Why This is Good

Believability is a topic I frequently cover with writers, it’s a category I started putting in my critique notes because I so often found that writers had shoddily researched facts and things that just didn’t add up. When I read a screenplay, I instantly recognize details, facts, and information that seems incorrect, hard to believe or phony.

Considering the presence of the internet, there is truly no excuse for misinformation in a screenplay. It’s incredibly easy to check facts, find out how things really work, and get the right information on people, places, careers, laws, etc.

Films do ask audiences to suspend their disbelief. We have to believe that people can fly, can gain superpowers by being bit by a spider, can encounter both friendly and hostile extra-terrestrials, are able to rob banks or casinos with intricately developed schemes and extreme weaponry, that the hero can be shot at multiple times by dozens of attackers and emerge without a scratch, that guns never have to be reloaded and cars often explode into fireballs.

But in order for your audience to believe any of the crazy, far-fetched, or fantastical elements of your story are possible, in order for them to be able to focus on the story and accept the impossible elements of it, you must get all of your other facts straight. An alternate reality where superheroes exist must still have laws, consistent rules, and limitations that are clearly established and never broken. A heist or caper film can bend the rules by letting the characters use techniques or gadgets that don’t exist, but they must be things that we could tell would or could work and logically make sense in the world of the story. We can believe a superhero can fly if you establish that he can early in the story, and also show what he can’t do, what gives him his power and what his limitations and weaknesses are.

Be consistent and mindful of skeptics and make sure that everything you present is logical and makes sense within the context of the story. If toys can talk and move about, fine, we can believe that, but show us what they cannot do, what the rule of their world are and do not break them.

Editing your work is like stretching after a big workout. You’ve finished the hard part, the important part, you’ve run the marathon, lifted the weights, you’ve done the heavy stuff, the stuff that counts and that will give you clear, noticeable results. Then when you’re totally wiped out, wanting to move to the next part of your day, you remember that you should stretch.

Stretching, while relaxing, can also feel arduous and time-consuming when you’ve just powered through a big workout. Editing is the same way. You’ve completed your story, novel or screenplay, you have a tangible tribute to your work, you’ve created something out of nothing and made a story come to life. Now you must edit, which can feel so tedious after the rush of writing and creating freely.

But, like stretching, editing is just as important as the writing (or working out) itself. An unedited manuscript or screenplay is much more likely to go in the reject pile. As careful as you are when writing, you’re bound to make obvious, embarrassing errors that will peg you as an unprofessional amateur if not corrected. Like your body after you’ve tried and tested your muscles, your writing needs to be conditioned and improved before it will be ready to go out into the world as a representation of your talent and creativity.

So even though you feel that by writing “FADE OUT” or “THE END” you’ve crossed the finish line, go back do the boring work of editing your story and polishing it until it is ready to be read by others. If you’ve ever neglected to stretch after a strenuous workout you know that your body will suffer with sore muscles, knots, cramps and fatigue. Your writing is the same way, and a story left untouched after the first draft will be so bogged down with spelling, formatting and grammatical errors that it will never reach its full potential.

Words to avoid

When reading a screenplay, there are certain words I hate to see and will fervently cross out.  At the top of my list is “We see” (read why here), but there are many other words that slow down the read and muddle the meaning.

Screenwriting should be crisp, precise, exacting and clear. Certain words keep your writing from achieving this ideal and you should eliminate them from your screenwriting:

-Suddenly

“He suddenly stops, turns around…” Just say “He stops.” It means the same thing and is far more clear and appropriate for a screenplay. Suddenly is almost always redundant. Unless you say that someone does something slowly we will assume their action is immediate and therefore sudden. Don’t bother telling us a character suddenly does something-they should just do it.

-Begins or Starts to

“She begins to unpack her suitcase.” “He starts to pick up the broken pieces of glass.” There’s no need for these words. You will convey the exact same meaning if you simply write: “She unpacks her suitcase.” Or “He picks up the broken pieces of glass.”

There are a few times when you might need to use begins/starts, usually when the action is started and then stopped-“He starts to leave but stops when he hears her crying.” Even then, however, you would be better of more clearly defining the action, like this: “He takes a step toward the door but stops when he hears her crying.”

-Immediately

As with suddenly, immediately is almost always redundant. If the action is happening, it is happening immediately, in the present moment. Everything you write in your script’s action description is present tense and therefore happening in real time. “She immediately swerves her car around the pole.” means the same thing as “She swerves her car around the pole.” Both are happening now, both are immediate, but the second version is cleaner and clearer.

-Sort of

This is the least egregious of the words mentioned here, but I still hate seeing it. Screenwriting should be exacting, precise and simple, adding words that soften causes your writing to lose definition and impact. Your characters shouldn’t sort of do or look like something. They should just do it.

I usually give adaptations a ton of slack. I understand that changes must be made, characters must be eliminated, and stories must be condensed to transform them properly from the page to the screen. I hate when people haughtily declare “The book was better than the movie!” in an attempt to seem intellectually superior to those who didn’t read the book and only saw the movie, or those who may have read the book but lack the imagination to envision it on their own and require a film version to bring it to life for them. I often think film adaptations are better than the book or at least as good.

Eat Pray Love was certainly an exception. I read the book when it first came out and was fascinated by the gastronomical, spiritual and emotional journey chronicled in its pages. I drooled as I read over the incredible things consumed in Italy, was moved by the deep spiritual wisdom gained in India, and smiled happily as Elizabeth finally found love in Indonesia. The book was vivid and visual and sensual. It was not a fictional story but the true recollections and memoirs of a woman’s travels and insights. When I heard the book was being made into a film I thought it was going to be an enormous undertaking. I doubted the book would translate well to film. Despite the beautiful locations and the well recorded tactile memories it contained, I knew the story was too episodic, too real and too personal to work as a movie.

Julia Roberts did a great job, the cinematography was gorgeous, and she practically glowed due to the warmth of the lighting and the vibrant colors enveloping her in every scene. But, I have to critique this film based on Michael Hauge’s definition of what films are meant to do: elicit emotion. The film adaptation completely failed to elicit any emotion from me. The book was deeply emotional, moving as well as interesting. The film was just interesting. I was interested to see what they would change, what actors would be chosen to portray certain characters in the book, interested to see what the places described in the book would look like on screen. But I was not moved in the least. I didn’t like Elizabeth on screen and didn’t understand her the way I did in the book. I didn’t care about her journey, didn’t feel the depth of the experience and felt absolutely no satisfaction when she found love. It was empty and phony. I think this film is an example of why certain stories should remain in their original form. So in this case I’ll go along with all the wannabe intellectuals and say, with absolute conviction: “The book was better than the movie!”

I wanted to brag about one of the writers I have worked with, the talented Todd Bixler, who recently wrote to inform me that his script, Fantasy Dad, the story of a down-on-his luck quarterback who magically switches bodies with members of his Fantasy Football team, placed in the top 10% of this year’s Nicholl Fellowship Screenwriting Competition!

To make his achievement even more awesome, this year had the most entries in the history of the competition-over six thousand entries!

Congratulations Todd and best wishes for continued success!!

To sum up the main problem of all the first drafts and poorly executed attempts it would be this: instead of writing about a person who is trying to do something, they are about something happening to a hero.

These passive heroes then react by doing nothing, or worse, doing nothing but also spending a lot of time talking about what happened to them. The story only moves forward by the writer imposing more things upon the hero. The hero never gets up and takes action to make anything happen, but is a passive, reactive victim of circumstances.

These stories do not work but are extremely common. My theory is that many ideas are conceived by a writer thinking-“Wouldn’t it be interesting if ___ happened to ___?” And this is a good way to come up with an idea. Many successful, well-written movies begin this way. The key is that they only begin this way. Something happens to the hero early on-at the 10% point-but from then on the hero makes things happen and does things to move the story forward, rather than waiting around for things to happen to them.

Phil wakes up one morning to find that he is stuck repeating the same Groundhog Day. This happens to him, but from this point forward he takes action to win the love of Rita. He uses what has happened to him to actively pursue a new goal. In Up things start out happening to Carl-he loses his wife and is forced out of his home. But then he does things and makes changes-attaching balloons to his house and going on an adventure to fulfill Ellie’s dream.  In Legally Blonde, Elle is dumped-this happens to her in the beginning of the film, leaving her with her dreams of marrying the perfect guy. From this point on, Elle makes things happen-she gets into Harvard Law school, she gets the right internship, she wins the trust of the client and then the court case defending her.  In Shrek the fairytale creatures are relocated to his swamp, invading his land. This part happens to him, but going forward Shrek makes things happen, setting out to make things right, then going on a quest to find Princess Fiona.

All too often, I read scripts that are so dialogue heavy they read like a play with little stage direction. Rather than including important notes about the setting and action, the characters point things out via dialogue, as in a low budget or very old play in which the dialogue is used to note things that cannot be shown on stage.

This type of screenwriting doesn’t work for many reasons. It goes against the very nature of what a motion picture should be, it neglects to take advantage of what a film can do, and it can be preachy and boring when long speeches are inserted not because they make sense for the character and the story, but because the author wants to spout their own ideas and get some fundamental point across. Finally, it bothers me because I know it will hinder the scripts success. Films with page-long chunks of dialogue are rarely made, and scripts with page-long chunks of dialogue are rarely read.

It has been said that the measure of a good film is that you can still follow the story line without listening to the dialogue. This is a bit too purist for me, but the idea still has merit, and that is that films were in their infancy, and ever should remain, primarily visual and dynamic. The modern advances in filmmaking and special effects have only made this more true, as we can now do and show any and everything you can possibly imagine on screen, negating the need to talk about it instead.

While working on a critique, I constantly find myself crossing out chunks of action description and scribbling “ONLY what we see/hear!” as a note. I wanted to expand on the idea and explain why I give this advice, why it matters, and why it is important for screenwriters to understand.

If you are writing almost any other work-a fiction or non-fiction novel, an article, short story, blog post or poem, readers are going to see your words and read them as they are. The piece you are writing is the finished product and is going to be seen and experienced by your audience.

When you are writing a screenplay you are writing a part of the finished piece, one step that contributes to the production of a final product-the film. Although many people will read your screenplay it is not meant to be seen by audiences and it cannot contain information vital to understanding the story that cannot be translated visually into the finished product that will be a film.

Therefore, you must be careful to only include information that can be seen or heard by the audience watching the film, because they will not have your screenplay there in front of them to explain how a character feels, what they were doing the day before, how they are related to the other character.  Any and all pertinent information must be something the audience will be able to see or hear and thereby understand when they watch the film. If you put information in that cannot be shown on screen because it represents internal thoughts, feelings, or comments by you the omniscient narrator, the audience won’t know it is true and you’ll lose that information in the final product, the audience won’t get it and the story won’t be understood as a film in the same way it was as a script.

In screenwriting it is often better to show rather than tell. This is especially important when it comes to your characters. Who they are should be shown through your descriptions and the actions they take, rather than simply told.

As I explained in my post on What are you wearing? details such as clothing are often great indicators of what a character is like. Rather than saying someone is polished and sophisticated, describe their perfect manicure, expensive, brand new designer clothes, and elegant accessories. This advice goes beyond the initial description and the choice of clothes and physical details. You should show us everything you can about your characters through what they do or say, not what you tell us about them.

Since you are writing the blue print for a motion picture, it’s not just that style dictates you should show rather than tell, it’s necessary. If you don’t show what your characters are like, the audience, who isn’t reading your script, will never know. If you say in your description of a character that he is mean-spirited and cruel, how will someone watching the film know this is true? It must be shown to be true through the characters actions and dialogue. This is the only way to communicate with the audience what a character is like and it begins with the script.

I found this fun website: I Write Like, which analyzes a sample of your writing and tells you which author your style is most similar to. I’ve tried it on myself using everything from blog posts to story excerpts to journal entries and had writers as varied as James Joyce, Cory Doctorow, H.P. Lovecraft and Agatha Christie, depending on what writing sample I insert.  I don’t think it’s meant for screenwriting, every time I plugged parts of a screenplay in I got Chuck Palahniuk, but nevertheless, it’s fun and intriguing to see if your style reflects writers you admire or read frequently.

When you find your famous author soul mate, dig a little deeper into analyzing your style and why this site might have deemed it similar. Do you enjoy reading this author? Can you see how your style is similar? Have you read their works recently, or possibly around the time that you wrote the work being analyzed? Finding and crafting your own unique writing style is a process that often involves mimicry or authors you admire and enjoy. This is not plagiarism, just a natural result of the things you experience and take in being reflected in your writing. Try reading some new author you’ve never perused and see if any hints of their style show up in your writing.