Screenwriting sage Linda Seger discusses
structure, craft, subtext and more
Interview by Jennine Lanouette

Expert Advice

When Release Print asked me if I would be interested in interviewing Linda Seger, I welcomed the opportunity. For several years now, I have used her books Making a Good Script Great (Samuel French Trade, 1994) and Creating Unforgettable Characters (Henry Holt & Co., 1990) in my screenwriting classes. She has a clear, accessible approach to explaining screenwriting concepts that is very helpful to students. As a teacher, what I most appreciate is her insightful treatment of the dramatic aspects of screenwriting without hyping a perceived commercial aesthetic as do so many other screenwriting how-to books. She has written six other books, including When Women Call the Shots: The Developing Power and Influence of Women in Television and Film (Backinprint.com, 2003), a well-researched analysis of the status of women in Hollywood, and Advanced Screenwriting: Raising Your Script to the Academy Award Level (Silman-James Press, 2003).
         Seger was in San Francisco last summer to present one of her screenwriting seminars at Film Arts Foundation. Given her 20 years of experience as a script consultant and seminar leader, I was anxious to hear her thoughts on the current state of screenwriting amid the saturation of resources that now exists. What I hadn’t anticipated was her generosity of spirit and commitment to expanding the influence of women in the film industry.

Jennine Lanouette: With the popularization of screenwriting over the last ten to fifteen years – an explosion of books, conferences, seminars, competitions – have you seen the quality of the work increase as a result?
Linda Seger: When I began doing this work in the early ‘80s I noticed that structure was way off. Literally, first turning points appeared as late as page 65, instead of around pages 25-35. What I notice now is that structure is not as much of a problem. There is much better craft in the work I see, even from the beginners. What is needed now is developing and deepening the story, how a film can transform not only the character but also the audience; what I would call the depth of character and the depth of theme. What is the writer really trying to say here? And how can it be said through the characters and images without becoming preachy? In almost every script I work on, the writer could get a lot more out of her theme, even the fairly good scripts.

JL: Throughout your years of consulting, have you come across typical problems and weaknesses, basic areas that always need rewriting?
LS: A lot of movies don’t have strong transformational arcs. Even in movies we would consider excellent like Good Will Hunting, the transformational arc is muddy. You see the movement into Will Hunting’s [Matt Damon] transformation, what the therapist [Robin Williams] is doing, but in the third act, where did Will really come to? In Witness, I don’t think John Book [Harrison Ford] really transforms. If I were living on an Amish farm for a period of time and my life were in danger, something in me would shift.
         I think Tootsie is one of the best transformational arcs I’ve ever seen. I tell clients whose arc is not working to look at it. Every time Michael Dorsey [Dustin Hoffman] moves forward, look at what’s happening. This doesn’t mean that every movie has to be a transformational story. But if transformation is somehow implied, then you have to play it out.

JL: Is there any particular concept that screenwriters are not completely grasping?
LS: Many less experienced writers don’t deal with subtext, how to express what’s under the surface. Subtext is hard to get at. But it often comes out when the writer starts working out the transformational arc, from knowing what the character’s feeling and what he’s aware of and not aware of.
         Another way to get at subtext is what I call the invisible dimension. The character doesn’t know the forces pushing them. For most of Tootsie, he [Dorsey] is unaware of why this journey is so important for his life. When he says to his agent, “I want to do some movies of the week so I can help other women like me.” He is saying, “I want to empower other women.” But the subtext is, “I’m being empowered. I’m seeing my life differently.” He is not fully aware of that yet. He finally gets it in the end when he says, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man. I just have to learn to do it without the dress.” The invisible dimension has become visible.

JL: How would you advise a beginning writer on how to use all the screenwriting resources available now?
LS: I would tell them to go to a bookstore and thumb through the screenwriting books to see what clicks with them. They need to get some knowledge of who’s out there. But they also have to be careful of what I call “guruism,” finding one teacher and comparing everyone else to that. I find with most of my colleagues, while our focus is different, our approaches are complementary. They also need to have some sense of what I would call the “basic books” versus “the next step.” For instance, I wouldn’t necessarily start with Chris Vogler’s book [The Writer’s Journey (Michael Wiese Productions, 1998)] on the mythic structure. I would start with classical structure, then go to Chris.
         Writers also need to be careful about simply reading and not writing. They need to be in a dialogue between theory and practice. They might write for a while, take a seminar, read some books, and then write some more. I’ve even had clients whom I’ve told, “Don’t read anything now. You have a very strong voice coming through. If you read, you could start trying to apply rules to your voice and corrupt it. Fine tune your voice first. Then you can put the craft on top of it.”

JL: That’s always a question, when to focus on the technical aspect of craft and structure and when to let the organic process happen.
LS: You have three different aspects of yourself – your art, which is your particular unique voice; your craft, which is the technique; and your creativity, which is how you keep writing if the muse isn’t right there. With different people, each of these is going to develop at different times. If you’re on a roll with developing your artistic voice, just go with it. Who cares if that script doesn’t sell. What’s important is that its part of your process.

JL: What is your response to screenwriters who say that any attention to structure will corrupt their artistry?
LS: I tell them there is an organic connection between what they are trying to say artistically and the way they express that through their craft. Craft is not something that is imposed from the outside. It grows from the inside. The story you’re trying to make flow from you is trying to find a way of being told; that is the structure, the architecture, the vehicle.
         To be able to play with structure, you need to know structure well enough to understand the function it serves. You have to do analyses of classically structure films, like Witness, The Fugitive, Fatal Attraction. Then start looking at movies that are a little different – Groundhog Day or Pulp Fiction. I said to Quentin Tarantino, “So you did that unusual structure in editing?” And he said, “Are you kidding? That was done in the script. I couldn’t do that in the editing. I had to have a very well-crafted script.”

JL: Back to the resources. You talked about books, but I could see a new screenwriter looking at all the seminars and conferences and wondering how to determine what’s worthwhile.
LS: Some of that is: what do you need and when do you need it?  Sometimes people who haven’t written their first script want to take the marketing and selling seminar. You have to tell them, “You’re three years away from that seminar.” If you’re starting to write, you should do a craft seminar, such as Robert McKee’s or one of mine. But if you’re having trouble with character, several people specialize in character-oriented workshops, such as Rachel Ballon and Judith Searle. If you want to know about myth, you can go to Chris Vogler’s or Pamela J. Smith’s seminars.
         In addition to seminars, I think writers should join writer’s groups. People who are in support groups sell faster. When your writing isn’t going well and you’re getting depressed, your group will have another person who says, “Let me tell you the technique I do when I can’t write.” Other people will say, “This is the seminar that would be great for you. I took it when I was working on my first script. This one I took after my third script that helped me sell it.”

JL: In When Women Call the Shots, you wrote about the status and influence of women throughout the history of the film industry. What is your sense of what’s happening with women in the film industry these days?
LS: The only real change I’ve seen since my book first came out in ’96 is that we have a few more women presidents and chairs of studios. So, on the development-executive side, women are doing quite well. If you look at writers and directors, the gains are small.
         There are a couple of problems. Until you get what some people call a “healthy third,” you don’t have enough of a mass to have an impact. Another problem is that Hollywood is an industry in which a lot of people are in fear of [losing] their jobs. They don’t want to make waves. I say to people, if you consider this a problem, you must ask yourself: where is my part in the solution? I asked myself that question in ’96 and noticed I was the only woman doing screenwriting seminars abroad. I counted eight men and myself. So I set a goal to get 50 percent of the seminar leaders going abroad to be women. I found the seven best women I knew of and started recommending them. In two years, as many women were going abroad as men and all except one got their job because of me.
         We could turn this industry around in five years, or less, if the people aware of the problem decided to make sure they have women and minorities on their list of interviews whenever they were ready to hire someone.