10 Life Experiences That Taught Me How To Be A Screenwriter

How do you know when you’re ready to write a screenplay? Have you studied enough; do you know enough? Do you need to know more?

First, a little about me so you know why I’m writing this.

Like many, I’ve always wanted to write. Instead, and who knows why—I made other random life choices. As it turns out, most of those choices have resulted in the number one thing I’d dreamed of doing since I was a sixth grader—writing.

But of course, I didn’t do that either. Not until I hung up the day job of writing legal and technical documents and environmental impact statements (if you’ve never read one, I don’t want to spoil the action, adventure, and excitement for you).

Once I decided to write and publish creatively, I hunted for my niche. What to write? I made a list and a goal to publish one of everything: a blog, magazine, newspaper article, memoir, essay, play, and short fiction for a literary journal. I had fun cycling through those goals, but none felt as rewarding as I thought they would.

Not for a story lover. And certainly not for a born movie lover.

Three of my Novels

What Do You Mean, Adapt My Novel To A Screenplay? 

One last goal taunted me—writing The Great American Novel.

I tackled that puppy and jumped in. Attended a ton of writer conferences and networked like my plane was going down. I became a sponge, absorbed all I could, and wound up with five written novels. Two that I’ve published and three more are on their way to market.

Next came the reviews. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good: “Love these books and want to see them made into a movie!”

The Bad: “Well written, but not enough sex for a romance.”

The Ugly: “This novel sucks! Too much sex! Do you have to name all those body parts with such graphic detail?”

When I crashed back to earth after reading the Bad and the Ugly reviews, I read through the Good 5-stars, curious why my readers loved these stories and wanted to see the film versions. The reasons were wonderful, but random—and that’s when I went deer in the headlights.

How the heck could I adapt these novels into screenplays?

The hubs shrugged as he escaped ravaging Scorchbeasts in his video game. “You have all that acting and writing experience, so write the screenplays. Can’t be that hard, you’ve seen every movie and TV show on the planet.”

Never mind that our conversation is a mash-up of lines from SEINFELD, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, and THE BIG BAND THEORY on a regular basis (I have a habit of saying ‘whatever George and ‘easy, big fella’).

The Zwink-Larson Family from "Proper Binge"

Not that hard? Well, all righty then.

You know how the Yodas say to learn everything you can before you venture into something? When it comes to screenwriting, I’m not sure that’s completely true. Sure, you need to school yourself, either academically or through your own self-imposed, do-it-yourself MFA, and devour every webinar and book ever written about screenwriting. That’s a given.

I did that when I set out to write my first novel.

It blew up my brain. I overwhelmed myself with TMI.

So, with screenwriting, first, I beat myself up—why didn’t I major in English, go to film school, go to acting school, become that movie star I wanted to be, become an existential philosopher like Matthew McConaughey? After the self-flogging, it dawned on me it’s not what I didn’t do in life, but what I did do that’s helped me the most. I have a lifetime of accumulated experience and a ton of perspective.

How do I parlay all of that into writing screenplays? I brainstormed my collective experience, then figured out how to apply it.

I came up with a list of what helped me the most, so thought I’d pay it forward. Maybe it’ll help you too.

1. Spend Some Time Acting

Doesn’t matter what. Just do it. On stage or in film. Community theatre is a good start. Or volunteer for a local film production. Do comedies, dramas, musicals, whatever gets you treading on the boards or in front of a camera saying lines of talented playwrights and screenwriters. Or take an acting class. Study the sides, study the scripts. Read what’s on the page and study how it transforms into the reality of doing it. That was an eye-opener for me—where I learned the most about writing for screenplays.

I spent decades acting on stage for fun in local theatre productions, saying lines of fantastic writers. I also worked on several Hollywood movies when they filmed in my hometown. I even landed a key role in a locally made movie that won awards at a Beverly Hills Film Festival.

2. Attend Theatre Conferences, Learn the Critique Process

Theatre conferences are great ways to break yourself into getting criticism. Having your play evaluated after a staged play lab reading is excellent preparation for having your work critiqued once you become a screenwriter. Character dialogue carries a play. There’s no film to show. A character’s dialogue and acting must do the showing. This taught me how to write screen dialogue.

If you want to bypass this process, form a group to give and elicit feedback for your scripts.

I don’t publish my fiction without first having beta readers tell me where my plot holes are, what characters they like or dislike, and if my story sucks (yes, a beta told me that once). Find out why your story sucks, fix it, and move on.

The objective of critique is to improve the writing, it is not about the writer. I had to repeat that to myself after someone ripped me a new one for how I wrote my female protagonist. Put the feedback away for a month or ten, then take it out and approach it from a fresh angle to fix it. Your story will thank you for it.

On the Set of "Ghost Vision" with Jon Voight

3. Attend Writing & Screenwriting Conferences & Study Your Market

Information on every subject imaginable, from poetry to screenplays is dispensed at these conferences. The older I get the ballsier I get, so have no problem approaching celebrity authors to ask for their advice. Most are generous with what has and hasn’t worked for them. At the Writer’s Digest Conference in L.A., one advised me to publish my story as a romance, since romance has a healthy share of the commercial fiction market. I’ve sold thousands of books as a result.

Mingle with your screenwriter groups. Get yourself to the Austin Film Festival, Sundance, or whatever you’re into. Listen to the Big Dogs. They’re generous with information and will gladly tell you what did and didn’t work for them.

4. Work on a Movie as an Actor or Volunteer to Crew on Local Films

Audition to be a lead or an extra in local productions. No better way to study filmmaking than to work in front of or behind the camera. If you can, get a job as an extra on a major film project. Much of the time is hurry up and wait, so I used mine to observe the mechanics going on around me and how the different departments worked with one another. How scenes were set up, what the director wanted crew and actors to do, and how vital it was to write spot-on dialogue. This is gold for a screenwriter.

Alaska had a film tax incentive a few years ago and several movies were filmed here. All I had to do was fall out of my house to work with people like (shameless namedropping here; I’m an Alaskan and we don’t get out much) Barrymore, Mulroney, and Krasinski in BIG MIRACLE, and Cage and Cusack in THE FROZEN GROUND. I had a phenomenal experience with these people and learned a ton by observing and working with them.

The best projects are those with nothing budgets and local filmmakers are grateful for the help. I trained to be a PA and a script supervisor. Talk about perspective. You get creative real quick when there’s no money for that Panasonic G85 needed to film your scenes (Bowfinger comes to mind—our crew was inspired by Steve Martin’s innovation to film his no-budget movie).

5. Enter Your Script in Film Festivals

I attended the Anchorage International Film Festival because I entered a script. It didn’t place, so I asked the judges how to improve it. I made their suggested changes, and the same screenplay later landed a 4th place in an Indie L.A. Film Festival, along with notes to improve it. I proved to myself I could at least put a script together (or maybe they felt sorry for me because it sucked).

6. Teamwork

If you haven’t done team sports, working on a stage or film production will school you real quick on teamwork. It’s fun but can be frustrating and exhausting when cast or crew aren’t on the same page, singing Kumbaya. But the reward in the end is exhilarating when you walk onstage with your cast and crew, to take that bow after your premiere and you hear that applause.

Why is that important as a screenwriter? Think production. Unless you’re one of the executive producers, your precious screenplay will morph and evolve before birth is given to the final product. Depending on the production, you may or may not continue to be involved, but it never hurts to know the timeless art of negotiation and compromise, just in case.

Proper Binge Q&A

7. Keep Writing

If you get stuck on your script, switch to something completely different. Write a blog or an essay. Maybe a magazine or newspaper article. Or write a letter to Aunt Myrna. Your creative juices will flow again, and you’ll sharpen your voice and your narrative.

Voice is that tonal attitude you give to your writing that is unique only to you. I listen to movie dialogue with my back turned, to see if I can identify the movie and who wrote it. Style and voice are key to a successful script.

8. Trust Your Gut Instincts!

Let me say this again. TRUST YOUR GUT INSTINCTS. When you’re starting out, it’s easy to get caught up in listening to too many Yodas. Concepts and information begin to contradict. Your brain fries.

While Hannibal Lector may lick his chops on that, I’ve found the best way to tell a story is to trust your own storytelling instincts. Once you have a grasp of story structure and decide whether you want a character arc or a static character who saves the day from prequel to sequel, you’re good to go.

My Composite Card - 1980s

9. Learn The Rules of the Road: Study Screenwriting Basics

I learned to stop telling the camera what to do in my screenplays, as one script evaluation service ever-so-tenderly reminded me (couldn’t help it, I’m a control freak). AERIAL VIEW. PAN DOWN. NO, PAN UP. WAIT, TRACKING SHOT ON THE DOLLY!

I also forced my over-writer brain to strike exposition. One day in front of a screenwriting class, the instructor held up my script and waved it like a road construction sign. “Who gives a flip how the glowing embers and the snap, crackle, and pop of the burning conifers turn the towering, blue-green mountains into a freaking inferno? In film, we don’t tell, we show! Novel writers, don’t you get that screenwriting requires an entirely different skill set?”

He glared at me and handed back my script. Scribbled across the top and underlined a hundred times was, “Just say EXT. Burning trees, for crying out loud!” I pictured him muttering as he stabbed my script with his red felt tip.

Well, all righty then. Only took me five pages to describe that in my novel.

"Proper Binge" news article

10. Write the Darn Screenplay!

Recently I Zoomed with a friend who’s a celebrity novelist. “Are you building your backlist, like I advised?” he asks at the start of every convo.

“Yes, Yoda,” I mumble, feeling guilty I’m not working on my next novel. I call him Yoda because he is. I shamed myself by whining about how hard it was to adapt my novel.

“You’ve armed yourself with the tools,” said Yoda. “Now, set aside every tv show and movie you’ve ever seen and follow your gut instinct to tell your story.”

I gazed at Yoda’s little Zoom square on my monitor, like he was one lightsaber short of a luminescent blade of magnetically contained plasma.

“But…but…isn’t there more that I should know before I start?” I stuttered.

“Time to trust yourself. Write your truth, what lives in your soul. Write the darn screenplay. If you do that and you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to be the audience of your own story.”

Yoda logged off our Zoom call. There I sat, staring at my forlorn keyboard and my scary-assed, blank monitor. I typed in the title.

Then I typed the two words that unfurled an infinite universe of imagination and possibility—and my heart sped a little. The two words that excite me more than any others, next to, You Won The Lottery…

FADE IN.

About the Author LoLo Paige

LoLo has worked on feature films in Alaska, a dozen TV and radio commercials, and over three-dozen stage plays. She’s worked as an extra in scenes with Nicolas Cage, Dean Norris, Dermot Mulroney, Jon Voight, and Drew Barrymore. She went on to play the mother of an alcoholic in the dark comedy, Proper Binge, which landed her in SAG-AFTRA.

Her play, Glaciers & Demons was performed in the play lab at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska, and her first screenplay, Evacuation, placed 4th in a Los Angeles Independent Film Festival.

LoLo is also an award-winning author whose debut novel, Alaska Spark received several Indie awards for fiction and romance. Alaska Spark has ranked No.1 on Amazon bestseller lists for action adventure and romantic suspense in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and has been featured in Publishers Weekly. In September 2021, the UK-based Page Turner Awards judged Alaska Spark as a finalist for the category of Book Adaptation to Film. She’s currently working on the screenplay.

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