Ed Solomon on Screenwriting, ‘Full Circle,’ and his Blacklist Workshop ‘Word by Word’ (Part 1)

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Ed Solomon:

“One of the only real skills that I seem to have cultivated in this business is patience,” jokes screenwriter Ed Solomon (Men In Black, Now You See Me 2). “Once you realize nothing is going to happen at the pace you thought it was, trying to rid yourself of this notion of time and rush allows you to deal with the constant letdown of your work not being ready, needing more notes, actors not being available, or it’s in turnaround.”

“That’s part of why I started to develop more than one thing at a time. But once you’ve been doing it long enough, you have all of these things that are one quarter way through, an idea you’ve been noodling on for four years. That becomes your day to day.”

“I can never work on the same part of multiple scripts. I can’t be in the middle of one script and be in the middle of another script. That’s hard for me to jump back and forth between. What I do is, work on an outline, while rewriting something else.”

Solomon says he would not advise the same to new writers. “It’s not as easy to jump around when you’re new because it’s so hard just to get through one script, especially the first few. You have to get the muscle memory, so when you get lost and feel like something is not moving forward, you stay with that feeling and keep going.”

Singular focus as a novice writer, allows for you to step back and reassess the work. “When you’re jumping back and forth, it’s easy not to do that hard work, especially when you haven’t developed the muscle for that. Get a few scripts under your belt and do some bad writing. Sometimes you don’t know what the screenplay is until you’re finished with it and revising it.”

Fresh Eyes

For those starting out, the screenwriter would tell you to finish a full draft before you move on to something else. That way, once you finish the first screenplay and perhaps start toying with the second one, the simple act of placing time between drafts gives you fresh eyes when you return to the first one. 

“Once you’re through something, by all means, start a new thing. See what the new thing tells you about the old thing. See what fresh eyes tells you about the old thing. Having more than one thing that you are nursing also takes the responsibility off of one thing being the make it or break it kind of thing.”

Time also gives you a fresh perspective on the story itself. “We’re never as good as we think we are. My scripts are never as good as I think they are when I have just finished them. They need other eyes on them, or me plus time. They still need work. Being able to understand that while a script is important and it needs to be as good as you can make it, it’s just one of a lot of scripts.”

Novice writers can have trouble understanding this idea, that they must fully care and fully work on a single script, but in the end, it’s one of many. “It also releases the pressure that sometimes causes a log jam. Trying to make something great is not the way to make it great. I would argue for a more compassionate approach.”

With compassion in mind, Solomon’s self-talk sounds something like this: “I need to make this as good as I can make it. I need to make it work. Is it working? Not quite here. It can be better here. What’s it telling me it wants to be?” With this in mind, you must constantly work on making it better, but simultaneously not judge yourself too harshly. 

Toss Out Bad Drafts

Through this mindset, you still have to occasionally toss out full drafts of work. Type “the end” on the final page doesn’t actually mean it’s done. Instead, you almost need to approach your draft with curiosity. Solomon tells himself, “I’ve written it, now let me see what it is” rather than “I’ve written it, now it’s done.” 

He elaborates, “Actually, like 35 of these 125 pages are really interesting, but lead to a bit of a different script than what I thought it was. Maybe I need to get rid of those 135 pages or some version of that. That can be very freeing, once you realize a draft is just a snapshot of something that is evolving and morphing. It can be freeing to say, I’m just making stuff up.”

With the new series, Full Circle, for example, the series ended up being about 400 pages, but it was originally a 586-page spec script. “It was originally a branching narrative form. We threw away that narrative structure and did it as linear storytelling. Threw away a giant amount of it.”

If you’ve seen the sticky note structure from Solomon’s work on Mosaic (on his website), this is the same type of “thought and geometry” he tossed out for the latest series. “We threw that whole thing out. I have scripts I’ve worked years on, 15 or 20 drafts, that haven’t sold or sold and not got made. They’re sitting there because they don’t deserve to get made. Not always, but sometimes, so you get used to the heartbreak.”

Solomon says this happens on a macro and micro level. “I wrote this whole script and it just disappeared (macro) or like, it took me 1,385 pages to get 103 that work. Sometimes that’s the case. You’re moving through a process to get something, so quantity matters less than the quality of what you’re creating. Sometimes it takes quantity to get quality pages, sometimes they come quickly. Those are skills you develop.”

The Outlining Catch-22

Many screenwriting coaches would tell you that if your formula works, the screenplay works. Solomon, who does dabble in non-linear works and experimental projects, has a somewhat different take. “If you write for a formula that sells, or a commercial script, that right there is a gigantic trap.”

“That’s writing from the outside-in, in all of the wrong ways. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to do that. I can’t do that myself. That’s where I think the screenwriting books screw people up more than they help them. They think that once you get the formula right, you just fill in the blanks. That, I think, is wrong.”

Instead, the screenwriter uses the outline to help him know whether or not he has something at all. “In Mosaic, interesting enough, it was mid-March and we needed to shoot in October, so we had an outline on the wall. Seven hours of stuff. I broke it all down for [Steven Soderbergh] and he said, ‘Okay, I see this. Now all that is left is the writing.’”

This is somewhat humorous to the outsider, but having worked together on multiple projects, Solomon understood what Soderbergh meant. He meant that we can get this made, he sees the potential, and he trusted Solomon to carry the story across the finish line for him to direct it.

‘It evolved a lot since then, but we knew the underpinnings of it. Not every project wants to be designed and built the same way. That’s a trap we fall into. The only thing that stays project to project is how you assess what that project needs. How does this project want to be told?”