“You can’t handle the truth!”

“If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

“Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.”

All of these lines came from the pen of Aaron Sorkin, one of the most famous screenwriters of our time. Sorkin wrote the film scripts for A Few Good Men, The Social Network, Steve Jobs, Moneyball, and The American President as well as the tv series The Newsroom, Sports Night, and The West Wing.

I recently watched Sorkin’s MasterClass on screenwriting. His class is about screenwriting in particular, but many of his tips are applicable to fiction and nonfiction writing as well.

If you haven’t yet spent the $180/year for a MasterClass subscription, you can find Sorkin’s 13 best tips here:

1. Create a strong intention and obstacle

“What I need before I can do anything is an intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something. Something’s standing in their way of getting it…They’ve got to really want it bad, and whatever is standing in their way has gotta be formidable.” -Aaron Sorkin

Sorkin returns to this idea throughout the entire MasterClass. He says that all good stories are driven by intention and obstacle. Those two components give your audience a reason to care about the story. They’re what separate an edge-of-the-seat thrill ride from one of your grandpa’s long yarns.

Sorkin offers this example: let’s say you want to write about a recent cross-country road trip you took with some friends. You don’t have a story unless you develop an intention and obstacle: who wants what and what’s standing in their way?

For instance, does someone need to get somewhere by a certain date (like Doug in The Hangover) or return something to someone (like Harry and Lloyd in Dumb & Dumber)? “Once you have that intention and obstacle, now, like a clothesline, you can start hanging those cool stories from the real trip across the country,” says Sorkin.

Your readers want conflict. It’s your job to give it to them. Turn up the stakes.

2. Don’t write characters like real people

“Believe it or not, the properties of characters and the properties of people have very little to do with each other. I know it seems like the goal should be to have a character be as human as possible…that’s not the goal — or at least not my goal.” -Aaron Sorkin

Sorkin is known for writing witty dialogue — characters bantering back and forth with impressive one-liners. But people don’t really talk like that, and Sorkin knows that.

He believes that a writer’s job is to create a story that is enjoyable for the audience, and standard dialogue you’d overhear at a Starbucks often doesn’t fit the bill. That’s why Sorkin advises writers to go against the common advice to write “realistic characters.”

Create compelling characters. When faced with the decision of whether to make a character more interesting or more believable, opt for the former.

3. Find the more important truth

“If you’re a writer, you have an inner moral compass (if you’re writing nonfiction). And you have to judge for yourself what’s the more important truth because you’re going to be lying almost constantly during this. You have to. People don’t speak in dialogue. People’s lives don’t play out in a series of scenes that form a narrative…You have to decide: is this lie that I’m telling unfair somehow to this person? Am I doing damage to the concept of truth in general?” -Aaron Sorkin

Any form of communication (writing, public speaking, etc.) forces tradeoff decisions between accuracy and simplicity. The only way to be 100 percent accurate is to provide an overabundance of information. If you want to convey an idea simply, you must sacrifice accuracy for understanding. The question is: how much accuracy should you sacrifice?

Maybe you want to write about the lessons you learned in your first job. If you want to cram that into a three-minute Medium article, you’ll need to find the innermost core of your story and sacrifice a ton of details. However, if you’re going to write a 50,000-word book on the same topic, you can offer much more explanation.

Prune as many of the excess details as possible. Sometimes this means giving the explanation that is 90 percent correct in half the amount of words. Simplify complexity while remaining true to your story and your characters.

4. Give your villains a fair shake

“If I’m writing a character who maybe has the qualities of an anti-hero who isn’t so easy to like, I can’t judge them. I have to write them as if they’re making their case to God why they should be allowed into heaven…I have to find what it is about them that’s like me and write from that point of view.” -Aaron Sorkin

No one is entirely good or entirely evil. Strong writing paints in shades of gray rather than black and white. Think about characters like Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series, Walter White in Breaking Bad, or Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Readers and viewers can easily identify the positive and negative traits of those fictional and nonfictional characters.

Your job as a writer is to give everyone a fair shake. Learn what drives each character. Characters with strong intentions who face large obstacles often resort to immoral means to get their way, which makes those characters even more interesting.

5. Conduct exploratory research

“You’ll find at the end of all of it that 90 percent of the research didn’t make it into the movie, but you needed to do it anyway.” -Aaron Sorkin

Almost every form of writing requires research. If you’re writing a novel set in London, you may need to research street names and the best bars for picking up a date. For nonfiction, you may need to research the details of someone’s life or the historical background for a military battle.

Sorkin distinguishes two forms of research:

1. Nuts and bolts — Tiny factual details that anyone can look up
2. Exploratory info —Studying the world that surrounds your story

He says nuts and bolts research can be outsourced (Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a research assistant?), but you must conduct exploratory research on your own because you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.

Hemingway believed that a writer’s knowledge of a topic would shine beyond the words they put on the page. Prove him right. Immerse yourself in the world of whatever story you’re writing. Read articles, books, and academic papers about it. Become a true expert on your topic.

6. Show yourself grace during the pre-work phase

“From the moment I say I’m starting until the moment I deliver it is usually about 18–24 months on a screenplay. But most of that time is spent trying to think of it and being depressed.” -Aaron Sorkin

Sorkin spends about one year in pre-work before he begins writing a screenplay. He spends that time reading about his topic, interviewing people, and conducting exploratory research. He calls it his “bulking up” phase.

“One of the mentally challenging parts of being a [screenwriter] is that most days you don’t write,” says Sorkin. During his pre-work, Sorkin spends a lot of time banging his head against the wall because he’s still trying to figure out what angle to take for the story.

Regardless of what you’re writing, you need to learn to show yourself grace. Many days will be a struggle. If that’s true for an icon like Sorkin, it will undoubtedly be true for you and me. Be patient. Keep chipping away.