Jay Wolpert: How do you Approach the Blank Page?

Screenwriter Jay Wolpert, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and The Count of Monte Crisco (2002), has a very simple approach for preventing writers block. In the very early stages of a project, he gets everything out of his head and onto the page.

“The first thing I always do is outline,” Wolpert explains. “In my case it goes far beyond an outline. It really is an [extensive] treatment.

“I go scene by scene, and if there is any dialogue that occurs to me, I put it in,” he continues.

“I know every scene I’m going to write. And, if in the middle of describing it, I suddenly get moved to write the scene, I’ll write the whole bloody scene in the treatment."

Wolpert may ultimately change these items, but rather than discarding an idea, a conversation, a detail, because it’s not time to write it yet, he has it chronicled for his next stage of the script.

“The most distinctive thing I do,” Wolpert adds, “along with this exhaustive treatment, is I begin with the end.

“In most cases, I know how I think it’s going to turn out. And that makes everything fit into place theoretically. At least it makes it a lot easier to back-drill.”

Once Wolpert can see that last scene—if it is moving or funny or a grand action scene—he can figure out how to get there.

“Very often by the time I finish that treatment, that last scene is not that last scene,” he says. “[That is] because characters write themselves. People glibly say that, but the truth is, they do.

“You lay a lot of pipe … in that treatment, not knowing if [the characters] will all go somewhere. As I am falling more and more in love in the progression of that treatment, I realize certain of those pipelines are not going to pay off. I find myself [happier] with something else, so I will make a note to go back when I finish this thing and tear up the pipe, because it no longer applies.

“There’s a retrograde element in that treatment process, because I am constantly working in a funny way backwards.”

Wolpert says part of why he is so adamant about treatments is because the one time he wrote a spec script on instinct, it was his least successful effort. There’s another reason Wolpert is a big planner. He used to work in high level game shows, producing such shows as The New Price is Right and an updated Match Game.

Working in the creation and philosophy of TV game shows “taught me how important logic is and how terrifying it [would be if the] logic should ever blow up in my face,” he says.

“When I went and formed my own companies, I took great pride in the fact that … when we got into the studio for a pilot, there would never be a disaster of logic. You might have … some technical [problem], but it was never because the game [didn’t] work.

“This would happen to a lot of the producers who would go in and not do their homework.”

As it turned out, game-show creation translated into Wolpert’s screenwriting career.

“I just make sure in the outline, the logic works out. And, if it doesn’t, it’s not because my logic was screwed up, it was because I thought of something I liked better."

Wolpert has one more useful tip for keeping himself out of the writers-block zone.

“I quit before I stop,” he explains. “I quit for the day while I am still hot and know what I’m going to do in the next scene or the next thing I’m going to write.

“That way, I hit the ground running the next morning. I’ve got a momentum going, the juices are flowing. I can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning, because I know what I’m going to do. That has been invaluable to me.”