The high point of my life as a screenwriter this week was a long telephone conversation with agent and publisher Julian Friedmann. He called me to discuss the details of a special offer for Shooters on his superb Scriptwriter Magazine, an offer we'll shortly be making available to all our members.
I was impressed with his tale of producing this excellent magazine on a shoestring and at no profit out of a sheer sense of duty that screenwriters need a magazine that deals with our craft in depth.
Naturally, the conversation turned to screenwriting itself and I was surprised to find him dismissive of the likes of Syd Field.
Now I'm something of a screenplay paradigm junkie. I've done the lot: Field, Vogler, Hauge, McKee, Dramatica. They gave a much needed sense of structure to a writer who just used to spew it out onto the page regardless.
But I'm starting to see his point about the need for a return to an emphasis on right-brained inspiration as a starting point, with left-brained structuralism resorted to as an editing tool only at the end. For years now I've been doing it the other way round, and I'm not the only one.
Maybe many of us have damaged our creative impulse through our obsession with paradigms, and the time is right to get back to the basics of creativity.
I'm torn between the two. I feel I'm a better writer for having learned them, but need to make them take a back seat with each project till I've had my blitz of inspiration and bring them to bear as an editing tool late on.
Maybe it's all about going through a long process of internalising them to the point when you adopt the patterns instinctively?