Ever heard the maxim "Write what you know!". With some mighty big exceptions (see Imagination) this tends to
be what we do. We bring our life experiences to the selection of our movie concept, to the
structure of our story, to our character names, to the drawing of our scenes, to the reality of
individual incidents.
Don't all great writers write autobiographically?
Great writers write autobiographically. William Shakespeare's Hamlet,
as an example, is so well-developed, even compared to his other plays, that many feel it must be
autobiographical. Because a writer tends to put far more into something autobiographical, some say
this work yields the best clues as to who the author really was.
Isn't it natural to want to write about your own life?
For better or for worse, our own experiences tend to play out in our artistic creations. For many,
that's why we take up screenwriting to begin with: to tell our own frightful story, to make people
see what we've been through (what victims we really are), to gain victory over those who have made
our lives difficult, or simply to work through our feelings about our life. This was W. Somerset Maugham's express purpose in writing Of
Human Bondage. He'd known other
writers to gain release from telling their own life stories, and this indeed turned out to be the
case for him. But, being an already experienced and successful author, he knew better than to
stick hard to the facts. His own story served as the wellspring from which the story was drawn,
but it did not limit his creative license to tell the best story possible, one that would appeal to
his readers.
Doesn't writing what you know make things more real?
Autobiographical experience can be very helpful in making things real, keeping things truthful,
giving the audience a palpable
sense of what's going on on-screen. It gives us a useful body of ideas to draw from; an artistic
toolkit, if you will. The trouble
comes in making our own life stories cinematic.
What's the problem with writing autobiographically?
Life stories tend to be chronologically linear, rarely following good dramatic structure. Good
cinema demands dramatic structure
to keep people in their seats and buying tickets. The author of an autobiographical screenplay
tends to be fixated on what
actually happened, almost to the exclusion of practical realities. If the only reason for writing
screenplays to begin with was to share his pain, then he's not likely to be interested in changing
the story to meet the very real needs of the producer to make back his investment, or the audience
to be moved.
How do I know anyone will be interested in my life story?
Where no cinematic storyline can be extracted from a life or true story--perhaps an engaging
romance, or a universal theme--the personality of the subject needs to be fascinating enough to make
readers and audience members want to follow an episodic rendition of his life. What writer has the
proper perspective on how interesting his life really is? or on how best to tell it to garner the
interest of others? HINT: Those who have the time to sit around learning screenplay format are not
likely living the kind of life anyone else wants to pay money to watch on screen.
But I still have so much I want to say from my life!
Given the inherent difficulties of crafting an autobiographical script, and the overwhelming desire
to do so, it might be best to channel your autobiographical experience into enhancing your scripts.
Continue to select movie concepts that appeal to you based on your life experiences. But dedicate
yourself now to becoming an experienced and capable writer before tackling your autobiography.
How will I know when I'm ready to tell my life story?
When you've achieved a level of ability you can better gauge if your life is worth retelling on-
screen, and you will know how best to retell it. In other words, after you've already written
several scripts and have tackled the genre sufficiently so you're not learning as you go.
|
For examples of films that drew on the author's own experiences to tell a compelling story, see Hope
and Glory (1987) or Thirteen
(2003).
|
I don't care what anyone says, I want to tell my story!
Just go ahead and make your autobiography your first screenplay. You want to so badly, you need to
get it out. Once done it
should make way for other things. Just don't spend the rest of your life on it (and don't expect
it to sell).
|
