Less is More
by Charles Deemer (May-5-2003)
I belong to the Johnny Cochran School of Screenwriting. "When in doubt,
leave it out!" Less is more.
Let's
look at how to put the philosophy of "less is more" into practice
when revising the draft of a screenplay. I'll focus on two areas where my
screenwriting students do most of their over-writing: in dialogue and in
description.
Less Dialogue
Often
you can tell at first glance if a scene has a dialogue problem. This is when a
series of long speeches are exchanged, each consistently taking up more than
several lines in the block of dialogue text, one character speaking for a dozen
lines, another answering for a dozen or so more, and so on, large blocks of
dialogue text filling the page.
When
I see this problem in a student script, after checking that in fact the
exchange is much too verbose, becoming repetitive and therefore boring, I often
copy the pages in order to do a classroom exercise. I pass out the scene as
originally written, select students to read the parts, and direct a staged
reading. We discuss it. Scenes based on large exchanges of dialogue are almost
always painfully slow, and the class quickly picks up on this. They identify
the common moments of repetition that happen in such scenes.
Then
I take out my red pen and very dramatically start crossing out lines. Over the
years I've learned that most fat in a long speech comes in the middle. So I
typically might cross out, in a 12-line speech, lines 3 through 11, leaving the
first, second and last -- and that's all. Perhaps I have to add a phrase to
make for a smooth transition.
I
continue this through the entire scene, crossing out half to two-thirds of the
dialogue. Then we replay the scene. The improvement is astounding! The pace
immediately quickens because now the exchanges are quick and snappy, not long
and verbose. There is no repetition to cause boredom.
The
class looks at me as if I'm a magician, able to fix a scene so dramatically by
doing nothing more than hacking out excess lines of dialogue. I'm not a
magician. I have experience. I've read many thousands of pages of verbose,
over-written dialogue. Often I can spot it half a room away.
The
key test to any line of dialogue in a script is this: what is lost if it is
removed? If precious little is lost, then cut it. Every line of dialogue
needs to move the story forward in a fresh way or make a point about character
that we don't already know. Verbosity is your enemy. Less is more.
Less Description
Here
is the description of Nash's fantasy CIA connection in A Beautiful Mind: "Fine dark suit. Thin tie. WILLIAM
PARCHER." This is all the
character description we get!
Here
is how we meet the title character in Citizen
Ruth: "She is around 30." No more.
Clarice
Starling in Silence of the Lambs:
"Trim, very pretty, mid-20s." That's it. The antagonist, however,
gets more detail because he is more unusual: "A face so long out of the
sun, it seems almost leached -- except for the glittering eyes, and the wet red
mouth."
Descriptions
of place get no more detail than descriptions of character.
From
Sling Blade: "It's an
all-American girls room. Everything is pink. There are stuffed animals
everywhere and posters of pop idols."
From
The Ice Storm: "A large
New England Colonial, with a few modern additions and touches."
From
Good Will Hunting: "The
bar is dirty, more than a little run down."
None
of these comes close to the long, verbose descriptions of character and place
that my students love to write, especially those who come from a background in
fiction. None of this detail is appropriate in a screenplay. Why? For one
hugely important reason. Understand this and you will solve your tendency to
over-write description.
The
screenwriter is a collaborator. He or she is not the costume designer. He or
she is not the set designer. A screenwriter writes a "fine dark suit"
and lets the costume designer pick the color, writes "a thin tie" and
lets the costume designer select the details. A screenwriter writes
"stuffed animals everywhere and posters of pop idols," letting the
set designer select which animals
and which pop idols belong
on the set.
Write
with an awareness that you are a collaborator. Write so it doesn't sound like
you are telling the costume designer and the set designer how to do their jobs.
Your job is to give them the
appropriate clues so they
can do their job in a way consistent with the context of the story.
The Writing and the Story
A
screenplay is a blueprint for a movie. It should be written accordingly, lean
and mean, in a style that lets the story flow quickly, vertically, down the
page. Your job is not to let the writing get in the way of the story.
Think
about that. What an odd thing to tell a writer! Don't let the writing get in the way of the story. We are used
to thinking about "writing" the
way a novelist thinks about it, as the every essence of the story, literary
style being everything. Screenwriting style is more subtle and more poetic
because there are far less literary tools to use.
When
beginning screenwriters over-write, they let their writing get in the way of
the story. Excess verbiage becomes camouflage, hiding story movement, and
becomes misdirection from the spine of the story,
which needs to be abundantly clear, quickly, and throughout the script.
Don't
let this happen in your script. Make your writing serve your story because a
producer isn't going to buy your writing, he or she's going to buy your story.
"When
in doubt, leave it out!" Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.
Charles Deemer's new book about
screenwriting will be released in June. It is called What Happens
Next? An Introduction to Screenwriting.
He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University and online at Writers on the Web. He is the
author of an electronic screenwriting tutorial, Screenwright.
"Less is
More" Copyright ©
2003 Charles Deemer. All Rights Reserved.