5 Obvious Tips For Writing About/For The Movies

"I am sometimes asked to give advice about becoming a film critic/blogger or a screenwriter. My first bit of advice is always the same: don’t do it. Don’t become either of these two things. If you want to work in the movies, become a director or producer, as you’ll be paid better, will get to boss the screenwriter around and will be more respected. If you want to become a film critic or blogger, consider instead taking on a job that will be more helpful to society, like being a McDonald’s employee. That job probably pays better as well. Whole Foods has nice benefits, I understand.

The only people who should aspire to these jobs are the poor souls who are driven, who feel like this is their calling, who have the sense that the universe dealt them a bum hand and they’re stuck with it. If that’s you, I have five golden bits of advice that you should study and learn. But first, two things you must already have:

- An ability to communicate. Don’t learn how to communicate your thoughts on the job. Come prepared to write properly, to write with style and to write with verve. The end goal of writing is to be read; be prepared to be read.

- Something to prove. This is what drives you. Whether you want to write to impress a girl or you want to write to prove detractors wrong or you want to write because you think you’re the most correct person in the world and everybody else needs to hear your thoughts, you must have a reason to be writing.

With that out of the way, on to the Five Golden Tips:

Tip #1: FAIL.

Fail early, and fail often. Good writing is about sharing yourself - your thoughts, your opinions, your feelings - and that makes you very vulnerable. You cannot embark on a writing career if you’re not ready for rejection, dismissal, unkind internet comments and general failure. It's like boxing - you have to get punched in the face to get over your fear of being punched in the face.

Not only does failing early in life prepare you for future (inevitable) failures, it adds to your ‘Something to prove’ prerequisite. When I failed out of college and found myself unloading trucks at a department store at 5am every day, I knew I needed to take serious action to change my situation. Failure is an excellent motivator.

Tip #2: GET DUMPED, DO DRUGS, TRAVEL FAR.

Write what you know, they say, and most people don’t know shit. Experience is key for a writer; meeting people, getting to know their stories and points of view, having strange encounters and testing your own boundaries are exactly the things any serious writer MUST do.

You’re thinking, ‘But I just want to be a film critic. None of this applies to me.’ This applies to you, and almost doubly so. One of the cardinal sins I see committed by younger film critics is that they attempt to filter everything they watch through their own limited, boring experience. How can you really understand a love story if you’ve never been in love? How can you really feel for a character on the edge if you’ve never been on the edge? If your whole life experience is comfy, middle class, college-educated boringness, you’ll always be at a distance from the other experiences you find on film.

That doesn’t mean you can’t understand a movie about a drug dealer if you’ve never been a drug dealer. What it means is that the broader your personal experiences, the more you’ll be able to project yourself into what you’re watching. Obviously a good filmmaker should be able to make any character, however extreme, in some way understandable to an audience, but as a critic you will need to be doing heavier lifting. And that lifting will be easier if you have lots of human experiences under your belt. A nice side effect is that having lots of human experiences under your belt will also make a better, more interesting human."

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