Use minimum viable material to test stories

How can building an audience in advance help your stories reach the people who make movies? And how can you prove there's demand for your book or screenplay before you've written it? Brooks Elms shares his advice after more than 20 years as a WGA screenwriter.

In the intro, what doesn't work for book marketing and what does [Amy Chan SubStack; Unsingle; Rephonic]; Goodreads giveaway for Bones of the Deep; FutureVision XPrize.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• How to see the opportunity in AI when others only see the threat
• How to test a story with samples, and what a 16-second movie can do
• Building the trailer before you write the screenplay
• Letting your audience finance the film once they have validated the idea
• Why Hollywood still wants existing IP, and what makes them pay attention
• Feeling safe enough to write the truth, and finding a concrete path forward

You can find Brooks on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected].

Transcript of the interview with Brooks Elms

Jo: Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. So welcome to the show, Brooks.

Brooks: Thank you. It's awesome to be here.

Jo: Fantastic. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into screenwriting.

Brooks: I started filmmaking first. A buddy came up to me in high school and said, “Hey, we're making a karate movie, do you want to help us?” I was like, “Oh my God, yes, that sounds amazing.”

So next thing I know, I had this karate outfit on, and we were just making this completely ridiculous and totally fun movie, and it was amazing. It was so fun.

Then it went to a whole other level when we shared it with a friend, this guy Jay Sharon, and he watched the movie and he laughed so hard he literally fell out of his chair. I was like, “Oh my God,” the fun I had making it could actually transfer to somebody else. I was hooked.

So from there I went to NYU film school, and then made a few independent feature films which were good but not great in terms of how they were received.

They were great for me in terms of enjoyment, but I knew I needed to iterate faster at that point. So then I was like, “Well, it's expensive and it takes a long time to make a movie,” at least back then.

So I pivoted to screenwriting, and pumped out two, three scripts a year, got signed at UTA, got writing assignments, and basically launched a screenwriting career. Then I still tried to get some stuff going, but it's hard when movies are so expensive.

It's not hard, it's just that it takes a lot of precision in the marketing, and a lot of conversations to find the right matches to finance something, and you're either interested in doing that or you're not. I just was like, “Well, I'll just mostly write screenplays.”

Then I started teaching at UCLA Extension and then coaching after that, along with writing. Then all the way up to the future.

What's great about moving forward is that with AI, shot-making is becoming very close to cinematic quality. You can actually match cinematic quality in moments in some genres, but probably by next year.

Right now you could actually do a really good horror movie all AI for 10, 20,000 bucks, depending on how much you're doing yourself or getting other people to do.

So the economics are going to absolutely explode. So I'm sitting on dozens of scripts that didn't get through the Hollywood packaging bottleneck because they're too expensive, and I now have this giant slate that's ready to go, and I'm just absolutely thrilled. It's been a lifelong dream for me.

Jo: Oh, so much to come back on there. Where to start?

I do want to talk about what you just said there, sitting on dozens of scripts and now seeing the opportunity. I actually wrote down in my journal about a year ago, I see what's coming with AI, and I think that the best thing I can do is create as much original IP as possible, so that I can make the most of the opportunity ahead.

So let's just get into the AI, because a lot of people feel it's a super bad thing.

Talk about the opportunities and the attitude that you've got [around AI], and that you've seen others have around this, for what is ahead in a positive way.

Brooks: It's fascinating to see how people respond to AI. I wonder, when the printing press rolled around, if there was some sort of backlash. Books must be handwritten. They can't be mass-produced.

Here's one of my theories. At a deep psychological level, it's so profoundly powerful that I think the default setting is, “Oh, crap.”

When I was a kid, some things were hard, and that power imbalance, when something big, new and powerful comes along: I'm going to get screwed, and so this is somehow a bad thing. I think that's the base psychological thing going on with most of the noise.

Obviously there are some legit problems, in terms of copyright infringement from learning models, or from some of the environmental situation. So I'm not saying it's all rainbows and butterflies, but I think 90% of the noise around it comes from a fear of change.

Here's the other one—a fear of, “Oh, yikes, I'm going to get taken advantage of somehow by either robots, or the corporations are going to use the robots against me,” or something like that. I have real empathy for me when I feel that way a little bit, but I don't feel it much, and for other people that do feel it.

The other thing is, you know what it is? I think they fear their own empowerment even more.

I had a therapist who was really good. He said, people aren't so much afraid of failing as they are afraid of succeeding. Because if we fail, we're stuck in act one and we don't go anywhere. The fear is answering the call and going to act two, when everything effing changes in the new world.

So I think people are afraid of how goddamn powerful they're going to be when they can have a team of AI agents helping them do everything they want in business or life or whatever.

I think it's the same thing with the internet. People are like, “Oh, I don't like social media, blah, blah, blah.” And I get it. There's a lot of noise and a lot of crap. Yet we have access to billions of people, and the algorithms in social media right now I think are level three out of 10. They're just going to get better and better.

Even as it is now, if I do a post about something and it gets ignored, that's on me. The algorithms are trying to match me to my people. So if I'm not unique enough and authentic enough and aware enough of how virality works, that's on me, and it's a learnable skill that I can embrace and then change and then get better at.

So I think people then resist that change. They resist the empowerment of learning the art of virality, or learning the art of some sort of social media stuff or whatever.

The last thing I'll say about this rant is, I don't want to act like I'm the guru on the hill that has all the answers. I refuse calls all the time. I'm scared about all sorts of things. I'm certainly not perfect. I feel frustrated when I'm trying to put my big ideas into action and I can't get this technology thing to work or that one, and I throw tantrums.

I'm trying to come at it from a real human perspective, but by and large, I've got stars in my eyes. I'm like, “This is amazing. This is going to be so powerful.”

For so many people, you just have to be ready to embrace it and just go along for the ride, because there's going to be some big-ass changes. There already are, and that's going to accelerate.

Jo: You mentioned there learning the art of whatever it is. One of the things is, I've spent 20 years, and so have you, learning our craft and our art, and now it can be done very easily.

I'm generating video, as you mentioned, which is a craft I haven't spent 20 years on, but now I can generate. So things have definitely changed in that way.

Just coming to the screenwriting side. Probably about a decade ago now, I did my first screenwriting course. I've written screenplays.

Then I looked at the game you have to play and, like you said, the conversations you have to have, the events you have to go and network at, all the things that you have to do to put a screenplay in front of the right person at the right time.

I was like, “I cannot do that. It's just not going to happen. I can't do that along with everything else.”

So I put it aside, but now I feel maybe it's time to bring it back because things are changing. So can you maybe talk about, if someone has a screenplay now that they've written, or some IP like a book that they have now—

What would you recommend people do in terms of wanting to get that [IP] in front of somebody, or doing something with it themselves?

Brooks: It's such a good question. By the way, not even a screenplay—you could do the same things with a novel. Let me try to be succinct here, which is a good challenge for me.

A simple way to look at it is, you're giving samples. Let's say it's a lemonade stand, and you give out a little shot of your… maybe you have cayenne pepper lemonade, some sort of fun lemonade. If you give out a sample and people are into it, they're going to come back and they're going to tell friends.

If you give a sample of the lemonade and they're not into it, then you go back to the kitchen and you mix up a different flavour.

So that's some basic business, but the internet allows us to do that at scale. So what I like to encourage people to do when I coach them is come up with the minimum viable material. It can be a 10-second clip.

There's a writer in my community who made a really beautiful 16-second movie. It's one shot. I love it so much. It's two wine glasses. There's a lipstick smudge on one of the wine glasses. They're half full, and it's just that shot.

It's sitting there, and all of a sudden you hear this thundering, thumping down these stairs, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Then you see out of the corner of the frame one person runs by, and then the other person behind her runs by and goes, “Wait.”

That's it. That's the whole movie. It's 16 seconds. He did that with his phone.

So there's so much going on. There's a couple of basic elements, but he just did it with his phone, and you can evoke enormous emotional impact on people through social media, whether it's just words.

You guys have a big advantage as novelists because you're so good with words. Whether it's a little bit longer, like sudden fiction, that's a couple of pages or whatever. Even just copywriters are really in a good position for the future because they're super potent with two words or three words or 10 words.

Then novelists are probably really advantageous because it doesn't cost anything to just put some words out on the internet. The point is, if you put something out, it's a signal, and you're talking about billions of people who could find that signal.

If you do it and then you look at the response, and then you try again, you look at the response, we can do this iteration infinitely for free.

So you can do it already. You've been able to do it for 10, 15, 20 years, just with words. But now you're going to basically be able to do that with movies or clips or trailers. So the thing that I'm leading in my community of writers is having people build trailers in advance, or clips.

When a book or a movie is done, how the heck do we get people to see it? One way is a trailer or some sort of behind-the-scenes material. You can just do that stuff now before even writing the screenplay.

I saw that you were doing this project, a trailer for this competition. And then you mentioned, “Oh, I've got to write the screenplay.” Not really. You have to develop the story enough to know what you're referring to, and then it's about studying the craft of either trailer construction, or whatever the clips are, or viral clips.

They all have a structure, and then you just test it. If you enjoy that testing process, which I find absolutely thrilling, it feels like the filmmaking version of a stand-up comedian. If I did stand-up, I say a joke, they laugh or they don't laugh.

It's really beautiful feedback from the universe. Nerve-wracking, right? But we can do that now as storytellers. We put a story out there in any format, and the audience responds.

Just like you have to read any room, you have to learn how to read the engagement on social media.

What do likes mean? What do shares mean? What do comments mean? How do you deal with trolls? All that is just part of the new art. Once you get good at it, holy smokes, that's the key to the kingdom.

You can build audiences in advance, and for movies you could even have them finance your movie in advance, if you've built an email list of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people because you kept putting out all these viral clips around your story, novel, or screenplay.

Then you go, “Okay, now 30,000 people are on my email list and I tell them about me and my perspective and my world. We're going to make this darn thing with AI for 20,000 bucks. You guys have got to pony up some money. Put in a dollar, five, 10, or you get the VIP $500 experience.”

It's like crowdfunding, but much more sophisticated, because most crowdfunding was like begging friends and family to donate to your crazy dream.

What I'm talking about is going to the audience directly, developing enough of the story, then going to the audience second, and then only when they validate the idea, to the extent that you're happy with.

You could do a crazy idea that's going to have a small audience, and you don't have to have a blockbuster audience. You get to pick the audience size that you want, and then put the samples out there and see if you have a relevant audience size for this next project.

Once the audience tells you, “Yes, we want this,” then you go make it. So you're ultimately reducing risk to almost zero. It takes time and you have to learn how to do this stuff, but it's thrilling to me because we just have the capacity to test the material and listen to the audience upfront.

The last thing I'll say, and I've rambled a lot, I'm sorry. When I made a movie in 1994, a feature film right out of NYU, it took me three years to find out what the audience thought about that movie.

I had to make the damn thing, and then I ran out of money, and that took me years to edit it, and I finally got it, blah, blah, blah. And again, I loved it. I loved every facet of it, and it was fine, but it was super inefficient.

Today, I could take those same elements, create an AI trailer this weekend, put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and they could tell me right away, “This sucks,” or, “This is interesting,” or, “Holy smokes, this is amazing. I want this.”

If it's not, “Holy smokes, this is amazing, I want it,” I can go ahead and re-edit the whole damn trailer, and just keep reiterating at almost no cost.

Then once the demand is there, I can take that demand and that audience and go to Hollywood, and that's when they're going to want to work with me.

Then it doesn't take a million conversations and finding the needle in the haystack, because Hollywood sees the numbers and they go, “Oh, you're the people we do want to do business with. You've proven demand. We want to do business with you.”

Jo: Yes, it's so interesting. I can hear people listening and they're like, “Easier said than done, getting an email list of 40,000 people.” And in fact—

It's exactly the same as building up a career as an independent author.

This is as a filmmaker, as a visual person, and the industry is visual, so doing a visual trailer is the obvious thing. And as you say, the tools I use just to do this one, I use Midjourney, and I've used Seedance as the main video model.

It does take a while, but it is pretty fast now, if you have a visual image of what you want in your head, which obviously you're a visual person as well. But is it…

Brooks: Hold on. I want to push back on that a little bit, because I think it's really important.

So yes, that's true, but underneath that, my friend, it's a relationship. It's the relationship, and the media is secondary. You have been prolific in connecting with your audience, and that's why I think a lot of people like you, because you share and they get to know you in that sort of cadence.

I saw you in another podcast, you mentioned Seth Godin, who just said, “Hey, I want to be the type of person that has this relationship with my audience. I'm going to share some of my thoughts every day.”

He happened to do it with words, with his background in marketing, but you could do the same thing with still images. You could do the same thing with a five-second movie clip once a week. It's the relationship you want with your fans.

I'm not saying you snap your fingers and you have 50,000 people on your email list. What I'm saying is, what else are you doing?

If we're artists and our impulse is to create and share, and if you do it in this way, if I can create and share and inspire trust in this relationship with a stranger because they like my genre thing and they like the way they felt when they experienced my media, words, images, movies, it doesn't matter.

They just like the feeling, and they go, “Ooh, I want more of that feeling. How do I get more of that? Oh, this person has this email list or community.”

If I can do it with one, then I can scale it out. So getting the first one, or the first 5 or 10 samples, that is a whole process. But then once you do that, scaling up is more of a mechanical thing. It's not even that hard, especially when you can do paid ads.

So you can scale up very quickly if you have the sauce. If you don't have the sauce, it doesn't matter who you're related to, you've got to get the sauce right.

Jo: Yes, and again, it's so parallel to the indie author community.

I've just got to ask you, in the olden days, an author might write a screenplay, or a screenwriter write a screenplay, and then they would send it. They'd find an agent. They'd pitch an agent, and I guess then they'd hope that someone would turn that into a movie. So is that just dead now?

Is it realistically that you need to get yourself out there, build the audience in the same way that it often is for authors?

Brooks: So, no. I've got two screenplay deals going right now. So here's how it's going to work. Think about Broadway, or the theatre district in Britain. It's like West End or East End or whatever…

Jo: The West End.

Brooks: Sorry for my American ignorance. West End, okay.

So every town on the planet has a stage, but there's only one Broadway, there's only one West End, right? And every town has its own festival, but there are a few significant tastemakers. There's Cannes, there's Sundance, there's Toronto. Hollywood is always going to be a tastemaker in our lifetime, for sure.

What they don't have anymore, what they enjoyed for the first 100 years of the industry, is that they had a stranglehold on basically the equipment, the financing, and the audience, and that's all going away.

Do you want to hear a fun story about the birth of cinema? Do you know why Hollywood started in Hollywood?

Jo: No.

Brooks: So Thomas Edison invented the camera, or the type of model camera that they were using in, I don't know, 1910 or something around there.

They didn't want to pay his patent. They didn't want to pay the patent to make these movies, so they went all the way across the country, a bunch of outlaws, and they set up shop in California because he couldn't enforce his patent that they were basically stealing.

And reason number two, LA enjoys amazing weather almost all year round. The weather here is either nice or really nice. You have mountains, you have beach, you have desert, you have all these different locales. So when it was really important to be on location, LA was the perfect place.

Anyway, that is all going away. For many decades, more people could make movies. In the early '90s, Robert Rodriguez made a movie for 9,000 bucks. There was a book in the '80s that I bought that I loved, it was Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices. This guy, Rick Schmidt, I think his name was.

There were the independent filmmakers really in the '60s and the '70s. So the cost has been going down and down and down, and now it's less than ever. Once social media came along, now you have access to the audience, so why do you even need Hollywood?

That being said, there are tons of people. There are 400,000 people already working in the movie and the TV industry here. And they're voracious. We have a voracious demand.

Humans need stories. We need big stories, long stories. We need stories, and Hollywood is so good at giving them stories. And so they have a need for these things, and they're still spending a lot of money on those budgets.

So yes, there's still a demand for turning books and optioning them and turning them into movies. Books are great. Any sort of existing IP is great because there are marketing efficiencies there.

People already know that stuff, know the vibe of it, and so it's easier to market than something that's totally creative and new. When you're spending that much money, you want those marketing efficiencies. They're really important.

So the point being, the power is shifting away from Hollywood. Hollywood will still be a tastemaker, but you and me can reach anybody on the planet now. Almost. Billions of people.

If it's making a movie, right now you could make a movie that most people wouldn't realise is an AI movie. If it was a horror film, I know a handful of people that could make a feature-length horror film right now with AI and 99% of the audience couldn't tell, if it was professionally written.

Jo: I think the point here though is, I'm an author, the people listening are authors, and we don't want to make movies.

We want to license our IP to people who want to make movies.

Brooks: Yes. Great. Okay, good. So then you could, if you wanted, build an audience. Hollywood loves when something's already proven, so that's that IP thing, right?

So if you just have a great book, then it's all about the sales. You guys have Dragons' Den, we have Shark Tank here. And what's amazing about that show is these are people or entrepreneurs pitching an idea, and there's an amazing rhythm that happens.

They say, “We've got this great idea. It's this sort of company.” And the sharks, or the dragons, will listen. And there's a huge turning point when they reveal sales.

They're either really excited about the idea and then they go, “Well, how are the sales?” And the person goes, “Well, we don't have any sales yet.” And they go, “Uh,” and they're not interested.

Or they might even be like, “Eh, it doesn't seem like a good idea.” And they're like, “Well, how are the sales?” And they're like, “Oh, well, we've sold through the roof.” And then all of a sudden they perk up. So it's all about the sales.

So step one is writing something that you want. Step two is making sure other people in your target audience are also loving it as much as you do. Step three is proving in some way at scale that there's real demand for it.

So you could do that with trailers, you could do that with clips, you can do that as an indie publisher. There's all sorts of things that you can do. Humans are much more persuaded by concrete data than they are by just vibes.

So if you can bring Hollywood concrete data of any type, like viral videos, like audience, like obviously bestsellers. Awards mean something, but not quite as much as sales. Then you're going to get Hollywood's attention because that reduces risk for them.

So even now, when Hollywood's definitely shrinking and contracting, there's still very significant money being spent because it's a huge demand. If you ever walk around a studio lot, those things are opulent places. It's stunning. Like, how are they paying for all this stuff? These lots are enormous.

It's because humanity is voracious for stories, and movies are one premium type of storytelling. The demand for stories is steady if not going up. It's just that we have a wider variety of types of stories that we can do, whether we're an indie author.

So anyway, did I answer the question? You get me too excited with these questions, Jo. It's a problem.

Jo: Yes. I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of ways in, but the parallels with being an indie author I think are quite clear.

One of the things I found interesting about your profile and what you do is that you help clients who are already accomplished but not quite breaking through, and that sounds like a lot of mid-list indie authors, probably a lot of mid-list screenwriters, mid-list filmmakers.

This is a hard place to be because, on the one hand, we are grateful for what we have achieved and what we can do, and yet wanting more, wanting that big Hollywood deal or the Netflix deal, or wanting the massive bestseller or whatever.

So if someone wants to get to that next level, what are some of the ways that they can perhaps try and get there?

Brooks: It's a great question. Coaching is a really wonderful way to learn anything of this sort of complexity and challenge, especially if it's a hyper-competitive business. We need two things, I think, to write a great novel or screenplay or both.

A, we need to feel profoundly safe in our space. If we can't really feel deeply authentic about the things that are embarrassing, or that we feel shame about, or just our shadows, or anything that we don't feel completely comfortable saying and sharing in public usually.

We need to be able to touch those things, and be articulate about those things, and that's one part of it. Then we need a concrete path forward. Maybe you're thinking about some tragedy that you had in childhood, and how you dealt with it and how difficult that was.

So you need to be able to be real precise in those observations about what it felt like, and how you tried to compensate for it, and that didn't work and it made it worse.

Whatever your observations are about your life journey, you need to be really specific and really deeply felt. A good coaching relationship allows you to be in that space, to be really honest with yourself and authentic. g

Aood coach will push you back and say, “You know what? That sounds interesting, but maybe not quite as true to you deeply.” So that's one piece of it. Then there's a concrete path forward.

You need to have the emotional access to that truth, and then you need to know what to do with that truth in a step-by-step way. Because most people, the ones that you're talking about, they're accomplished in something else.

What happens is when we first start writing, and maybe this happens with novelists, but for sure it happens to screenwriters, you just start typing words. But you haven't really thought through the theme, the concept, the structure, the character, all the deeper questions that really matter.

The milestones, like a North Star: winning a major award, or getting a publisher. That's the direction that we're heading towards, and then you set it and forget it, but you want to keep checking it every week, every month or whatever. But you want it very specific.

“I would like to sell a book, or sell a book to Hollywood, or write a screenplay, or get a producer attached to a screenplay.”

Whatever the milestone is, make it really specific, really concrete, and then reverse engineer.

This is what I do on the concrete path. I reverse engineer every step to get there, starting with a really tiny one we can do today, and I make sure they feel really safe, and then we just walk through.

Then what happens is, if you do that, if you feel safe, if you're showing up authentically and you have a process that's repeatable, not just willy-nilly, it's got to be something that's proven to work. It wasn't an accident I wrote 45 scripts. I've got a whole system.

But by the way, the first five scripts took me forever. The last movie that I made took me three years to write that script. I can write a better script with those same elements in three months now, because I know I have a concrete path.

So if you want to do something new, whether it's playing the piano or getting six-pack abs or writing a screenplay, work with somebody who's got a system that's already proven, and make sure you relate to them, and then just follow the system.

Then when the doubts come up, and they will, that's where the feeling safe is really important. Because, oh, I want the six-pack abs, but I don't feel like going to the gym. I want the extra donut.

If I'm working with a really good trainer, they go, “Dude, do you want the six-pack abs or not?” And then you go back and forth, and I go, “Okay, now I can make peace with myself and say I can take one tiny bite of the donut and then still do my workout,” and then I'm moving towards that North Star. Does that make sense?

Jo: Yes. I think, like many independents, I resist anything that is systematised. I'm a discovery writer, and I follow the muse, and all of that kind of thing.

I think I would say something in a similar vein, which is sustainable creativity for the long term, because your 45 scripts are also years of work, and my books are years of work, and we get better at what we do. So my system, I do have a system really, because—

My system is that I do the work, and I write my stories, and I get them out there, and I do the marketing.

So even if it's not as systematised as such, it's still a process that I have repeated over and over again.

Brooks: That's fascinating to me. Would you consider yourself a pantser? You're like, “I've got an idea,” and you just start writing?

Jo: I don't use the word pantser. I guess I call it discovery writing, which is…

Brooks: That's a better term.

Jo: Yes. What I'm writing for this prize, for example, I know the characters, I know now what's happening.

When I had the idea, it was very much a vision and a theme, and the competition has a theme: a positive future with AI and technology. But the things that came around that, I then started playing with ideas around the treatment. I haven't written the screenplay yet.

I don't do a plot, or I don't follow Save the Cat or any of that kind of thing. When I write a novel, I just explore and I never write in order. Then at some point I stop and then I have to think about the structure and putting it all together, so the edits are quite big. But my fun is in that discovery, really.

Brooks: Oh, that's awesome. Okay, so let me ask, that's really fascinating. And by the way, that doesn't, to me, negate the system that I use.

The one that I use is ultimately… the thing is, these questions, the audience is wanting your unique answers to. You don't necessarily need to do it in a certain order. I think that's actually really cool that you write out of order and you have a few elements in mind. All that stuff sounds awesome.

The only thing that then makes me curious is, how's your pace? Are you actually completing novels at a pace that feels good, or do you feel like you go too fast, too slow?

Jo: I do one or two a year at the moment. Well, two a year, really. But I would say I'm not as successful as I'd like to be, so I'm not saying that my system is the best. I'm saying I want to be better.

It's just that my fun is this sort of creative chaos, which I then try and control later.

One of the things I really like about screenplays and treatments and doing this kind of thing for film is that it is much more structured, I think, than a 70,000-word novel. You can go in all kinds of directions, whereas with screenwriting you do have to be more disciplined really.

Brooks: Yes, so this is going to be fun probably, to hear my view for your audience, and the differences as I see them.

For starters, you're talking about what, 10, 20, 30 hours reading a novel sometimes, or maybe less, whereas a movie's a 90-minute experience, right? So that's different. Or if it's a TV series, you might see an hour and then an hour. So that's a very different experience.

What happens is when it's condensed like that, you're loading up layers. So every scene is stacked with exposition beneath the drama, and done in a certain way. So specifically, movies are only what you can see and only what you hear. Whereas novels, if you can think it, you can write it, it can be in there.

So you don't need to have a plot, but if you want to sell your book to Hollywood, it helps.

So I was very resistant about structure. I went to NYU film school, where we really just made short films. It was funny, I had friends that were in the dramatic writing department, and I was like, “You guys are wasting your money. You're just learning to write scripts. We learn to write the scripts and make the movies.”

What I hadn't realised is it's a different skill set to hold somebody's attention across an hour-long play, or a 90-minute movie, than it is to make a movie that holds their attention for two minutes or five minutes.

I found out years later when I made a feature that was like a lot of shorts patched together, and people were not… They liked it, but they didn't love it. I was like, “Well, what's going on?” And so then I learned to really love Save the Cat in particular. It completely changed me.

What happened was, I got a big old slice of humble pie. I had made my second feature, and I put everything I had into it, and it had loose structural beginning, middle, end, blah, blah, blah. But I was still, “Eh, Hollywood BS. What do they know? It's all fake.”

So I was very anti-Hollywood structure. Then I was like, now I've got two independent films out there, people saw them, liked them, whatever, but it wasn't getting me consistent work. It wasn't really advancing my career in the way that I wanted. And I was like, “Well, maybe there is something to the Save the Cat.”

So I went to the Save the Cat workshop with Blake when he was still alive, and he was delightful, a really awesome guy. He's got this kind of cutesy style, for people that don't know.

For context, Blake Snyder was a working Hollywood screenwriter, and he had this system called Save the Cat, which actually has some really interesting ideas.

He's got this very light, breezy sort of style. A lot of people don't like him and some people really love him, and everything in between. But I took his weekend seminar, and it completely changed me, because at that point, like I said, I took three years to write a script.

Then once he had a process and he had a way of thinking about craft that was just much more screenwriter-friendly, I was like, “Oh my God.” It was so much easier, because I was just focused on the right thing at the right time. So it just sped everything up.

After that, I was banging out two to three scripts a year, and better and better quality.

So for me, because I went from winging it and wrote five scripts in 13 years, and then wrote two to three scripts every year, I became a huge proponent of system and process.

Then my own system really came from that, but it's modular. I have a nine-step system, but you don't necessarily have to go in that order, other than the last three steps, but I won't get into the details. Sometimes you kind of jump from two to three and then back to two and then back and forth.

So I love that you get the feel for those elements, and then you just felt your way through. But writing screenplay pages doesn't make sense until you really understand concept, you get a deep sense of beginning, middle, end, character arcs, and these other threads.

There are just way better tools for those jobs than screenplay format, because it's a really weird format. It's got these weird slug lines at the top that are all in caps, because a screenplay is a blueprint for somebody else to make the movie. It's not an end-user document like a novel.

I don't let my clients even go to that format because it just gets them focused on the wrong things. What they really need to know is, what is your perspective about this theme? What happened in your life that you're fascinated with, that you'd even want to write about this? And tell me what your real life lessons are.

So we go into… again, I go back to relationship. What's your relationship to the universe? And what's your relationship to your best friends, or where you got your heart broken, or whatever you want to write about. And then we get that clarity, and then I show you how to express it in terms of developing a screenplay.

It's really long-form storytelling, and then the structure just makes it build on itself. But with the structure, because you're talking about so much money and people involved to make it, at least traditionally, what ended up happening was narrative structure that was not so much rigid.

Because here's the thing, you can look at 50, 100 years of European cinema and you can look at Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood laps them.

When I taught at UCLA Extension, I had lots of foreign students. Let's say there'd be two or three students… if there were 12 people in the class, two or three people would be from America, and everybody else would be from other countries.

I would go around, I'd be like, “What movies and TV shows have you been watching?” Almost in every single country, they watch half from their own country, half from Hollywood. So Hollywood storytelling works, that's just the data, and they're dominant.

The reason it works is what Aristotle was saying thousands of years ago.. There's a way of thinking about beginning, middle, end that just deeply speaks to the psyche, and you can ignore it if you want. I think Godard said, “You need beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order,” right? Which is great.

Just the way we experience life, there's a beginning, a middle, an end to this podcast interview. There's a beginning, middle, end to the day, a beginning, middle, end to me eating lunch.

So if you don't lean into the beginning, middle, end psychological aspect of your story, you're going to bore your reader.

But to your point, you don't necessarily have to sort that out in the beginning. It's more efficient probably if you do, but you don't have to. Go into it wherever the muse tells you to go, and then at some point, like you do, then you go, “Okay, now I go back and I edit.”

If you're saying there's another level, you have another gear in you, then yes, I'd be curious to slowly go through how you're making those decisions. Because what's happening probably is there are ways you're holding back a little bit. There's maybe something you're afraid of being vulnerable about.

That's usually where me or other writers are holding themselves back, and we can take a look at that. There are different ways I show writers to do it. Then you can go, “Oh, I was doing it here, and now I can do it there.” And it could be with process, or just a certain creative choice.

With story, it's clear and compelling. Those are the simple things. So, is this clear enough? Is it compelling enough? And there are almost always ways to up-level on any facet, whether it's one sentence, or a sentence that describes the whole concept of the book, or a chapter.

Each one of those can be looked at with that lens and we can just say, “Hey, this is 70%, 80%,” whatever, and then we say, “Well, how do we get a little bit more?” And then when you do that enough, it piles up. Then especially if you bring in an audience and people are flipping out for your work, they'll tell you.

Jo: Yes, I love a challenge, so thank you for everything you've shared today.

So where can people find you and everything you do online?

Brooks: Well, one way you can find me—if anything I said seemed helpful for you, if you have questions about Hollywood or you have a screenplay in your heart—you can just email me, [email protected].

You could look me up on LinkedIn. I'm at Brooks Elms. I also have a Skool community called Screenwriter Marketing, but it's really for any sort of storyteller, and it talks about my favourite way to engage an audience and get through it. So anybody can jump into that if you like my vibe.

If you really think anything I've said, or the way I said it, seems like it could be helpful for you, just reach out. Let me know what you're up to, and maybe there's a way I can help you.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Brooks. That was great.

Brooks: You're welcome. It was a total pleasure. It was lots of fun, and I really appreciate you.

The post How To Prove The Demand For Your Stories And Get The Attention Of Hollywood With Brooks Elms first appeared on The Creative Penn.