Renowned Bollywood scriptwriter Shridhar Raghavan has no plans to direct films, unlike his brother director Sriram Raghavan. He’s happier writing and sharing screenwriting tips!
Popular films scripted by Shridhar include Khakee (2004) and Bluffmaster (2005). TV series written by him like Aahat and CID spanned over 640 episodes and 300 stories respectively. Shridhar’s last assignment was co-writing Yennai Arindhaal (2015) with Gautham Menon. He is currently in big demand and writing for Kunal Deshmukh, Rohan Sippy, Vikram Motwane, Saket Chaudhary, Puri Jagannadh (Telugu), Tigmanshu Dhulia and Rohit Dhawan.
Shridhar is also training and mentoring new writers for Trinity Pictures and Eros International. And luckily we got him to share his writing wisdom with readers of The Quint.
1. Choose Your Idea Like You Would Chose a Relationship
It is easy to fall in love with your ideas and think that you’re sitting on the next big script. But have you chosen the right idea? Remember, every idea you invest in is a year or two, or more, of your life. Choose your idea the way you would choose a relationship. We live in an age where millions of ideas bombard us every day. So here’s my tip:
Every morning when you read the newspaper, choose three ideas that you could turn into a film. It could be from the sports page, the front page or even the matrimonial section. Do this exercise daily. At the end of a month you’ve got 90 ideas. In a year, 1000! You don’t need to make any of them. But the aim is to train your mind to look for ideas everywhere, before you choose one to invest your energies in.
2. Read All You Can!
I don’t mean blogs, Facebook, Twitter and news feeds. I mean books. I have rarely come across a decent writer who somewhere wasn’t a voracious reader. Every genre you are into, stuff that seems new and cutting edge to you, has been worked on by fabulous writers a couple of hundred years ago. If you like adventure and you haven’t read Vernes, Dumas, RL Stevenson; if you like the Supernatural or the Sci Fi space and haven’t read HG Wells and MR James; or if you like Spy Stories and haven’t read Ambler, Maugham, Le Carre, you’re doing yourself a huge dis-service. For starters take some time out and read the Mahabharata. Read any of its translations or editions.
3. A Good Story Needs Indepth Research
Research doesn’t only mean looking something up Google and Wikipedia. It means meeting and engaging with people in real life. Writing a law, cop, army story? Meet real lawyers, judges, cops and people in the forces. How can you access them? Look around in your own building or colony. Chances are there’s a neighbour, a family friend, a classmate of an uncle or aunt who fits the bill. There may be some old retired gentleman in your colony who you might have ignored or find boring. But he could be a fund of stories. People are stories, people are characters, people are your research. The average rickshaw driver has more stories than most of us.
4. Make Every Film You Watch a Learning Experience
Every time you watch a film that doesn’t work for you, instead of moaning over Old Monk about how your magnum opus and genius talent isn’t getting a chance, think of what you would’ve done to fix that film. Even the worst material has some merit, an interesting premise perhaps or a stand-alone good character. This way every film becomes a learning experience, a training and an experience. This is one of the ways to hone your own skill and talent for telling a story.
5. Get Off the WWW When You Are Writing
Writing requires concentration and focus and the enemy is all around you, inches away from you, lurking in your cellphone. Every text, FB like, Twitter notification, email and Tinder pop up, or whatever you respond to is breaking that focus. We are in a permanent Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) mode. Even if it’s an hour or two a day, learn to go completely offline. Thats when you get a better shot at writing a coherent and focused story.
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