, as if they were always there just waiting to be found.

Stories and characters and dialogue arise often without calculation. I am, myself, a strong advocate for outlining, but this does not mean that writers shouldn’t stay open to the surprises. Indeed, to do otherwise, to over-plan, is to rob a script of its spark and sparkle and sense of spontaneity.

This is true also for life narratives.

Who has a better job than I? I write and I teach writing. In the former instance, I get paid for what others are scolded for: letting…