Cut!

It takes a second to toss a ring into a volcano.

Editing (\ˈe-dət-iŋ\): a curious act that simultaneously inflicts pain and pleasure.

I'm a big fan of what UCLA professor Richard Walter refers to as integration. This is the idea that your script, your scenes, your actions, your dialogue, everything, must accomplish two tasks:

1. Tell us more about the character.
2. Move the story forward.

Walter posits that if a script is integrated from start to finish, then that's a huge step in the right direction. I agree, and I'd like to couple that with an idea that fellow UCLA professor Hal Ackerman shared in a recent lecture that I had the pleasure of attending.

Ackerman stated that when a U.S. president is elected for a second term, he asks his entire cabinet to submit their resignations. The president then approves or rejects the resignations, depending on whether or not he wants them in his second-term cabinet. Ackerman then extrapolated this anecdote to apply to a screenplay. "Each scene must submit its resignation," he said, "and justify its continued existence in your script."

Well said. Like Michelangelo, who freed David from a block of marble, or da Vinci, who produced the Mona Lisa from a just-right amount of oil paint, or Peter Jackson, whose rough cut of The Return of the King was fabled to be over six hours long – if you write, you create. That's certain.

However, inherent in writing, inherent in artistry, and just as important, is the ability, indeed, the duty to destroy.

Or, as professor/screenwriter Mari Kornhauser bluntly states, "Sometimes, you have to kill your babies" (after Faulkner).

For your voice to shine through your work as purely as possible, you must edit. Being an artist means knowing what to take out, as much as it means knowing what to put in.

Or, as classical pianist Artur Schnabel said, "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes ah, that is where the art resides."

It's not just about choosing sublime words. It's knowing when to remove certain sublime words to make your work even better.

In most of the early-draft scripts I see, the biggest issue is the unnecessary inclusion of what Professor Tim Albaugh calls "the movie outside your movie." I read a draft recently that included a sequence with a young man leaving his art studio, heading out of the building, going to the train station, catching a train, sitting on the train, walking from the terminus station to his house, and finally entering his house.

My notes to the writer were, "What does this tell us about the character? How are we engaged? What invests us in this train ride so strongly that necessitates our seeing it? Why couldn't he simply leave the studio and arrive home? It's implied that he had to transport himself there."

That's an easy one. It's a lot tougher when you have to cut an action-filled or dialogue-heavy scene. First drafts are called first drafts for a reason. Screenwriter David Koepp (Spider-Man, The Lost World, Carlito's Way) said, "I'm successful because I can tolerate 17 drafts." From what I hear, 17 drafts is on the lower end of things. Expect to do more.

Screenwriter and friend Kelly Fullerton has a helpful formula. It boils down to, "A character wants something, but X, Y, and Z stand in his/her way." The trick is to tell that story as simply as possible. Simple story, complex characters.

Each line, action, and scene exists in your script for a reason. As soon as that reason's accomplished, move on to the next scene. Don't take 10 pages to say what you can say in half a page. Look up the Buddha's Flower Sermon, for an even more poignant example. Wisdom without words.

Less is more.

Embrace the Fear

"I'll build my castle here. It shall be made of awesome."

There's a difference between people and characters, just as there's a difference between real-people-speak and film dialogue. UCLA's Richard Walter asks, "Is that line of dialogue worth paying money for?" and he's right. People who say that a certain film's characters "talk just like how real people talk," are only fooled into thinking so. Ever see The Social Network? Or Game of Thrones? No one is as witty as Tyrion Lannister. That's what makes him Tyrion Lannister.

Another important point to make is that your characters, in addition to being fun to listen to, must also be fun to watch, and rarely is a character more fun to watch than when they're embroiled in conflict, and ever the more so if that conflict is representative of your character's greatest fear.

Before you set pen to paper, it's a damn good idea to know what your character fears the most. Screenwriter Blake Snyder called these primal motivations: "survival, hunger, sex, protection of loved ones, or fear of death." What, at its most fundamental level, does your character set out to do?

And ultimately, what does your character fear the most? What stands in his or her way? What conspires to defeat them at every turn? If you're a writer, you have to know the answers to these questions.

A character's reaction to his or her greatest fear is to see their flaw in action.

Examples:

Unsuccessful screenwriter Joe Gillis, in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, fears a one-way trip back to Dayton, Ohio, where he'd likely spend the rest of his days in obscurity, covering local funerals for the paper. His flaw kicks in when we see how wealth goes to his head, how he pushes away those who love him the most. His desperation to be somebody, his flaw, lead to his actions to pursue success from a questionable source.

Headstrong Jedi Anakin Skywalker, in George Lucas's Star Wars saga has plenty of flaws, the greatest of which we see in action as he commits mass murder to prevent his wife's death. His inability to accept that everything dies (foreshadowed rather strongly at the death of his mother) causes his ultimately doomed attempt to save his wife.

In Christopher Nolan's Inception, information thief Dom Cobb fears never seeing his children again, so he takes on the riskiest mission of his career despite his self-doubt, due to the guilt that dogs him over his own wife's death while performing a similar operation. His doubt manifests itself as the film's primary antagonist, the memory of his deceased wife, who appears at the most inconvenient times while he invades the dreams of others.

Silent film actor George Valentin, in Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, betrays his flaw, excessive pride, after the birth of talking pictures sidelines him. He stubbornly remains locked in a world that he believes should cater to him, as opposed to the way the world actually works. He refuses opportunity after opportunity, and hastens his own downward spiral.

If you underscore your characters' greatest fears, you will generate motivation for the defining actions they go on to perform in your story. If you set up the odds just right, they'll want nothing more than to prove to themselves, the world, and you, that they can do it.

Good Bad Guys

"I only just met you. Should we be dancing this close?"

Good writing is about characters in conflict with other characters. This typically leads to a protagonist (a sympathetic, flawed, window through whom we experience the story) up against an antagonist, who opposes the protagonist at every turn.

The first thing you need to expunge from your mind, as a writer, is the idea of the "bad guy." No one wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what? I'm going to be positively evil today." All actions that a person performs are usually justified from that person's own frame of cultural reference and point of view. What's good for one person might be bad for another. Or, to quote Six Feet Under episode Out, Out, Brief Candle, "Everything's bad for something."

Sympathetic, flawed protagonists need sympathetic, flawed antagonists. It might seem counter-intuitive, but you absolutely must make your antagonists somehow relatable. Not every antagonist is (Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, or Palpatine in Star Wars) but the most effective ones, the most tragic ones, are:

Charles Muntz in Up is driven to murder in order to catch an exotic bird and clear his name. Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight wants retribution after his disfigurement and the death of his paramour. Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard can't let go of her glory days as a silent film actress and is willing to do anything to return to the spotlight.

Regardless of how relatable an antagonist is, they all share one thing in common: they all want to possess something. They all want stuff. They won't let go. Antagonists sure are selfish.

But in some way, shape, or form, we're all selfish. Good antagonists merely take this to the extreme.

Tim Albaugh of UCLA and Hollins puts it succinctly: "A villain doesn't know when to stop." By extension, a hero does. A hero learns the wisdom that the antagonist lacks (or ignores) and winds up on top at the crucial moment.

The best adversaries are the ones who represent a darker version of the hero him/herself. If you're a fan of mythology and the archetypes inherent (see Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Christopher Vogler), then you already know a fair amount about the Shadow archetype. There's no "bad guy" archetype per se, although there's a Shadow. Literally, area of darkness. The anti-protagonist (not antihero), the shadow can value itself over others, or put others in danger to save itself or to achieve its ends. Selfish, greedy, obsessed. Many protagonists (in fact, the best) possess aspects of the Shadow. Remember Luke Skywalker fighting himself in the cave on Dagobah? Or Frodo screaming at Sam that the One Ring was his own responsibility? Or Amadeus calling Italians "musical idiots"?

We all have some Shadow in us. The antagonist merely features this archetype closer to the surface than his/her heroic qualities. What I recommend is that you give them solid reasons for being that way.

Harvey Dent becomes an antagonist, but we understand what drove him to the depths of obsession and madness. We don't applaud what he does, but we understand why he feels the need to do it. What UCLA's Hal Ackerman refers to as intimacy. In The Lord of the Rings, while Sauron isn't too relatable, Gollum certainly is. Nearly desire incarnate, he fights (or pretends to fight) a losing war against a want that's tormented him for 500 years. Or look at Robert Mitchum's creepy portrayal of Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter. He's a misogynistic serial killer, but he operates according to his own belief system and moral code, which he believes comes directly from God. Or Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the relentless hitman in No Country for Old Men. He's a machine, a tool, with a task: go there, get this, remove anyone who stops you. It's an extreme version of anyone who is given a task at which failure is not an option. Even he has his own set of rules. We don't necessarily endorse what these antagonists do, but we understand why circumstances forced them to be who they are.

Consider this: it's been said that we dislike the people we dislike because they remind us of something we don't like about ourselves. Otherwise, we'd be indifferent.

Christopher Nolan, when asked about Batman's antagonists, said, "[Batman’s] best adversaries are the ones who represent some other, darker direction he could have chosen."

The best bad guys are, in essence, your good guys, but having surrendered to their flaw. Charles Muntz in Pixar's Up is unable to let go of a dream, and it's this rigid state that dooms him. Up's protagonist, Carl Fredricksen learns how to let go, and he turns out just fine. The Dark Knight's Joker is a version of Batman who has lost faith in humanity: "When the chips are down, these... civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve."

The best antagonists aren't monsters, either. They're obsessed and unwilling to let go. They're human. Sometimes, that means that they're you or me.