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The Screenwriter in Cyberspace
By Charles Deemer

Column #24: The Most Common Screenwriting Mistakes

When you teach screenwriting as I do, and read over 100 student scripts a year, it doesn't take long before you get a sense of the kinds of mistakes most student screenwriters make in the beginning. Here is my summary of the most important of them.

Lack of Story Clarity

It's astounding how many of my students cannot give a brief, focused answer to the question, "What is your story about?" Usually the question elicits rambling monologues that go on forever. By the end of them, I know less about the story than when I asked the question.

Story clarity is essential in a screenplay. If the story has no focus, no story spine, on which to hang all the episodes and actions along the way, then it's far too easy for the reader/audience to get lost, far too easy to see the energy of the story dissipate rather than beam into one, intense direction for a singular effect.

A good way to test your story clarity is with a logline. There really are two uses of loglines: for pitching the story after it is written, which is the common use. But I also use loglines in my classes as a writer's tool. A logline can be a guide and reminder of the central focus of the story. "An estranged husband cross-dresses as a nanny in order to visit his children." That's a good logline. "A lonely boy befriends a stranded alien and rescues him from government capture so he can return home." There's another. Can you write as succinct a logline for your own story? If you have story clarity, you should be able to.

"May I get you a drink?": The Waiter Syndrome, or Poor Scene Design

Scene design is about when scenes begin and when scenes end. Beginning writers, and a lot of pro's in their early drafts, begin scenes too soon and end scenes too late.

Let's look at an example. I use The Birdcage in class because Elaine May's script has excellent scene design. There's a moment when Armand and his son are wondering how to pass themselves off as a normal family for the visit of the conservative future in-laws. Armand gets the idea of drafting the boy's real mother, long out of the picture, to pose as the mother of the family. That's the action. It's presented this way: Armand makes the suggestion and the son replies, Wow, do you think she'd really do it? The cut is to the mother already on the phone, saying, Armand! It's been years!

A beginning writer not only would continue the conversation between father and son -- Of course she would; Really?; Why not? etc. -- but would prolong the scene to show Armand finding a phone booth, looking up a number, dialing, the mother's secretary answers, and so on. May's cut is from the meat of the scene to the middle of the response.

Study movies for their scene transitions. You can learn a lot about good, efficient design.

Chat, chat, chat, ho-hum: Pointless dialogue

Many of my screenwriting students would be better off in a playwriting class. They write long, talky scenes more suited to the stage, where dialogue is the primary tool for story exposition and movement. In film, however, dialogue is not the primary tool -- visual storytelling is.

I recently showed E.T. to my University screenwriting class. Look at that movie again and notice how much of the story is told without dialogue. In fact, no important dramatic moments in that movie are dialogue scenes. Dialogue is a kind of filler between the visual scenes, giving us details of story and character that we need to expand the more essential strokes of the images.

There's an easy way to test dialogue in a script. Cut it and see what is lost. If nothing is lost, leave it out!

Remember, dialogue in a screenplay must move the story forward or reveal character -- and preferably both at the same time. Take out the chain saw and rid your script of all idle chit chat.

Director wannabes

Director wannabes are always writing about what the camera is doing. We see this and we see that. In the contemporary screenplay, the writer does not direct the camera in any way. If you are telling the audience a particular way it sees a scene, then you are being a director. Don't be.

So how do you tell a story visually without directing the camera? Easily. You include the images important to the story but not the particular angles at which these images are seen.

There are several ways to isolate important images in your storytelling. One is to isolate them in separate paragraphs, which also opens up your script to include a lot of white space. And just your choice of detail suggests images that are important. For example, in the script to E.T. early on, mention is made that the arriving humans are anonymous and that one is known by his dangling keys. On film, this translated to shots of legs and feet -- and the keys. The writer wrote the images, and the director responded.

So you can tell the story visually without directing the camera, and that's what you should do.

Novelist wannabes

Many writers are "too good" for screenwriting, or so they think. That is, they are too much in love with rich, flowery prose for the crisp, lean rhetoric of screenwriting. The screenplay should not be regarded as a literary form to be read so much as a blueprint for a movie and a business proposal for a very expensive collaboration.

The trend in screenwriting rhetoric has been toward leaner and crisper writing, and if you are in love with language so much that you think ten words are better than one word any time, then screenwriting is probably not for you.

What happened to the protagonist?

In many student scripts, somewhere in the middle the main character gets lost. Some other character becomes more interesting and begins to carry the story. Maybe it's the antagonist, or a friend (helper) of the protagonist, but the main character disappears for pages and pages. This is a clear red flag that something has gone wrong with the focus of the story.

One of the reasons I like screenwriting software (besides ease of format) is for the reports they generate. I like to look at these reports and see how many pages of script I have without the presence of the protagonist. More than three, and I double-check focus because that much time away from the main character worries me.

Think of your protagonist as played by a superstar with a huge ego. Every moment the superstar is not on screen is a moment you must defend. You will find yourself doing this as infrequently as possible.

In other words, since your story is about the main character, s/he should be on screen as often as possible.

Is this all there is?

What does your story add up to? What has changed in the life of the main character as a result of experiencing the story? And what does the audience walk out of the theater with?

Movies are bigger than life. Many beginning screenwriters are too concerned about "being real" to understand that movies actually are not real: they are bigger than life. That's why we go to them!

So a lot of student scripts get this comment from me: "Crank it up!" Make in larger, more consequential, make it matter more to the hero and to us. Make the stakes bigger, the threats bigger, the payoff bigger. Crank it up.

Movies are bigger than life. Never forget that -- and tell your story accordingly.

These are some of the common mistakes my students make over and over again. In my first draft, I still make a lot of them myself. It's okay to make them -- as long as we rewrite to correct them. Writing is a process, and the key to this process is being able to recognize your own mistakes so you can go back and correct them.

Everyone makes mistakes. It's a natural part of the process of writing. What separates the pro's from the amateurs is the ability to go back and rewrite things right.

--Charles Deemer



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Originally appeared at the Hollywood Network.