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The Screenwriter in Cyberspace |
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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