Oh sure, that's a metaphor.  We writers love them.  Metaphors allow us comparitive tools to understand something foreign by its relation to something familiar.  I want to understand how a song works.  I love movies.  I think of the qualities of a movie and begin to recognize similar components in a song's structure.  The comparison shines a light on a mysterious subject, and I begin to understand more about songs.

I find this sort of transitive learning useful in other ways.  I love to hear masters at crafts other than mine speak about their work because many of their insights illuminate my own benighted strivings.  I have created a whole set of exercises devoted to this concept for songwriters, some of which I utilize in teaching The Roots I & 2 at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles. It is this interest in the teaching of otherness that led me to attend lectures that the Oscars put on by and for screenwriters.  Gary Ross, who adapted the book Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand into the screenplay and blockbuster film, was invited to lecture at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in their Marvin Borowsky Screenwriters Series in 2004.

Did you ever see the movie?  You remember, the little horse (and jockey, played by Spiderman) that could--and did--when everyone else gave up on them. I get a Seabiscuit-sized lump in the throat through most every black-and-white photoed voice-over moment.  (Our friend, the talented Julie Lynn of Mockingbird Pictures was a producer on the film in charge of the racing sequences.)

I confess to being a ritual note-taker.  I'm not sure if it is the student in me or the teacher, but if someone is saying something interesting, chances are I'm scrambling to write it down.  Reading over my notes serves this valuable purpose:  they remind me of all the memorable things I have heard--and forgotten. 

Below are my notes from that lecture.  If you are a songwriter, consider the 3:30 movies you craft and listen to a fellow writer's sense of the humility, candor, courage, and generosity it takes to create something beautiful and true.

As the screenwriter, you are the first director.  The screenplay is not a blueprint; it is a beautiful scale model.  The writer sees the whole thing first.  Best advice from Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye:  “find a book you love and write it for yourself.”

Ross likes to look for the juice in work, in life:
-    what interests me?
-    what will drive me?

Aristotle posits in his Aesthetics that there are essentially two types of stories:  the simple story, which is essentially a plot and its outcome, and the complex story, a richer one in which the theme of the piece reveals a question that blooms out of the center.  This comes from challenging oneself with questions from the outset.

Outlining
It is a joyous process of mining the interesting stuff, the chance to ask yourself the best questions.  This will give way to structure. 

The decisions of a movie get smaller as you go.  Enjoy the process in the beginning.  If we ask the good questions, we generate the structure out of that process.  “I have a career,” Ross asserts, “because I love and live in the middle of the movie.” 

No one ever stunk upstream, he quips.  A problem in Act 3 reflects a problem in Act 1.  The plot must feel inevitable.  Aristotle said there can be no deus ex machina.  If an ideal story is cause and effect, then the “literary big bang” is this:  build the right back story and the inevitable follows.

Does plot spring from character or vice versa?
Characters service your vision of the story.  They are as much unformed as the story you haven’t written.  Movies aren’t confessional; let characters service the plot.  Know your point of view first, then theirs. 

Structure should not happen mechanically; it should occur organically as result of the story.  One needs
-    a strong point of view and the detachment to portray it cinematically
-    yearnings of a character and their collision with the world
-    a desire to express must move us to write.  We must write what we want to see in the world
(RCS thinks:  not so far from Gandhi’s notion, that we must be the change we wish to see in the world.)

Voice and point of view will guide you.  Focus on the structure itself is a form of self-doubt. 

Embrace your voice.  When you rid the self of defenses, you reach a braver, more enduring place.  Your voice comes from this place.  For Ross the world boils down to this:  people are kind or wounded.  He has compassion for both.  Define the values you are!  Cynicism is nothing more than a defense against the breaking heart.


Ross on his own process:
-    spends equal time outlining and writing because outlining is the best time to dream the free-est, when one is open to the biggest ideas
-    select your criticism wisely; be careful to preserve strength and conviction of your voice
-    please  yourself first
-    be willing to write the equivalent of “hitting a flat in jazz”—Ross enjoys robbing the audience of symmetry for the powerful effect that choice can have
-    see the struggle as noble
-    see life as poetic and beautiful even in its smallest moments
-    write the movie you want to go see
-    write the song you want to hear (RCS)
-    you can want to please the critics, but you won’t please them unless you please yourself
-    you can’t tailor your career to a market
-    if you seize the power you realize they don’t know better than you. 
-    Conviction and authenticity are what they want to hear.  In other words, your voice is essential because only your voice will ring true from your mouth, pen, guitar, brush, lens…
-    Don’t try to BE entertaining.  Then you’ve given your voice away to a projected audience.  Entertain yourself and have integrity in the writing
-    Don’t submit a draft that you don’t like.  Don’t surrender yourself to the notes process.  Be the writer you need to be to be satisfied.
-    Each phase of process has to have its own life and dynamic
-    Ross:  “I won’t play a note I fundamentally don’t believe in.”  Why?  Because now I’m not the right guy for the job.
-    Dynamism
-    Epic size and truth are not mutually exclusive (this was a notion of acting teacher Stella Adler)
-    Don’t be a writer who directs!  The pace of the syntax on the page can kill the life of the moment and the actor’s interpretation. 
-    If it doesn’t serve the story you want to tell, don’t tell it.  Write to that story.  For Ross in Seabiscuit, the story was ultimately about healing.  He wrote to healing and left out what did not speak to that. 
-    Grace, kindness, generosity, and a braveness in that generosity—these are themes that move his pen to action.

Here, here (I wrote).