A Mistake Every Writer Makes

追加: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Writers have a problem. Now, I know that's kind of like saying floods might make you damp or the sun is kind of warm. If writers didn't have problems, they wouldn't have much to write about after all. Still, there's a problem that I see with a lot of beginning or amateur writers that some professional writers can slip back into. Now, Jeffrey in the dramatist toolkit outlines this problem very well for playwrights. But what I think he's talking about for playwrights and for screenwriters applies to narrative writers, storytellers of any stripe. I think we can all take something from this. So, let's dive in.

[00:00:44]You shouldn't begin writing a play, says Jeffrey, if you haven't mastered the craft of writing a scene.

[00:00:51]And you can't write a scene without knowing something about how actors work and what the playwright has to supply so that they can do that work.

[00:01:00]Of course, the actor needs to know the fundamental details of the character like the character's race, gender, sexual preferences, age, all that kind of thing.

[00:01:11]But the actor also needs to know what I have preached over and over again as one of the most crucial components of character if not the most crucial component.

[00:01:22]Objective as it's called in the dramatic world or >> can I ask about my motivation?

[00:01:27]>> Keep me from puking is your motivation.

[00:01:29]>> What the character desires, what the character wants, what the character is pursuing, the character's goal.

[00:01:36]Everything the character does is in some way in pursuit of the character's overarching objective. The big thing that he or she wants and will go to extremes to achieve.

[00:01:47]In fact, it is these extremes that make a character memorable.

[00:01:53]Does every character need to have an objective? No. Do you always have to have a character with an objective and a character pursuing a goal in order to write a decent story? No, not necessarily. But if you want to capture your readers or your audience's attention, this is a good rule of thumb to go by. If your character doesn't have any desire, it is very hard to grab a reader. You often have to rely on other things. If you don't have a character with a desire, you have to have a really brilliant pro style or some amazing ideas that you're working with, some really catchy imagery or sound devices or something else to grab your reader and somehow hold them on through the course of a story without a character's objective to latch on to. It's a very difficult thing. So to make it easier on yourself and to write what is mostly going to be a good story, you want to have a character with a desire. But that doesn't necessarily mean that this has to be cookie cutter, that you have to follow some kind of hero's journey program or anything like that. The character's desire or goal doesn't even need to be something that they have consciously named or that we can necessarily consciously identify at first. It might only become clear throughout the course of the unraveling of the plot of the story.

[00:03:10]What the characters want is not necessarily one, what they say they want, or two, what they consciously think they want. Sometimes characters pursue objectives that exist on a subconscious plane, ones that they might even consciously disavow.

[00:03:27]Your character has to want something, but they don't necessarily have to know what it is they want. Or what they want on the surface may be actually covering up a deeper subconscious need. And this is why I like to put it, that need versus want distinction. Characters don't always get what they want, but in some sense, they always get what they need. Now, this is going to lead us to one of the great sins of writing, a problem that we need to all confront and do our best to avoid most of the time in most kinds of writing. There are exceptions to everything. Every rule is just >> more what you call guidelines than actual rules.

[00:04:10]>> So Jeffrey Sweep believes that the best playwrights are those who were once actors, not once novelists or short story writers because playwrs understand how plays work because they've acted in them. They've read them. They've interpreted them over and over and over again. And he's got kind of a point here. If you haven't done any kind of acting, it can be hard to grasp what a play really needs to make itself succeed. It's a good idea to actually do some theater before you decide to write for the theater. It's a good idea to work in film a little bit or at least study under some screenwriters and read screenplays before you decide to write screenplays. Just watching movies is not necessarily going to make you a screenwriter.

[00:04:56]Part of the skill of acting resides in creating the illusion of not knowing more than the character. Actors without this skill to submerge themselves in the parts they play run the risk of indicating commenting on their roles.

[00:05:13]The actor who plays a villain by twirling a mustache and chuckling malevolently is indicating. So is the actress whose approach to the role of an anjenu includes poking at a dimple with her forefinger and fluttering her eyes as an attempt to convey innocence.

[00:05:28]Both actors in these admittedly exaggerated examples are trying to communicate directly to the audience how they want their characters to be viewed.

[00:05:37]This is also what we call preaching or being on the nose. I used to put a note in my creative writing students stories when they would do this. Ootn you're being on the nose. you're being way too direct and literal with it. You're telling instead of showing in a place where you shouldn't do that. I'm not against telling. I'm four, balancing telling and showing. But there are places where showing is going to work a lot better and telling really shortcircuits the story. And a lot of students don't know where those places are. And so they tend to flip them around because it can be hard to delve into the details and show what exactly happens at a turning point of a story when you really haven't thought that through and you don't necessarily know how your characters are going to get out of the hole that they've dug for themselves. But that's where the real work comes in. That's what becoming a writer is all about is learning to solve those puzzles on your own.

[00:06:33]So it's indicating is as opposed to simply playing the characters truthfully and leaving the job of evaluating to the audience. In so doing, such actors draw the audience's attention to their performance rather than fostering belief in the characters they are playing.

[00:06:52]Indicating is the big taboo of naturalistic acting.

[00:06:57]You don't need to show and tell the same things at the same time again and again.

[00:07:04]That's really what he's getting at here.

[00:07:06]Sometimes telling is fine. Sometimes showing is absolutely necessary and the right thing to do. Sometimes showing is a little too much and you can sit back on telling. But you don't almost ever need to do both. Nor do you need to show over and over again or tell over and over again if that's not part of some kind of motif or some kind of development of your story that's necessary to it. Sometimes that's just stylistic flare that just covers up flaws that doesn't really cover up. So for Jeffree playwriting is an extension of acting. I believe too that faulty technique in playwriting is often a corollary of faulty technique in acting.

[00:07:49]Actors are not the only ones liable to indicate. Dramatists, too, may succumb to the temptation of commenting on or evaluating their work in their texts.

[00:07:59]Usually, this manifests itself in the script's most ornately written showpiece speeches, the ones in which it is apparent that the writer is particularly impressed by his or her own eloquence, often at the expense of the character's credibility. The passages that writers most admire in their own work are the ones in which they are most likely to have slipped into preaching or not so veiled self- congratulation.

[00:08:23]In playwriting, of course, this is usually in speeches.

[00:08:28]In fiction writing, this is often times, if it's not in speeches, in beautiful, ornate, descriptive passages that run on and on to redundancy, describing things that don't need to be described.

[00:08:42]overly detailed action shots or introspection that is unnecessary because we've already got the gist of the character's emotional state through the external factors involved.

[00:08:59]Basically, being too much in love with one's own voice. I get this sin so much.

[00:09:06]I am way too flowery often times on my first or even my second drafts and I need to carve back. Once upon a time I really kind of followed the Earnest Hemingway school and I kept a simplicity but even then I was always too flowery on my initial drafts. Nowadays I tend to want some more ornate language. I want some more of that description in there.

[00:09:29]But at the same time, I really have to be careful about not going overboard with it, not providing more than is necessary or sublimating the function to the form. The form's got to follow the function, right? The style needs to serve the story.

[00:09:47]Our job as writers is to put dramatic action on the stage. Then we should get the hell out of the way and trust the members of the audience to discern its significance for themselves.

[00:09:59]In short, the premises belong on stage.

[00:10:03]The conclusions belong in the house.

[00:10:06]What he's saying here from a logician's perspective is don't give them the full argument. Don't give them 2 plus 2 and four. Give the audience two and two and let them put it together and make four.

[00:10:18]Or as he puts it later on, 2 plus 3 equals 5. 2 plus 2 equals 5 is not very interesting. We can all tell that. But give an audience 2 plus xals 5.

[00:10:28]and the audience is automatically going to fill in that X for themselves.

[00:10:33]Audiences want to do that work. Readers want to do that little bit of extra work. They want to come to conclusions on their own. And not all of those conclusions are always going to be the exact conclusions that you might want to guide them to. You have to allow your reader that freedom. This is kind of a sacrifice we make as authors if we want to be authors and storytellers and not just preachers.

[00:10:58]hard to mistake a pure preacher's meaning usually because it's pretty direct. But if you're a pure preacher, you're not pure storyteller and vice versa.

[00:11:10]Our goal as playwrights and as writers is to engage the audience in our characters and their dilemmas. The way to get an audience engaged is to stimulate them to fill in for themselves what is left unsaid.

[00:11:28]This doesn't mean be opaque. It doesn't mean leave everything up to the audience for interpretation and just give them something that's generally empty and mindless and leave them to fill in the gaps. That's not how you present themes.

[00:11:40]You can absolutely present your take on a theme or multiple takes on a theme or simply raise the question of a theme for an audience.

[00:11:49]But they've got to do some work themselves to get to that theme.

[00:11:55]Otherwise, you're shortcircuiting their intellectual enjoyment and kind of shortcircuiting your own message by doing that.

[00:12:04]To keep our audiences involved in our stories, I believe we dramatists should offer the theatrical equivalent of X's to fill in. Again, filling in those X's for those equations. try to give the audience those equations, but those little gaps where they need to put two and two together. We don't need to spoon feed them every single thing that happens. If we know that a couple is going to get together, we don't actually need to see them all the way through to the wedding scene, right? We don't necessarily need to see every aspect of the gory devouring of a person who is about to die by being devoured by wolves. We get the gist of that. And there's so many other things that a lot of storytellers feel they need to be on the nose about. They need to be so clear and direct in explaining that they take all the pleasure and mystery out of storytelling. One good example of this just came to me is if you have read Stephen King's The Dark Tower series and then you made the unfortunate mistake of going to see the movie version in the theaters.

[00:13:08]>> Hell no. To the No. No.

[00:13:14]Oh boy.

[00:13:16]For those who don't know, the Dark Tower series is a seven book series by Stephen King that he wrote over the course of, I don't know, 20 years. And in the first book, by the end of the first book, you really have no more clear idea of what the Dark Tower is than you did at the beginning. You've been given a lot of little hints, a lot of little clues, but you haven't given given enough to put together the mystery, but you've been given enough threads that you want to find out what's going to happen next, how this mystery is going to come together. And this series does a pretty good job, at least the first few books do, of starting to weave that web together, that background web, where you start to understand the world that you're in and what the Dark Tower could actually be that people are aiming for.

[00:14:06]In the movie, they tell you in voiceover narration in the first three minutes exactly what the Dark Tower is, exactly what the problem is with it, exactly why the man in black needs to get to the Dark Tower, exactly what's standing in his way.

[00:14:23]Mysteries that took seven books to develop are all given to us in the first three minutes of the film. And that film, well, if you haven't seen it, there's probably a reason that film bombed because it was awful and it had everything going for it except the script. Except thinking through the structure of the story. If you show your hand at the beginning, you have blown that hand. You've lost that hand. That's what they did in that story, indicating, right? They didn't trust their audience to understand what they were going to tell them. So they decided to spoon feed them everything at the beginning and so they killed their audience's investment.

[00:15:07]That's what you don't want to do as a writer.

[00:15:11]So in order to engage the people in the audience, you present just enough information premises for them to figure out for themselves the meaning of what's going on on stage. The conclusions.

[00:15:24]>> Brilliant.

[00:15:25]>> There's not an easy fix for this. It's something that you need to practice looking for over and over and over again. You don't always want to try to identify this in your first draft.

[00:15:37]You're going to screw up. You're going to be doing this in your first draft. As a matter of fact, sometimes you want to be on the nose in your first draft so that you know what you are trying to say. So that when you go back and rewrite and revise, you can figure out how to creatively and artistically disguise that message to make it part of the overall story so it doesn't sound like you're preaching so that you leave it to the audience to come to their own conclusions.

[00:16:07]That's the way to artistically deliver a theme. Don't indicate. Don't talk down to your audience or your reader. Don't tell them what your story is about. Show them your story and let the audience figure out what they need to figure out about it. That's all for me today, guys.

[00:16:26]I hope this helped you out. This is a good lesson for me to come back to again and again because, as I said, I am prone to it and a lot of writers are. A lot of young writers that I've worked with do it way too much and a lot of writers who should know better still do it way too much. So, please keep this in mind and let me know what your thoughts are on it in the comments below. Thank you again for watching. Please like the video, subscribe to the channel, and consider becoming a member. Thank you so much to my current members. I am pushing out new membersonly content, but even just having you guys here watching these is enough for me. That's awesome. And till next time, good luck and good writing.

[00:17:11]Peace.