When first starting out learning to write, I felt like I had to learn as much as possible from others who had come before me. I read books. There was no Internet then. Being the last generation to grow up without it meant getting my information the old-fashioned way. And even then there wasn’t a cornucopia out of metawriting out there.
That meant if you didn’t have direct access to another writer, you could try writing to them or hitting the library for whatever information was out there. But writers were reclusive folk surrounded by an impenetrable wall of agents, publicists, and so on.
Things have obviously changed. Many writers, both for the screen and literature, have availed themselves of the Internet and what it has to offer. They can connect with their fans and that’s great.
The point I’m getting at is that they all at some point had to contend with that old-fashioned way of learning how to write. I think that incubation period is necessary to let a writer develop their ideas in private. Everybody has their own opinion about what they think the “right way” is to write.
My father used to tell me that there was always more than one way to skin a cat. One day I replied with, “There’s twenty-three.” He gave me a quizzical look then laughed at the absurdity of the statement. Of course there’s more than one way to do something. You should always be looking for more than one way to solve a problem, either in a story, a script, script, or film.
It’s also wrong to put absolutes on how many there are. I said what I said to my father as a jest, partially because I was a smartass growing up. In writing it’s the same. Don’t read one book on how to write and think it’s the end-all, be-all absolute rules. You’ll only look like an amateur when you say, “Well, so-and-so said in their book that you style your scene action like this…”
People seem to want rules. They want to know there’s some manual they can go back to. In writing, film, and otherwise, there is no real manual. Every film is different in just enough ways to make it not quite like the last one.
Everybody’s different. And there’s a lot of cats out there.
