I spent a while on the phone with a good friend who is confused and tearful because of a learning process she’s going through. In acquiring the skills she wants to help her develop as a person and succeed in the next chapter of her professional life, she’s increasingly aware of a tension between how she feels, and how she thinks she’s supposed to feel. According, that is, to the stuff she’s learning. To which there’s an answer, of course…the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, theory works. In practice, it doesn’t.

As in life, so in screenplays. Having waded through Syd Field and Robert McKee and Phil Parker and concluding that John Truby offers the most useful frameworks for tackling scriptwriting, I’m increasingly inclined to ignore the guidance of such gurus and set out in pursuit of my own truths.

Of course, I have a sound theoretical basis for such a stance. You may or may not be familiar with Alfred Korzybski. He was a very smart fellow who through studying the slippage between reality and representations of it coined the phrase ‘The map is not the territory’. Meaning, among other things, that words are not which they describe, and that however accurate a map is, it will inevitably miss details that would be pertinent to some observer or other.

As all this relates to screenwriting, Korzybski’s notion could be expressed thus: ‘the script is not the film’. How could it be? A script is a thing of around 100 pages. A film exists in time, and supposedly that time is linked to the number of those pages. I am less convinced of that linkage than I ever was, especially as I write my current script. After the opening sequence, the action moves to a mental hospital. The protagonist is passive, the camera showing us what he sees from a wheelchair as he’s pushed from the back of an ambulance into the lobby, and from there up to his ward. The journey happens in real time, and I know in my head that it takes longer than the pagecount suggests it should. The same applies to other sequences in the script, which are written concisely but I know to have the intended effect would take a longer time on screen.

That’s just one example of the disconnect between what’s on the page and what I hope to see on a screen one day. It’s also impossible to get across just how I want the sound design of the film to work. When the protagonist is in hospital, the building is having work done on it, and he interprets the sound of the construction as his psyche being drilled into and restored. I can point to that, but I know my description is only a very binary version of what I want to see and hear — if the effect is achieved as I’d like it to be, it will be a synaesthetic link between what the character perceives and what it means to him.

Structure is another area that’s mutable, never mind what McKee and the others say. Oh, there has to be a structure, there’s no doubting it. But it should flow from the natural shape of the story, rather than being a cookie cutter to pour a story into. Some stories are cookie shaped, and that’s fine. Not all of them are. And remember how arbitrary some of this stuff is — structure for tv writers is determined in large part by whether there are ad breaks in the show you’re writing. A straightforward commercial consideration dictates how you exercise your craft. Simple as.

Really, all structure is about is ensuring that the turning points in your story work effectively and build up to a satisfactory resolution. There may be three acts. But why not five? Or instead shape your story into ten minute sequences. There’s a way that will work for your story. Mine too. And my increasing suspicion is that the longer writers dwell on the formalities of all this, the less creating they get round to.

I’m reminded of an acquaintance, a talented musician who somehow never gets round to creating any actual music. First it was because he needed a bass guitar. Then because he needed a five string one. Then because he lacked home recording equipment. Finally, he has a studio of his own, with more kit than The Beatles had. And hasn’t produced a sound.