Basic Skills


2013 update. After decades of teaching screenwriting and reading several thousand student scripts, certain typical writing issues emerge. All beginners overwrite. They write action like a fiction writer. Their dialogue is too chatty and long. Economy, then, is an immediate issue with beginners.

Another is focus. Beginners have a hard time, in general, sticking to the story spine. They want to wander and make things too complex, thinking more like a novelist than a screenwriter. They must learn the elegance, the elegance, of focused storytelling.

Finally, a third major issue with beginners is poor visual storytelling. I use a David Mamet trick and get them to imagine their stories as silent films. How can you tell it with as little dialogue as possible? Now add what dialogue is necessary to reveal character or move the story forward.

Economy. Focus. Visual Storytelling. Broadly speaking, these are the areas where beginners need the most growth to become screenwriters.


There are certain basic skills that the screenwriter needs to master, regardless of whether s/he is a tree or forest person. Screenwriting is crisp, clean and focused writing, more about clear storytelling than impressive rhetoric. It takes many writers, particularly those coming from a fiction background, quite a while to learn such an "unwriterly" form of writing.

In this sense, screenwriting is a bit like writing poetry. A student of mine, Stacy Coffey, put it this way:

Like poetry, in screenwriting you are trying to show something with words, often with as few words as possible. While some poetry is wordy, many poems are more of a distillation of an idea or feeling. Really, thatıs screenwriting. A script distills a story down to itıs absolute essence. Everything not necessary must be boiled away, or chopped out with a gas powered chain saw, an image thatıs more appealing to my iconoclastic nature.

In screenwriting, the general rule is "less is more." Or, to put it another way (the Johnny Cochran School of Screenwriting), "When it doubt, leave it out!"

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule: and in screenwriting, the exceptions often are made in the interest of writing in an entertaining way, while still respecting the incredible economy of the form. A good example of this -- minimalist writing that still manages to convey an entertaining writing style -- is the opening of Max Adams' screenplay Excess Baggage (a script that got butchered in development and rewrites; this is from her original script). Example of Excess Baggage.

Examples of good screenwriting.

Examples of poor screenwriting.

Character Descriptions

The first time a character in your story is introduced, which always happens in an action element, the name is capitalized and the character is described. Almost without exception, beginning screenwriters "over-describe" the character.

Let me make my point by showing you the character introductions in a variety of scripts:

You do have some leeway here, as the examples (especially the last two) suggest, but please note that one of your options is not to write like a novelist or short story writer, providing detailed descriptions of the character.

In fact, "around 30" often is quite enough!

There's a cynical reason for the brevity of these character descriptions in screenplays. If you write, for example, something like "JOE is 25 and stands five-foot-two-and-half-inches in his bare feet. His black hair is parted in the middle and glistens from too much hair cream. He has a dimple in his chin which, when he smiles, is embraced by dimples on each cheek. His nose is too small for his face." And so on.

You write this - and then a producer reads it and thinks - "My God! I could never find an actor meeting that description!" And he passes.

Give the producer "around 30." He can handle that.

Of course this story, which gets passed around in screenwriting circles, couldn't possibly be true.

Next.

See my column Less Is More.

Descriptions of place

The same rhetorical economy is used in physical descriptions of place as in character descriptions. In his straight-forward and useful book, How to Write a Selling Screenplay, Christopher Keane gives a good "bad example" of physical description, which he rewrites into proper screenplay rhetoric:

"A Victorian house with great columns and a weedy front yard sits on a street filled with nicer homes. The paint is chipped, and the windows need washing. The front porch has steps missing, and an old rusted swing stands on the front lawn, which hasn't been moved in years. It's a disgusting place, from years of neglect, and a place badly in need of repair. The widow's walk looks as if it will tumble down any minute, and you'd swear there are bats flying around in the moonlight."

This is the way a fiction writer uses language, not a screenwriter. Keane rewrites this to:

"Once majestic, gone to seed, the house is bathed in eerie moonlight." [REF]

The slugline establishes it as a "DILAPIDATED VICTORIAN MANSION." Now that is taking out the chain saw for a rewrite! Which is why one of my Golden Rules of screenwriting is, The chain saw is your friend.

In the rhetoric of screenwriting, less is almost always more. But this creates a great challenge to the screenwright to select words carefully. Rely on a few well-chosen details, expressed economically, rather than filling the page with descriptive language.

Here are some sample descriptions of place from scripts:

See my column Less Is More.

Characterization

Describing a character is one thing; bringing the character to life is quite another. Creating "unforgettable characters" is one of the more important skills you have to learn.

Look back in your own life at people you know or have met that are "unforgettable". What makes them so? Their physical, emotional and verbal behavior, which adds up to their personality and character. So these behaviors are what you have to work with to create fully fleshed characters on the page.

Here are some tips for creating strong film characters:

Good actors can create "character" even from bad scripts - but don't use their skill as a crutch. On the contrary, write such strong characterizations that even poor actors can get the character across.

Your hero and antagonist(s) especially need to be drawn strongly.

Jennifer Lerch [REF] offers the following tips for creating strong characters that spring to life:

In Writing the Picture, Russin and Downs note that "Strong, well-developed characters who take action make the story. There may be a limited number of stories out there, but character is inexhaustible."

They quote from a 1923 screenwriting manual to reveal an age-old truth:

"Our ultimate purpose, as a photoplaywright, is to arouse the emotions of the audience -- to make them weep, to grip their hearts with pity, to thrill them, to make them laugh, and fear, and shed tears of joy. We strive to do these things by means of the actions of the people we create. We make our characters struggle and suffer and win and lose in their fight for happiness. Every act of every character may be regarded as an effect."

Action Scenes

Do not over-write action scenes and be sure to break up your action into small paragraphs - I suggest no more than five lines each - with a blank space between them, which adds white space to the page.

Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) has been especially successful in creating a flow of action driven by considerable white space on the page (from American Screenwriters):

"I've seen scripts where the first page looks like huge blocks of paragraphic text, which no one's even going to read. But on my favorite pages, the action is continuous and has a lot of short slug lines. The attention goes down rather than across. It flows, it reads as if you're following the action." [REF]

Let your verbs be the heavy hitters. Here is the conclusion to my Creative Screenwriting article, The Rhetoric of Action:

"...the writer must describe action with economy and imagery, bringing the scene to life on the page. For this goal, verbs are the heavy-hitters and simple sentence patterns, rhythmically broken up with compound or modifying elements, build the foundation of the narrative structure.

As the examples above show, within these guidelines a variety of personal writing styles is possible. You must find yours.

But always remember that you are writing for the SCREEN:

S implify!
C reate
R eadable
E fficient
E vocative
N arration"

Simplify! Create readable efficient evocative narration in your action scenes. Something else for your memory bank.

Examples.

The screenwriter's use of time.

An example of screenplay rhetoric.

Screenplay rhetoric v. fiction rhetoric.

Cyber Film School columns on action writing: Part One, Part Two.

Dialogue

Dialogue comes out of character. People from different backgrounds use a different vocabulary and speaking style. Your own dialogue should reflect this - and if it does, you will avoid yet another common mistake by beginners, which is having all characters sound alike.

Brad Mirman, the screenwriter of Knight Moves, Body of Evidence, Truth or Consequences N.M., and other movies, has a website on which he offers advice to new writers [URL]. Here's what he has to say about dialogue:

"One of the most blatant signs of a new writer is that all the characters speak the same. They have the same vocabulary, the same cadence to their speech. This is because the writer is writing all the characters as himself. He is not looking to the dark, light, happy, sad, male, female sides of himself. He is writing all the characters as the total assembled package of himself that he presents to the world."

Mirman goes on to compare how different people might say the same thing:

                          21 YEAR OLD MALE
	    Man, I squashed this cat on the way over.

                          23 YEAR OLD FEMALE
	    On the way here tonight... I think I ran 
	    over a cat.
			
                          57 YEAR OLD MALE
	    Hey, you know what?  Comin' here I flattened
	    some cat.

                          52 YEAR OLD FEMALE
	    Oh, dear, I believe I may have run over some
	    poor kitty. 
This exercise makes the point perfectly.

"All good dialogue," writes Tom Chiarella in Writing Dialogue, "has direction. It's a mishmash of need and desire on the part of an individual character weighted against the tension inherent in the gathering of more than one person." Most of all, he writes later, "Dialogue feeds through, and grows from, character."

In his book Stein on Writing, Sol Stein asks four questions of dialogue, establishing the conditions it must meet:

  1. "What is the purpose of the exchange? Does it begin or heighten an existing conflict"
  2. "Does it stimulate [our] curiosity?"
  3. "Does the exchange create tension?"
  4. "Does the dialogue build to a climax or a turn of events in the story or a change in the relationship of the speakers?" [REF]

Stein also notes how interesting dialogue is often oblique. He gives many examples in his book. One is this exchange: "How are you?" "Fine" is a boring, ordinary exchange. But when we change it to -- "How are you?" "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see you." -- we create interest because the person does not answer the question, which establishes subtext -- something more than meets the eye is going on here. Ordinary speech is boring, and good dialogue is carefully crafted to give spoken exchanges tension and mystery, direction and conflict.

A pejorative term for poor dialogue that has come into fashion is "on the nose" dialogue. Russin and Downs define it this way:

"When a character states exactly what he wants it's called on-the-nose dialogue. The character is speaking the subtext; there is no hidden meaning behind the words, no secret want, because everything is spelled out. But most interesting people, and certainly most interesting characters, don't do this." [REF].

Here are some things you can do to improve your skills at writing dialogue:

Another common mistake by beginners is weighing down dialogue with exposition, which are facts we need to know in order to understand the story.

"This reveals the amateur writer faster than anything I know," says William Kelley, who wrote Witness. "Exposition is necessary. There's no question about it. But, you do it as unobtrusively as you possibly can; and as you get on through a screenplay, go back through and wherever there's exposition see if you can possibly leave it out. Or have it appear in any other way. I mean, a newspaper, an old yellowed newspaper article, or a radio broadcast or some other thing in any way you can, try to get exposition out of your dialogue." [REF]

Communicating exposition is always a challenge and is best handled in ways that are natural (organic to the story) and don't draw attention to themselves.

For example, if we walk outside and see the street filled with parked cars from the 1930s, we know we are in a certain era. (Or we'll be surprised to learn something else - for example, that we are on a movie set!) This is visual exposition.

In contrast, a poor writer would have a character say something like, "I haven't been this angry since last year, in 1935!"

If you must present exposition in dialogue, do it as information that flows naturally out of another focus of the conversation. Try always to avoid having exposition shout out, "Look at me! I'm exposition and here are some things you need to know about!"

Think of yourself as a doctor and exposition as a pill. You want to give it to the reader/viewer without them realizing they're taking the medicine.

Examples.

Cyber Film School columns on dialogue: Part One, Part Two.

Common Beginner's Mistakes: the 5 Too's.

See my column Less Is More.

Scene Design

By scene design, I mean when a scene begins and when a scene ends. This is one of the major problems in the scripts of beginning screenwriters, to wit:

Starting a scene too early means that you start the scene long before the actual focus of the scene occurs. When you study scripts and movies, pay special attention to when scenes start - and see how they start in the middle of an action. Beginning writers take forever to "set up" an action when this is not necessary at all.

Similarly, once a scene has made its point, beginning screenwriters like to linger. Don't do this. Get in during the middle of an action and when the action communicates the point of the scene (and every scene must be there for a reason!), end the scene.

As a result of this efficiency, in most screenplays, most scenes are under a page in length. Scenes over three pages long are rare. This is not a rule but a general tendency, but there are clear exceptions in such character-driven movies as When Harry Met Sally and Good Will Hunting, which have more scenes over three pages long than most screenplays.

The point is, make sure your scenes are cut to the quick. In my own work, I double-check any scene over a page in length for its efficiency - and the longer the scene, the more carefully I check it for fat.

More about scene context.

Examples.

Cyber Film school columns on scene design: Part One, Part Two.

Subplots

Some people, such as John Jarvis of StoryCraft, frown upon subplots. However, I think that his objections are largely a semantic disagreement, rather than disagreement with substance, to what others like myself have to say in support of this parameter of screenwriting.

Subplots are secondary stories that give your script density and dimension. They may involve the hero, the villain, or other characters - but they always work best when they are related to the central action, which will always be the case when the hero is involved.

For example:

Antagonists, too, can be involved in a subplot that runs in counterpoint to the hero's journey. In Chinatown, Mrs. Mulray's subplot to escape with her child from her father (and the child's father) provides an intersection with Jake's search for the truth that leads to the story's climax - but along the way, we attach the wrong meaning to her story.

Subplots have beginning, middles and ends - but not all points along the journey have to be shown. We don't see the judges in Fargo ruling the painting contest, for example (we don't see them at all). This is a minor subplot that is used to "flesh out" the hero by giving us small but important details about her marriage.

The purpose of subplots is to enrich the story and broaden it into a more dense and layered reflection of the world of our script.

Pacing

Pacing is one of the more difficult skills to learn. Even experienced screenwriters must work to improve the pacing of their story.

Pacing is about the ebb and flow of the story, the sequence of scenes moving from those that are gripping and those that are quiet, the big sequences and their interruption by smaller sequences.

There are some guidelines to follow as you develop a sense of pacing your story:

Visual Elements

We are writers. And because we are writers it is easy to forget that movies are not about language, movies are about moving pictures.

Yes, the screenplay is "a literary form" - but it is a very specialized kind of literary form, as you should be aware of by now. A screenplay is a blueprint for a movie, and the blueprint is written in language. But this language, besides being hugely economical and "minimalist", also is best used when it suggests "moving pictures."

This is why the action element of your screenplay is so important. This is where the "visual elements" of your story are set down. As you complete a section of your script, flip through the pages and see how much consecutive action writing you have compared to dialogue writing. If all of your pages are filled with characters speaking, you are going to have a very "talky" movie.

In Boys from Brazil, there's no dialogue for the first five pages of script - and yet this is one of the more gripping hooks you'll ever want to see.

Imagine (again) that your script is a silent movie. That is, take all the dialogue out. The more your story still makes sense, the better.

There also is a practical reason to drive your story as much as possible with action/visible elements: the foreign market. Increasingly important to film producers, the foreign market loves visually driven stories because translation or subtitles are kept to a minimum.

Put "movies are moving pictures" right up there with "American movies are about what happens next" and "the chainsaw is your friend" as the axioms upon which your craft will rise.

Examples.

Big Sequences

Movies almost always have "big sequences" - those sustained moments when we are locked into the action. Almost always these are visually driven. In action/adventure movies they are easy to spot, but they exist in other movies as well.

Indeed, there are some commentators who believe that a good movie can be defined as a series of three or four big sequences linked together by a coherent story.

For example, consider the following big sequences:

So look for the big moments in your story - and don't be afraid to pull out all the stops when you describe them. Movies are an exaggeration of life and in your big sequences, more than elsewhere, you have the opportunity to turn loose and provide your audience with the thrills, the suspense, the tension, the hilarity, the horror, the grief, or the joy of a lifetime.

Most beginning writers are too timid. They write as if movie stories were "realistic." Movie stories are not realistic, they are entertaining and/or true - and both entertainment and truth are communicated by exaggeration.

The screenplay is a minimalist structure that is meticulously ordered - and this in itself makes it "un-lifelike."

Since you're not imitating life in the first place, don't be too timid to stretch in the other direction from time to time, in those high energy moments of your story called "big sequences."


MODULE 5: SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

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