MR. CLEAN

Five writing tips taken from Stephen Susco’s session with Leigh Whannell at Screenwriting Expo 5. Susco is the screenwriter of “The Grudge,” “The Grudge 2,” “Dibbuk Box,” “Sanctuary,” “ZeroDarkThirty” and “Prom Night.” The upcoming “White” will be his directorial debut.

STEPHEN SUSCO

1.) BECOME DISCIPLINED: “I’m very undisciplined. I found that out really early on when I was writing. I had to force myself to become more disciplined. I started getting up really early. I would start setting deadlines and say, ‘I can’t play Halo unless I’ve written five pages.’ Then Counter Strike came along and I couldn’t play Counter Strike unless I had written ten pages… I can be very ADD. I will start cleaning the house. I’ll be like, ‘Man my car needs to be cleaned.’ All the sudden my life is like so much cleaner than it’s ever been and I’m a week behind. Everyone has to fight that battle and of course you have the inner demons you have to fight that are like, ‘That word’s shit!’ ‘Shut up!’ ‘That’s the lamest sentence!’ ‘Shut the fuck up!’ You know what I mean. It never really goes away. I think the more you write the quieter it gets, the more confidence you find in yourself and you sort of become more at ease.”

2.) MAKE THE TIME TO WRITE EVERYDAY: “What helps is that you do writing because you love it. I firmly believe in the idea that you are a writer if you write. You don’t need to sell anything or publish anything. You need to write and you need to write every day. And it’s just like anything else. The more you practice the better you get. You have to write your ass off. I see a lot of people who kind of just have that one script and they’ve never written anything else. They’ve just sort of rewritten that same script for years… I will write all day, if I’m on deadline. I’ll get up at five or five-thirty just because the phone is not going to ring in the morning. I think writing is so specific and individualistic that I think you need to create a space around yourself and protect that as much as possible.”

3.) MIX IT UP: “I’ve always believed in the philosophy of testing your limits. I believe you should write a script in every genre. I think you should always be working on more than one project. I think that’s the best way, for me anyway. When I was a kid I met Isaac Asmov. It was one of those sort of life changing events. He’s like the only writer to write a book in every single Dewey Decimal system category. He’s written like 500 novels or something. I remember somebody asked him, ‘How do you deal with writers block?’ And he said in his sort of rye way, ‘Oh there’s no such thing. I don’t believe in writers block.’ When asked to clarify, he talked about how he has a U-shaped desk at home. He said, ‘I’ve got like seven type writers and everyone is a different book, a different essay or project. I have a chair with rollers on it and when I am writing something and I either get stuck or bored, I roll onto the next one. So I am always writing, my fingers are always moving, my brain is always kind of processing. I never really stop.’ He correlated it to sharks. He said, ‘You know, sharks die if they stop swimming.’ So I think there is something to be said for that.”

4.) GIVE IDEAS TIME AND THINK PROJECTS THROUGH: “I just kind of put myself in a place where I am thinking about it without thinking about it. I kind of just let ideas come. I end up piling up little post-it notes with phrases and ideas for scenes. After a couple of months I’ll just kind of sit down with this whole mess of garbage and I’ll start to find what the spine is... Anyone else get great ideas in the shower? The shower for me is like fucking Mecca. That’s where I go. My wife’s like, ‘You’re really clean today, it’s going well?’ Or when I drive I get all of these ideas. Sometimes I think you have to kind of turn your brain off. You don’t think in the shower. You don’t really think, ‘I’m going to do the other armpit next and then I’m going to go down to the knees.’ You’re on automatic and driving is the same thing… I think sometimes you just have to take your attention away from your project and then things start firing at you. To me those are the gems that are harder to force into a story, so I like to give them time.”

5.) TRUST INSTICNTS AND APPROACH FROM A CREATIVE STANDPOINT: If you try to start being too technical up front, you start to create a film that we’ve seen before. You are following a familiar paradigm. You are writing like movies you have seen… I like to feel my way around an idea. It’s so important for your writing to be individualistic. It’s so important for your ideas to be unique. Its so important for the execution to be fine that if you come at it too pragmatically I think you end up writing like other people as opposed to writing like yourself… While you need to figure out what those flags are that will lead you through the woods, I don’t think that should be your first task.”

- compiled by CCF, November 2006

(Click here to read The Magical Key featuring Stephen Susco & Leigh Whannell)