Screenwriting : Which do you find harder ... by Kenneth Michael Daniels

For me I feel like it would be doing it justice writing it! I think so long and hard about making it perfect the first time whereas conceptually it is very easy for me to find what I want to tell though both are difficult in its own right

Doing the concept justice writing it is harder for me, Kenneth Michael Daniels. Coming up with the concept and outlining it are easier.

Definitely the latter for me as well. In my head it's "Lawrence of Arabia" and on paper it's "Ishtar"...

Doing it justice for sure. Often takes me a few drafts and multiple rounds of notes to unlock the perfect combination of style/substance

I kind of write it out and power to the end. After I reread it I’ll see what I can pick out it. Sometimes it works or not.

Great question as I’m just starting my first feature spec. During the outlining phase I started with creating a satisfying ending so I have something to build towards. Not sure if this will be how I do things in future projects but it seemed like a logical idea to keep the story focused.

I try to let the process show me. I don’t hunt the perfect concept. I have some seed to something I find interesting. After some time of thinking and exploring hopefully finding a specific, personal view on the subject I wanna tell. This is the way I wanna tell it. Many screenwriters search for smart concepts and they don’t write scripts till they do. short answer is; let the process of writing find an interesting concept.

I find it harder to come up with the concept. Definitely a “gardener” letting it reveal itself to me.

The biggest challenge for me is to make sure the formatting and action lines are industry correct. This is my first true selling script and if the formatting is wrong it's dead on arrival.

Writing

Selling it. The other stuff is easier.

Yes ;-)

I don't find either hard. I enjoy writing.

One would think that ANY writer would find the transcription of any idea forged in the mind's eye more difficult than spawning ideas, "solid" or otherwise. Your imagination is essentially boundary-less while putting ideas to page, especially in the form of unsolicited screenplays, forces one to cram all that delicious head magic into...a deliverable product... A construct that, despite potentially shunning certain writing rules, still lacks that superior cerebral vision because spoiler alert no camera angles allowed, no unlimited mind-spawned CGI, no stepping into other crafts' territory, no actors delivering your lines flawlessly...

Neither. Getting paid what you think you are worth is hardest, in any occupation.

Mike Childress

I get where you are coming from, but disagree. Some of us are terrific technicians without an original idea in our head, while others of us have terrific concepts but can't put a coherent sentence together to save our lives.

Of course most of us fall somewhere on the spectrum between those extremes, but where exactly is quite difficult to discern, even for ourselves. IMHO, ideation is a natural gift which is hard to improve upon, our ideas are about as good as they are apt to ever be (though there are strategies to get nominally better), whereas one can get much better at the craft with even a small amount of study and effort. Put more simply: while repetition is the key to mastery, you can't polish a turd.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I find coming up with a concept fairly easy. I feel writing the story is more difficult as I frequently second guess myself on how something is worded or if there’s a way it could be better.

Kenneth Michael Daniels I respect that. I suppose I was dealing in absolutes, when I try not to do that, thinking EVERYONE would have this wild imagination that can be triggered by something as basic as a concept spoken about in an undergraduate Psychology class (that was where the idea for my first script came from).

You do raise an excellent point though, i.e. the 'technician' part can be taught...learned, but what about the ideation part?... Can you instruct someone who struggles with ideation, that is an individual not born with that "natural gift", in the art of idea formation, i.e. how to be more imaginative? Guessing on that idea spawning spectrum not many, if any, are just on the fringe where they have NO ideas worth transcribing...