Four Years Into Tencent's Young Screenwriters Competition, Working Screenwriters Give Entrants Some Blunt Advice

"Talking a bunch of concepts — market this, IP that — that's empty stuff. For creators, that's not our territory."

On June 19, the fourth edition of Tencent's Young Screenwriters Competition opened.

According to the organizers, the competition — it is called NEXT IDEA, and we'll refer to it below as the Competition — was first held in 2015. It has strategic partnerships with the China Film Directors' Guild's Qingcong Program and with the FIRST Youth Film Festival in Xining. It solicits original Chinese-language screenplays from people aged 16 to 35, and judges them on two things: literary merit and market potential.

Support programs for young directors and screenwriters keep multiplying. One day before this Competition was announced, Banana Pictures, part of Wang Sicong's Banana Project, unveiled its own plan to find new screenwriters, with a prize pool of 6.3 million yuan. Unlike Banana Pictures, which positions itself around commercial films, the Competition sets no limits on genre, and university students are a particular focus.

This year the Competition opened three tracks at once: a designated arts-academies track (seven schools — the Beijing Film Academy, the Central Academy of Drama, the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the Communication University of China, the Nanjing University of the Arts, the Yunnan Arts University, and Hong Kong Baptist University); a designated comprehensive-universities track (the University of Macau, Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Chongqing University, Fudan University, Jilin University, Nanjing University, Tsinghua University, Shanghai University, Wuhan University, Xiamen University, the University of Hong Kong, Zhejiang University, Renmin University of China, and the Chinese National Academy of Arts); and a main track.

Martin, who runs the Competition, said: "We've found that different schools have different characteristics. A student who has come up through four years of dramatic literature writes a very different script from a student at Tsinghua University, and among the four or five hundred entrants we've had in past years, some schools clearly turn out higher-quality work — so we give them the better treatment of a dedicated track. That's one of our guiding ideas."

In 2016 the Competition added the NI Young Screenwriters Workshop and the NI Young Screenplay Showcase. The top 30 screenwriters get coaching from professional screenwriters, and Tencent recommends the top 10 scripts to film and TV companies. Shu Ping, screenwriter of Let the Bullets Fly and Devils on the Doorstep; Wang Hongwei, screenwriter of Crazy Racer and No Man's Land; Angie Chai, producer and director of Meteor Garden; and Wu Bai, producer of Day and Night, have all taught at past workshops. Last year NI received 811 scripts.

The organizers have not yet announced this year's mentors, because they are still working out schedules; so far only Angie Chai is confirmed.

At the press conference, Song Li, who also runs the Competition, described something that puzzles her about the program: three editions in, NI's conversion rate for the scripts themselves is still low. "Maybe one passage in a script, or the core of one story, is interesting, but as a whole it can't be used." The conversion rate for people, by contrast, is high — nearly two-thirds of each year's top 30 were not working in film and TV beforehand, and afterward almost all of them enter the industry.

"I honestly find this puzzling. Because when we started this project, what we hoped would convert was the work," Song Li said.

At a salon after the press conference, eight guests discussed young screenwriters: Shu Ping, screenwriter of Let the Bullets Fly; Wang Hongwei, screenwriter of Crazy Racer; Wu Bai, producer of Day and Night; Yin Hong, professor at Tsinghua University's School of Journalism and Communication; Wu Guanping, head of the Film Studies Department at the Beijing Film Academy; Ding Yaping, director of the Institute of Film and Television Art at the Chinese National Academy of Arts; Gu Xiaobai, screenwriter of Under the Hawthorn Tree; and Ren Jiying, director of Tencent Pictures' Content Creativity Center.

Below are some excerpts

Topic: Young directors and screenwriters have drawn a lot of attention in recent years, but much of their work hasn't done well. Beyond the market, the financiers and the marketing and distribution, what is going on with the young creators themselves?

Wu Bai: I've read a lot of scripts, and honestly, once they're shot they're just so-so. Shooting them wastes time, writing them wastes time, and when you go to sell them the platforms buy without much enthusiasm either way. A lot of this goes back to the very beginning of the writing. I think nobody considers the social angle; they think only about commerce. How do you write something that sells, how do you write it so it has so-called internet feel, or so it supposedly touches the market and audiences will like it — feeding them sugar, spoon-feeding them, that sort of thing. I think the starting point is wrong, so what comes out is wrong too, because more and more I sense that the ideas people come up with are fake ideas, not genuinely good ideas for film and television. That's the most basic reason. There's also no respect for industrialization — and by industrialization I mean process, not the mature Hollywood kind. With an ordinary script, people tell you that you need to go and experience life. Honestly, I think there are plenty of great Hollywood scripts nobody else could have written — only that one screenwriter could write it. If you're going to write, write something else, something nobody can copy, something that can't be replaced. A lot of our scripts are entirely replaceable, endlessly replaceable: change the names, change the setting, and it's a different script.

The other thing is that people aren't clear enough about the social dimension either — what exactly you are writing this for. That is the most original driving force of creation. If you can't find it, all that's left is commerce, and then you're just chasing money. Money is only a thing: it has value because we attach value to it, and none if we don't; it depends on how you look at it. If that's your starting point, your work naturally comes out hollow — it can't be otherwise. You still have to think it through starting from life: why do you want to write this, who do you want to see it, why do you want them to see it. Of course you should express yourself, but ask whether what you're expressing is mostly for the audience. There is definitely something wrong with the creators themselves, especially with young creators now. The problem is big, and it's serious.

Wang Hongwei: Just today, about an hour ago, I saw this: this morning at the Shanghai International Film Festival there was another forum on young filmmakers, and at that forum a teacher argued that we shouldn't use the word "support" for young directors, we should use the word "accompany." That seems to have ended up as the forum's guiding theme. I strongly disagree, and here is why: if a young filmmaker's work doesn't get an adequate response in the market, and you then go and blame the market, blame the audience, that's a particularly naive piece of evasion and rationalization. The market and the audience are always in a relationship with the work; that isn't something you can change through some kind of instruction or some kind of rule. A young creator's responsibility is to turn things around with good work of their own, not simply to hand out blame. So faced with a situation like this, I think those of us who have been through it carry more responsibility toward young filmmakers, and that responsibility absolutely cannot be mere accompaniment. It should be real help, help with real effort and real time in it. If you aren't qualified to support them, or don't have the ability to support them, then fine, all you can do is accompany them — however these kids grope their way forward, you walk along beside them. I find that a bit baffling.

What young directors — and all young screenwriters and young filmmakers — are missing right now, in these quiet support programs, isn't accompaniment. What's missing is exactly the deeper, more concrete kind of help you get from something like the NEXT IDEA mentor group: really a master training an apprentice, really an experienced hand passing on what he knows to those coming up behind him. Only that can help them quickly — not adapt to the market, exactly, but understand the market. In the end our goal might be to change the market, even to lead the audience, and that is what film means, whether as a cultural product or as a work.

Wu Guanping: I'm not very willing to pick faults in young people. The earliest support program I worked on was in 2005, when I was at the Film Association, on Chinese Youth Images — back then nobody was supporting this kind of thing, and now support programs for young talent are everywhere. What that shows isn't that something has gone wrong with young people. It's that in this blind, restless climate, which treats young people as cheap labor, we are sometimes the ones stifling the creativity in them. If there's a problem, the problem may be our own restlessness, and the things in young people actually need us to find them and to escort what's valuable in their work safely forward. I think that may be the most important thing. Including the funding I mentioned a moment ago — that's something only a big player like Tencent can afford. At any smaller scale it really can't be done.

Topic: Advice for young screenwriters

Shu Ping: Let me tell you how I became a screenwriter. In college I studied electrical automation, and later, because I loved literature, I wrote fiction. Then in 1995 Zhang Yimou came looking for me. Honestly, I became a screenwriter in a daze; I hadn't designed it that way or set out down this road on purpose. From then on I worked with Jiang Wen, and with a lot of other directors, and started down a road of no return. The literature I used to love fell further and further behind. That said, my experience isn't typical — it's a fairly unusual one. But come back to the work itself and it's all writing stories; that part is the same, no great difference. On creativity, I think that if a person wants to accomplish something in a given field, especially in screenwriting or fiction or storytelling, there are at least three conditions.

First, you need talent — that instinct, that intuition. Heaven gives it to you; there's nothing you can do about it. Second, you need the corresponding experience of life; you have to have it. A seventeen- or eighteen-year-old simply cannot write a great work. Third, against the vast sweep of world culture you need to read widely, compare across time and across cultures, and work out where you stand.

Coming back to it, stories only come in two kinds: original stories and adapted stories. For film I lean toward adapted stories, because there you have a foundation first and then rework it. If you're a genius you can create your own stories and do original work — someone like Quentin Tarantino is fairly original in that sense. Once you have these conditions, I think you know in your own heart whether what you've written is any good; you don't need other people going overboard evaluating this and that for you. The real test of whether what you've written is good is to tell it to the people around you and see whether they're willing to pay to hear your story. Talking a bunch of concepts — market this, IP that — that's empty stuff. For creators, that's not our territory.

Back when I wrote fiction, publishing a novel was hard. You had to get past magazine editors, past the publisher; there were a lot of gates in the way, and if you got through, the thing was at least a 50 out of 100. That threshold is much lower now. There's the internet, there are all kinds of platforms, and getting your own voice out is easy. If you have a good story it's very easy to be found — and there's a good platform like Tencent, too. If I'd had a platform like this back then, how happy I would have been. I didn't. So, all things considered, when you write your own story you have to get the flame burning, and don't let too many concepts box you in. You need spirit in it, something felt, whether or not you're writing about yourself; imagination and inventiveness are good things. As for making art, I've said this to others before: artists are heaven's favorites. It isn't something just anyone can do, only a handful of people can, and it's quite hard. I hope that among the young people here today, some of heaven's favorites will appear.

Yin Hong: My first reaction is that I strongly agree with what they've said. Being young isn't wrong — youth is always the best advantage there is. But it would be wrong for every young person to want to be a screenwriter. More films aren't better, more scripts aren't better. Creative work as a profession takes talent, and that isn't something everyone can fix through diligence or effort. As I understand it, having read this many scripts, that talent comes down to just a few things.

The first talent is the ability to find what's distinctive in life and what's distinctive about a subject. I see a lot of scripts now that are utterly ordinary — anyone could write them, TV dramas broadcast them every day — so why are you writing this particular one? The talent lies in whether you can find what's distinctive in life, whether you have the ability to find a distinctive subject. This is quite crucial. Most stories, once they're in your hands, feel worthless. Any child can tell a story, but finding a distinctive story, a distinctive subject, a distinctive angle — that ability is talent.

Being able to find a distinctive story isn't enough on its own. Second, you have to find the shared emotional point where human nature connects. That's another kind of talent. I call it seeking difference and finding sameness. You need to find the most universal emotional focus. Human nature really is interconnected, and this comes up often in our scripts: a story is told in a complicated way, using every technique there is, but you can't tell where it's supposed to move you. I helped plan Forever Young; the storytelling wasn't complicated, but every strand had its own distinctiveness, and every strand could find a shared emotional point. It isn't about how complex the dramatic technique is; it's about whether the distinctive story and the shared emotion can be joined better… These days I sometimes look at what young people write and it's more formulaic than what the older writers produce. Take the love-story formula — people fall in love every day, so how is it more formulaic than the old writers? Two bicycles collide, and the two of them fall in love. It looks like somebody else's script — and it shows how weak your own ability to observe life is. I think both of these things matter. To get there, though, young people who want to write scripts have to observe life: read ten thousand books, travel ten thousand miles, understand ten thousand kinds of people, and feel the emotions shared across ten thousand kinds of people. People who are too young probably all have some problem or other, starting with reading too little. Reading really can help a person understand different lives and different worlds, and find different angles of observation. Those three sayings capture something very important. Good screenwriters all love reading, love experiencing different lives with people, love getting to know different people's inner worlds and finding a way to connect. Only if they can do that will these young screenwriters really keep developing.

Gu Xiaobai: If there is a problem, it may be that they don't yet have enough experience and accumulation to produce a distinctive story. Distinctive means you already know what isn't distinctive, so you can make the comparison. A lot of people think what they've written is already very distinctive, but set it in the long river of film history and somebody has already written it. That's a little laughable. But this is something you get to as you grow older.

Young people do have one advantage: they understand better that audiences are getting younger and younger, and some of their tastes may line up with the audience's. But that's only an advantage from a product standpoint. For me, more as a creator, to some degree you still have to fight with yourself every day. By fight I mean holding a whip and holding a knife, wrestling and arguing with yourself; only slowly, that way, do you find the subject you're really good at. Over a lifetime a creator can write at most one or two subjects, and that is your real distinctiveness. Because that subject is probably the thing that troubles you most, that causes you the most pain, that makes you feel you have to use the work to talk with yourself, to fight with yourself and make peace — that's the channel. Only that way can you write a screenplay, or a film, that belongs to you alone as a screenwriter or a director. A lot of young screenwriters today are probably short at exactly this level. They love slapping on labels: sweet, wide-eyed, kisses and hugs and lifting each other in the air. They think, isn't this how it's supposed to go, and they never go on to ask what happens next. Sure, it can be sweet, there can be kisses and hugs and lifting each other in the air. But what's behind that — that's what you need to pay attention to. You really have to read a lot of books and watch a lot of films. Otherwise you'll never be distinctive.

Cover image: Douban Movie