Member-only story
The keys to being a great writer are kind of like being a great watchmaker.
Craig Mazin is one of my favorite screenwriters. On the podcast he co-hosts, he occasionally talks about how he learned to be so good. It wasn’t because he went to Princeton. It wasn’t because he moved to L.A. after college to be around other writers and producers and directors. It was because of something Mazin did on his own.
He watched the same movies over and over.
These were his favorite movies, and Mazin would take out a pen and a piece of paper and play the film again, rewinding each scene, breaking it down, trying to figure out its conflict and how it resolved itself only to build into a slightly larger conflict that the next scene explored. He would write notes on all of this. (He would once dedicate a podcast episode to his notes-taking process and what he called the Hegelian dialectic of movies. In another episode, he and his co-host John August went nearly scene-by-scene through their favorite movie, The Princess Bride.) Mazin likened what he did in his early years in Hollywood to the apprenticeship of a watchmaker.
Watches are intricate things. To learn how to make one is to open its face, and study how each part within connects to the next. That’s the only way to learn the craft, this minute, gear-by-gear…
