Why This is Good

To illustrate what I’ve been discussing in the last few posts on how description in a novel versus a screenplay can differ, I’ve taken descriptions of characters from several different adapted scripts. Here you can see the difference between the language the author of the novel is able to uses, versus the more succinct, visual language the screenwriter has to choose in the adaptation.

The first example is the description of Chiyo’s mother in Memoirs of a Geisha. The excerpt from the book is long, detailed, and mentions things we are not necessarily seeing at the present time. The writer describes each character’s personality in a way that would be inappropriate for a screenplay:

“Because from my earliest years I was very much like my mother, and hardly at all like my father or my older sister. My mother said it was because we were made just the same, she and I-and it was true we both had the same peculiar eyes of a sort you almost never see in Japan. Instead of being dark brown like everyone else’s, my mother’s eyes were a translucent gray, and mine are just the same. When I was very young, I told my mother I thought someone had poked a hole in her eyes and all the ink had drained out, which she thought very funny. The fortune-tellers said her eyes were so pale because of too much water in her personality, so much that the other four elements were hardly present at all-and this, they explained, was why her features matched so poorly. People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste, and so does a mushroom, but you can’t put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. She had her mother’s pouty mouth but her father’s angular jaw, which gave the impression of a delicate picture with much too heavy a frame. And her lovely gray eyes were surrounded by thick lashes that must have been striking on her father, but in her case only made her look startled. “

By contrast, the screenplay description condenses these images down to a few short lines, and the mother and daughter’s personalities are revealed through actions throughout the story, rather than talked about right when they are first introduced. The screenwriter must show, not just tell, what the characters are like:

“MOTHER (40) reclines, wrapped in a quilt. She is frail, her face etched with pain. She opens her eyes briefly to drink a medicinal tea: they are a silver color.”

This description still mentions the gray eyes, since they are an important detail, but rather than elaborate on each physical feature, the screenwriter gives an overall sense of the mother’s illness and state of pain by showing us that she is ill through her actions.

In Twilight, Stephenie Meyer spends a lot of time describing what the characters look like. In fact the entire book is filled with descriptions of how gorgeous Edward is. The author also spends a lot of time describing Bella, and not just what she looks like, but what this means about who she is and how she fits in:

“Maybe, if I looked like a girl from Phoenix, should, I could work this to my advantage. But physically, I’d never fit in anywhere. I should be tan, sporty, blond—a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps – all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun. Instead I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete; I didn’t have the necessary hand-eye coordination to play sports without humiliating myself – and harming both myself and anyone who stood too close.”

By contrast, the screenplay description is short and simple, while still capturing the essence and most important points of her overall look as described in the novel:

“ISABELLA SWAN, 17. Long, dark hair frames alabaster skin. She’s a vulnerable, introverted, imperfect beauty.”

Again the screenwriter doesn’t need to mention here that Bella is clumsy, as the novelist does, because this will be show later through her actions during the course of the movie.

In the story Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, the narrator, Red, describes his first impression of Andy in great detail. Here is another example of the type of detail that the prose writer can delve into, going off in tangents and mentioning things that aren’t being seen or heard in the present moment of the story:

“When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean. That’s a funny thing to remember about a man, I suppose, but it seems to sum up Andy for me. He always looked as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he was, especially when you consider how conservative most banks are…and you have to multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks don’t like to trust a man with their money unless he’s bald, limping, and constantly plucking at his pants to get his truss around straight. Andy was in for murdering his wife and her lover.”

Stephen King doesn’t just describe Andy, he makes a comment on how New England bankers are, and mentions what Andy does for a living. He goes off on a tangent, because stories are not linear and are not meant to occur in real time, as a screenplay is. In the script’s description of Andy, Frank Darabont is much more succinct, and mentions what Andy normally looks like in contrast to how upset and agitated he is when we first see him:

“ANDY DUFRENSE, mid-20’s, wire rim glasses, three-piece suit. Under normal circumstances a respectable, solid citizen; hardly dangerous, perhaps even meek.  But these circumstances are far from normal. He is disheveled, unshaven, and very drunk. A cigarette smolders in his mouth. His eyes, flinty and hard, are riveted to the bungalow up the path.”

In The Time Traveller’s Wife, author Audrey Niffenegger spends a lot of time introducing Clare at age six, describing what she is doing in great detail:

“She is very young. She is oblivious; she is alone. She is still wearing her school uniform, a hunter green jumper with a white blouse and knee socks with penny loafers, and she is carrying a Marshall Field’s Shopping Bag and a beach towel. Clare spreads the towel on the ground and dumps out the contents of the bag: every imaginable kind of writing implement. Old ballpoint pens, little stubby pencils from the library, crayons, smelly Magic Markers, a fountain pen. She also has a bunch of her dad’s office stationery.  She arranges the implements and gives the stack of paper a smart shake, and then proceeds to try each pen and pencil in turn, making careful lines and swirls, humming to herself.”

The screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, describes the same action, but in a much more succinct, simplified way. Also note that in the screenplay, the action is already in progress when we first see her. Unlike the book, the movie has the constraint of time, and doesn’t waste precious minutes detailing how Clare unloads and sets up her art project. The action is already underway, so the more important parts of the story can take place sooner:

“CLARE ABSHIRE, 6, sits on a large beach towel on which she has spread crayons, colored pencils, magic markers, and a stack of paper.”

In the novel, Fight Club by Chuck Palanuik, the Paper Street house is described in detail, giving the reader a good sense of how it feels to inhabit such a dilapidated, odd home.

“The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures. When it’s raining, we have to pull the fuses. You don’ dare turn on the lights. The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a basement. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor. The baseboard moldings are carved and varnished and eighteen inches high.  The rain trickles down through the house, and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust.”

The script mentions a few details in the action description, but more often shows us how the house is by mentioning things as they occur, and uses some brief voice-over to describe some of the home’s quirks.

“It’s a grand old three-story long abandoned.”

“Tyler and Jack climb CREAKY STAIRS to the 2^ND FLOOR LANDING”

“Jack turns on the water. LOUD VIBRATIONS from the walls. Water spits in starts.

Reading novels and screenplays is a great exercise to help you contrast how screenwriting differs from other types of writing you are used to seeing. By choosing the right details and the most vivid, descriptive words, screenwriters are able to convey images as effectively as novelists using far fewer words. This skill is extremely difficult and takes time and practice to master.

Screenwriting is dramatically different type of writing as compared to what most people are used to writing-narrative prose. Most children don’t practice writing stories in screenplay format and are used to reading and writing in traditional novelistic prose. These stories are nearly always written in the past tense, which is the first and most glaring difference between the format of narrative prose work and screenwriting.

There are other, more subtle differences that often take years to get used to. I always recommend new screenwriters read as many screenplays as possible, not just see movies, so they can familiarize themselves with how screenplays are written. Because it is much more than changing to present tense, using Courier, and formatting the margins differently. There are things you can do in a novel that you cannot do in a screenplay, and the style and language used in novels and short stories is so ingrained in our brains that it is a difficult habit to break.

Today we’ll discuss narration and point of view and how that differs in novels and screenplays.

In screenplays, narration is written by someone who sees everything from the outside, someone who only sees and hears. (In this article, when I mention narrator I mean the author of the action description, not a narrator who may offer a voice-over narration via dialogue). Novels are written in either first- person, or third-person, some use a combination of both. The narration is usually omniscient-meaning the narration covers everything every single character sees, thinks, or feels through an all-knowing, all-seeing god-like narrator. Other writers rely on one character’s perspective and only include what that character would realistically know, see and feel. In screenwriting, we write third- person narration that sees everything every character does and says, but does not see at all what the characters think or feel. Unlike novels, which can and nearly always do get inside the characters’ heads to explore what they think, what happened in their past, and how they feel about everything, the narrator of a screenplay cannot get into the emotional head of any of the characters.

Though this habit is extremely difficult to break, if you break down what screenwriting is, it’s easy to see why you cannot do this in screenwriting. Unlike novels and short stories, which are meant to be read, screenplays are not the final form of the medium they are a part of. Screenplays are read, but that is not their sole purpose. A screenplay is meant to serve as a blueprint or a guide to direct the production of a film. The final medium that is intended to be seen is the film itself, not the screenplay. Anything that you write, therefore, needs to be something that the audience can see on the screen, because, in theory, that is all the audience will ever see. If you include thoughts, feelings and background information in a novelistic, non-visual way, ask yourself how the audience will see these things.

Screenplays should only include what we see-in the action description, and what we hear-in the dialogue. Other details can never be shown on screen, which means the audience won’t see them. If there is information included on the script that cannot be shown on screen, your reader will know these crucial details, but your audience will not. That is why you must write visually and guide the directors, actors, and producers who will make your film to show everything pertinent to the telling of a story on screen. Emotion can be show on the actor’s faces or revealed through dialogue. Backstory and the histories of characters can be show through flashbacks or, again, revealed through dialogue. Thoughts must be spoken aloud or conveyed visually by skilled actors. The screenplay must indicate exactly how these internal elements should be conveyed by using specific, step-by step instructions that will result in the production of a film.

When reviewing your own scripts, watch out for things that could not be seen or heard by anyone other than the person reading your screenplay.  As you read action description and descriptions of characters and their reactions, ask yourself if everything you wrote could be seen on screen, and how. Ask yourself how the audience will know that your hero feels sad. If all you have written is that he feels sad, you need to convert this novelistic style into screenwriting by noting how his face looks-his mouth is turned down in the corners, his shoulders slumped. If you’ve written that the mother is tired from years of backbreaking work taking care of her children while her husband is away, how will the audience know that this is true? Instead, show us in a way an audience can see. You could insert a flashback to the woman washing loads of laundry and cooking for screaming kids while she is all alone. You could show her worn, red, dishpan-hands, her hunched back from years of strain, her gray hairs from worrying. But you cannot rely on the same elements a novelist does to convey the inner thoughts, emotions, and background details about your story.