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Life is simple when you are writing.

You sit down with pen and paper and laptop and then you just put one word down and another and another. Life is not simple when you are a writer, though. And it is unbearably difficult when you’re a talented screenwriter in Germany.

You see, we have it all. The funding, the education, the technical knowledge. We have a solid infrastructure and a social security net. We should be making great movies and sometimes we do.

But mostly we don’t.

Even worse, we don’t even make bad movies. Bad movies can make you feel something. We make movies that leave us empty when the credits roll. Movies that are forgettable. That certain something that they lack: Call it personality. Call it soul or profoundness. For the purpose of this text I will call it life.

German movies lack life.

In a movie narrative this dramatic realisation might have cost me my joy in writing. But in real life it didn’t. Instead the joy quietly quit on me. It slowly faded out and then one day it was gone. I was sitting in front of my laptop, trying to piece together movie ideas and I couldn’t.

This was not the lack of success. Yes, it sucked that no one was interested in my ideas, no one wanted to pay me to write. But that’s not why I lost my joy. Because writing itself was always joyful for me, independent of the outcome. So even without success, even before success, I always had writing and my joy for it. And now I had even lost that.

Writing had also always helped me to sort the chaos in my head, bring me focus. So here I am, trying to write, trying to understand: Where did my joy go, where did the life go?

We are failing

Let’s start with acknowledging this: I am failing. A whole industry is failing. Again and again.

This is difficult. Because acknowledging failure goes to the core of our identity. I have to give up being a successful writer, the German film industry has to give up making successful movies. We have to give up who we want to be and acknowledge that we might never get there.

I have never been good at admitting failure. Additional to the privilege of being white, male and from a stable household I have the privilege of being good at stuff.

I learned reading and writing at the age of four, I finished best of my class in school without much effort. I did fine in my physics bachelor’s degree, even though not being invested, and I got accepted at arguably one of the best film schools in the world on first try. I left film school with a decent, diverse portfolio of projects, written or even directed by me.

I had, or have, potential. I couldn’t fail. I was too good to fail. And yet I did.

When the loss of joy hit me, I was already off-track. I was without a writing job for quite some time. It felt like I was running and still falling behind. Like I was sprinting at full speed in all the wrong directions. But, as every screenwriter knows, the next big project is only one great idea away.

Right?

Right. So there I was, finally getting back on track. My agent told me she needed new ideas, so I wanted to create some fun one-pagers. Designing the layout myself, making it enjoyable to look at and easy to grasp the core of my idea. Maybe the stories wouldn’t sell but it would gain some attention and would put me back on the table as an interesting writer.

Creating these documents was actually a pretty good plan. And yet I couldn’t do it. I was playing around with the page layout instead of working on the stories. And then I stopped doing that. I started feeling numb, then I started feeling anxious about feeling numb and then I started feeling numb again to not feel anxious anymore.

I was a bad writer. I was a bad artist.

I kept asking myself: How can I turn my writing skill into success? What are the ideas I need to come up with? What does the market want?

And the market told me: We want IP-based stuff. Books, comics, songs, toys, whatever we can base a movie on. We want historical stories but with a modern take. Unique but universal. Young but still interesting for everyone. Diverse but not too much out there.

I never asked myself: Why do I want this? What is success? Why am I afraid of failing?

And the market never told me: We don’t know what we want. We are afraid. We are failing and we don’t know why.

This isn’t a new insight, a new problem. But everyone has a different answer. Everyone has someone else to blame. I am guilty of this myself.

I blamed the producers, the network executives, the directors. Other writers who accept bad conditions instead of saying no. I blamed the markets and capitalism. Netflix and Amazon and Tiktok and Disney and how they turn art into content. And all of it is true.

Yet none of it goes deep enough. And blaming others doesn’t make the pain go away. It makes it worse. Joyless thoughts create joyless minds and joyless people.

We are all in this together and we can’t see it because we are part of the system. We are fish and this is water. Water with just enough oxygen to survive in pain. Water where life isn’t created but merely maintained.

So, what is the life I am talking about? Let’s distract ourselves from our emotions about the state of the industry. Let’s dive into some inspiring theoretical thoughts. Let’s get to know Christopher Alexander.

What I talk about when I talk about life

Alexander was an architect. That is what he thought about and wrote about. And yet “The Nature of Order”, the book that I will be referencing, is about so much more. It might be one of the most profound books on art ever written.

It is about how beautiful things are created. Things that live. Things that bring us joy and not in a fulfilling-desire-kind-a-way but in a harmonious-and-simple-kind-a-way. Things that touch us deeply.

We all know this feeling that he is talking about here. We might have experienced it somewhere else, in moments of friendship, moments in nature, a piece of art that moves us, makes us want to smile or cry, even if we suppress it. It is hard to define and to study but Alexander tries to do it anyway.

He argues that everything has a certain amount of life in it. This doesn’t mean organic life or consciousness or soul or whatever spiritual equivalent you might come up with (although Alexander goes deeper into this in the last volume of his book). For our purpose it is simply an attribute that is linked to the structure of a thing and hence to how much beauty or profoundness we see in it.

Go out into the city and look at the buildings. You will find that certain buildings (often times older ones) evoke a deeper feeling in you than others. As an interesting example: google ‘HFF Munich’ (my former film school) and you will find a building that has very little life. Funny how that works.

Alexander goes deep on identifying different patterns that living structures seem to have. This is also very enlightening but not the focus here. A rough summary: things that have life have a certain mixture of structure and looseness. Symmetry and randomness.

There are two main takeaways that are important for us, though.

First: life in art is a real and measurable thing. It is not a matter of personal opinion. You can love a Marvel movie but it will still have less life than a small personal movie like ‘Aftersun’. Or like ‘Oppenheimer’ to compare it with a different big budget blockbuster.

So, my observation that German movies lack life should be measurable with actual studies. Although, I think most of us can feel it to be true without further proof.

And second: there are ways to create things that have life and we can learn them. Especially we as creatives tend to like the idea of the visionary artist: Every Paul Thomas Anderson movie is a masterpiece because PTA is a genius. There is this black mystery box that ideas go in and a great piece of art comes out. There is also the opposing idea that art is simply hard work. Just learn the tools of the trade and then climb up the ladder. Creating art is just another hustle.

Both of these ideas are not completely wrong but also they are. They don’t go deep enough.

What makes Alexander’s ideas so profound is that he doesn’t start with art. He looks at matter itself. At the universe. At nature.

Because nature is very good at creating stuff that has life. It has billions of years more experience than us. So how does nature create the calm scenery of the seaside, the inspiring colours of a blooming meadow?

We will get to that but first I want to take a look at how German screenplays are written.

Screenplays made in Germany

Let’s start with one way that is specific to the German system: screenplay funding. (Almost) every state in Germany has funding and there are a few national options as well.

Here in Bavaria even first time writers without a credit can apply. You will get 25,000 Euro which is a decent amount of money. It can carry you for a bit even in a fairly expensive city like Munich.

There is a catch, though. There always is. For your application you have to write a twenty-page summary of your story, called a Treatment.

This makes sense, right? The funding committee needs to know that they are investing in a good story by whatever standards they have. What better way to prove that than to give a detailed summary. Well. Not quite.

I hated writing these Treatments and I don’t know any writer who sincerely likes it. It actively works against writing a great story. Understanding this is the key, I believe, to why German movies don’t have life.

First: this is a lot of work if you want it to be good. I applied two times and it took me about two months each, basically full-time. It might be only twenty pages but you have to figure out the whole story.

You are also not getting paid for this work. It is a risk you have to take. And it is a risk that doesn’t pay out most of the time. Never did for me. So, you have to be in a privileged position to write this Treatment. Or work in your free time. Pick your poison.

There is a deeper issue, though: figuring out the story in this twenty page format is impossible. You need to let your characters talk and act in scenes to get to know them. You need to try out different endings until you find the one that is right.

A screenplay doesn’t consist of plot or characters. It consists of scenes from which the plot and the characters emerge. If you can’t write these scenes you can’t figure out what the screenplay is. Kind of obvious, one might think.

It is impossible to summarise a story you haven’t found yet. This is one of the deepest misunderstandings between producers and writers. You can talk about plot and character ideas, yes, about mood, about theme, maybe about specific moments. But you can’t summarise the whole story.

As a little side note on how I use these terms: plot is what happens in the movie, story is the whole thing. If you think both are the same, many of my arguments might not make sense to you.

Now for the last and most important point: This Treatment, this twenty-page-summary, maybe it’s meant as a guideline, only a stepping stone, a part of the process. But it’s not.

Even though it is treated like a substitute for a screenplay, it is something completely different. Writing it is very different from writing a screenplay. We change our process. We have to think differently, compose our story differently. And we do that because it is its own product.

It is a sales document. We don’t want to find the best story. We want to find the story document that sells the best. This is a subtle but huge difference.

And even though I like giving capitalism a hard time: the main issue is not that the Treatment is a sales document. The main issue is that the Treatment is made to control the outcome of the creative process. It is the attempt to plan out the screenplay before it is written.

And here we get back to Alexander and the creation of living things.

Because Alexander makes a very important point: the difference between stuff that is generated and stuff that is fabricated. Generated is a loaded term in the age of AI, so let me choose a different wording: it is about process-oriented creation versus outcome-oriented creation.

Alexander argues that modern buildings don’t have life because they are fabricated, they stem from an outcome-oriented process. The way they are built doesn’t allow the life to evolve because every decision is planned far ahead, no matter how well it will work when actually executed. Every decision wants to control the outcome, making everything inflexible and impersonal.

It is the same for movies. There is only one way of writing a screenplay. And that is by writing a screenplay.

We all have a different process, sure. Maybe your process includes writing a twenty-page-long sales document. I doubt it but it still doesn’t change the point: the personality of a screenplay arises in the specific process of writing it.

The life unfolds in the process, how Alexander puts it.

It is that simple. Life cannot be fabricated. It can only be generated. You only have to look at nature to understand that. A meadow isn’t planned, the ocean wasn’t planned. And yet they have beauty and profoundness that will still be there when us humans and our art is long gone. All that nature does is take one step at a time. Nature trusts the process. Nature doesn’t care about the outcome because it can’t control it.

This is what Alexander understood and this is what we need to learn.

Process in the Age of Industrialism

We are not only writing sales documents when applying for screenplay funding. Here in Germany we have to do this constantly.

First there is the idea paper, maybe one page, still manageable. Then the Exposé, about five pages, getting more painful. Then the Treatment, 10-20 pages, the most hated document. No one wants to write it and no one wants to read it. Sometimes there is a Bildertreatment, the structure of a screenplay but the scenes are written in prose, which is at least somewhat useful.

And finally even the screenplay is a sales document: you need it to apply for production funding or to convince the network executives.

The road to development hell is paved with good sales documents.

And now, for a brave moment, consider the making of the actual movie: After years of developing sales documents suddenly there is funding. The movie has to be shot now (with a lot of exclamation marks) before funding expires. But the context has changed, the cast, the director, the locations, probably even the story because it was rewritten to fit exactly the need of a certain network or funding committee.

And so the shoot becomes the line-to-screen-translation of a sales document that has the personality of everyone’s favourite color mixed together (somewhat greyish-brown) and the flexibility of the screenwriter’s backbone (none). That screenwriter who is already gone, by the way, because nobody needs them because we have their script, right?

Yeah. It’s a mess.

And the worst thing: this is nobody’s fault or maybe everybody’s fault. It is a system that is fundamentally built in a wrong way. It is built on the desire to control the outcome. It is built on the fear of failing. We have adapted this from other industries. And controlling each part of the process makes sense when you are building a safe car or a precise microchip.

But art should be different, art should be unsafe and imprecise and how is this not obvious?

This is the essence of Alexander’s writing. To create something beautiful we have to take one step at the time, trust the process, and follow the life. This might sound esoteric or random. But it doesn’t mean that we do whatever we want. Or simply throw a dart at the word cloud.

It means that beautiful, interesting, deep stories cannot be fabricated, they arise from a process that we can learn (and that many writers intuitively learn by simply writing a lot). And following the process, following the life, leads to joy.

Because there is a lot of joy in this industry. It can be found in all the small moments. In the moments of friendship, of creativity, of authenticity. All the moments that are deeply felt, how Alexander would put it.

There is a reason we are doing this. And it is time that we acknowledge what it actually is. Where our values lie. What this is about. The joy is found in the process. The life is found in the process. And the process is simple, step by step, looking to create the best possible solution under the circumstances.

Simple doesn’t mean easy. Following the process needs practice. You need to learn the tools. You need to make a lot of decisions and a lot of mistakes to learn what the process needs.

But again, when I talk about joy, I don’t mean pleasure. Writing can bring that, sure, but pleasure will come and go. Joy will come and stay, even when the writing is difficult.

There is no writing block only writer’s block.

It’s difficult to believe that it can be this simple. I still don’t trust it. And because we are afraid of simplicity we manage to make things insanely complicated.

So let me dream, just for a moment, about a process-oriented film industry.

An industry where a sales document is not a screenplay and a screenplay is not the movie. Where the screenplay is our main communication tool, the way we screenwriters get the movie out of our head into the heads of other people.

In a process-oriented industry we have to learn how to do this. How to communicate properly with the words we choose. This is not only about character and story, remember, it is about feeling, about mood, about soul. About life.

And everyone else has to learn how to read screenplays. How to extract what is important to their role but also to extract what feeling it evokes in them. We have to learn to be authentic in our writing and in our reading.

So, when writing, when reading, we will listen to the others, to the context, to all the tools we learned and especially to ourselves. We will decide each and every moment what the next steps will be, considering our values and the life in our story. And then we will follow this process, step by step.

We will discover that the screenplay format is not enough for communicating our ideas. We need to find more ways and they are already out there. Trailers, images from other movies, test scenes, music, short stories, small models made of wood and paper, table reads, simply just talking about it.

All of this and so much more can be part of our toolbox. We will find that following the writing process will eventually evolve into making the movie. And obviously, real world concerns are part of this. Allocating the production budget is part of it, bringing the movie to the audience is part of it. All of these concerns will not force themselves onto the process but they will be an integral part of it.

Is that too much to ask? For now, probably, yes. But one can dream.

Letting go

For now let me give you a personal answer to the question what we need to do. And it frightens me to the core:

We have to let go.

Let go of getting rich by making movies. Let go of wowing the audience. Let go of winning the Oscar or whatever award suits our imagined acceptance speech. We have to let go of pleasing the critics. We have to let go of having a career (whatever that means). Let go of doing this and only this with our lives. Let go of defining our self-value by the outcome of our projects. We have to let go and trust the process.

I don’t like this at all. My mind tells me that I am wrong or that something is missing. That I am not considering this or that. That we can’t simply change how we do stuff. That the system is built this way because it makes sense.

And I don’t blame my mind for being afraid. Letting go of who we think we are and who we think we want to be is the hardest thing we can do.

So I come back to this: I’m not letting go of writing. I am letting go of having success as a writer because I cannot control it. I can only control my process. The actions I take every day. The words I choose to fill my pages with.

And there it is, the life. Right there. It is not something I write towards, it is the writing itself. It is the process.

I am still afraid, every day. What if it won’t work. What if I’m wrong. What if I am failing again. What if. There seems to be a bottomless pit beneath me, a dark hole waiting to swallow me and my ideas, my creativity, my self-worth, my identity.

And yet, when I close my eyes. When I let the fear be what it is and call it by its name. When I stop overthinking and planning and plotting and when I start trusting the process. When everything is calm and simple.

Then I can feel the life. I can feel the joy. And I want to believe that letting go will be worth it.

Because if life isn’t worth it, if joy isn’t worth it, what is.