How to Improve Your Writing: 5 Secrets From Hollywood

When I’m reading something, what lets me know if I’m in good hands or not is whether there’s a sense of structure to it.

Knowing where you’re going is key. If you don’t, how can you know what your theme is? How can you foreshadow anything? When you know what your ending is, then you know what you’re writing. It may change as you’re writing but I really feel like you have to have a “true north” that you’re heading toward — and that “true north” is your ending. You don’t have to know every detail of it. With Seven I always knew that there were going to be seven deadly sin murders. Therein lay the structure of it. Good cop was gonna become “wrath” in the end. With that I had a skeleton on which to build the spine of the story.

That golden rule that “writing is rewriting” gets ignored a lot. Completing it is one thing, but then going back to the beginning and completing it again is the most important part of the process. In fact, I would say “completing it again and again.” You should rewrite your rewriting too.

Much advice on good writing is really advice on revising. Because very few people are smart enough to be able to lay down some semblance of an argument and to express it in clear prose at the same time. Most writers require two passes to accomplish that. And after they’ve got the ideas down, now it’s time to refine and polish. Because the order in which ideas occur to a writer is seldom the same as the order that are best digested by a reader. And often, good writing requires a revising and rearranging the order of what you introduce so that the reader can easily follow it.

It’s only by being aware of genre and audience expectations that you can really surprise people… Best example for Seven was taking a movie that’s about characters who desperately want to catch a murderer and an audience that’s awaiting the cathartic moment of capture — and then having the killer turn himself in. Stealing that catharsis from the audience and sucking all the air out of the room so that the characters — and now the audience — are off-balance. And then everyone is going, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Without the surprise, without the twist, if you don’t pull the wool over the audience’s eyes, then it’s unlikely you’re going to be memorable. It’s precisely the fact that things are not what they seem that makes a story interesting.

When you’re writing, if you’re super happy and having a fun time — you’re probably doing something wrong. Good writing means being a perfectionist. And that means being at least semi-miserable. But that’s a good thing. Perfectionism leads to rewriting. Now you can get so depressed over writing that you get in your own way, but a happy writer probably isn’t pushing themselves hard enough.

Before you show it to anyone else, are you really asking yourself, “Is this the absolute best it can be?” Are you being as hard on yourself as you can possibly be? Because those important reads that may get it seen by an agent or a publisher, those reads are really rare and you won’t get two of them out of the same person.

One of the most important things for any writer is to be constantly refilling their reserve of naiveté. If I weren’t as wholeheartedly naive now as I was on my first day leaving film school that I was going to achieve something in the world of screenwriting, then I wouldn’t still be doing it. It’s like selective memory. If you can’t tamp down the bad experiences you’ve had writing — and they’re numerous — almost actively forget them and refueling your optimism each time, then you’ll just stop… I’m as optimistic about writing now as I was at the beginning — which is completely delusional. Embracing delusion is really important. They say the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” But if you’re not doing that in Hollywood, you’ll never survive. It’s only the person who has the determination to keep saying “yes” in the face of all those “no’s” that will make it.

Doublethink is essential to the success of leading athletes and other top performers… Take top golfers…they have to make scrupulously rational choices about shot selection (laying up, for example, rather than going for the green), but once they have committed to any given shot, they have to be—indeed, they train themselves to be—irrationally optimistic about execution. Nick Faldo, the six-time major winner, made precisely this point when I interviewed him at the Open Championship in 2008. “You have to be very calculating in selecting the right shot,” he said. “You have to make a decision based upon a realistic assessment of your own weaknesses and the scope for failure. But once you have committed to your decision, you have to flick the mental switch and execute the shot as if there was never any doubt that you would nail it.”

One of the things that’s important is to create a daily or weekly sense of completing something. I’m not going to be done with this script for months or years. It may not get made into a movie. If it does it’ll be years from now. I can’t finish this script today but I can finish sweeping the floor. I can’t finish this novel today but I can finish this submarine sandwich. I can finish this nap. Every little bit of distraction or procrastination that has closure to it is a small reward for the person whose main journey of writing has its reward so far away and on such uncertain terms.

Fincher does a lot of things that a lot of people don’t do. He listens. He actually collaborates. He’s incredibly specific with his input. But he’s not desperate to put his stamp on something. It’s his lack of ego. Usually when you’re getting notes on a project, the person giving them is clearly motivated by having their voice heard, their ego being stoked.

Really good actors like Morgan Freeman, and Brad and Kevin, will always take your worst stuff and make it a thousand times better than it was on the page. And so the lesson is, when it goes from the page to fruition, less is better. In the right hands, you’ll be amazed how much better it gets.

Honesty is the most important ingredient.

Seven came from a very personal place. The argument that’s taking place both internally and externally for Mills, (Brad Pitt’s character) and for Somerset (Morgan Freeman’s character) is an argument that I was having with myself, living in New York City in the late 80’s. If there’s anything that elevated it above an exploitational film, it was the stuff that came from me personally. The “write what you know” wasn’t experiences I had; I was never a policeman tracking down this terrible, murderous villain, but it was the debate over “look what this city’s become.” I was empathizing with John Doe and having him express frustrations of mine — in the worst way possible. It was an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other — and this is the argument that Mills and Somerset are having, that I was having. Morgan Freeman wants to quit and Brad never will. As a writer, I had to earn that moment where Morgan Freeman, despite his pessimism about the city, decides not to give up. And that’s what drives him to say, “I’ll be around” at the end of the movie.

In the same way that there’s an art to crafting surfboards or an art to designing cars, there’s an art to pumping gas or being a garbage man. No matter how much you’re being paid or what you’re doing as a career, you need to embrace the art of it and not be afraid of the artist in you… Find the art in everything you do.