Why This is Good

As a creative form of expression, and compared to other types of writing, screenwriting can seem limiting. As with poetry, writers are forced to choose only the most vivid, precise and appropriate words to describe things simply, yet clearly. A novelist can elaborate for as long as he or she desires on something as mundane as the color of a character’s hair or the way the cars are moving down the street. A screenwriter is forced to omit minor, unimportant details, and find the right way to clearly and concisely evoke a strong, visual image while using as few words as possible, and, as a further constraint, to do so using simple, easy to read language.

Considering how difficult this is, and the abundance of advice out there on how to screenwrite well, the admonitions to use the most visual, vivid language and imagery, it’s no wonder so many screenwriters get confused, and so many screenplays end up muddled and overwrought.

It’s important to remember that above all the other pieces of advice you’ll hear about screenwriting style, clarity is the most important. A screenplay will be better received and reviewed if it is clear, simple and easy to understand than if it contains unique and engaging sentence structure and creative language. If you are able to be vivid, unique and visual while maintaining clarity, great. If not, sacrifice vivid and unique for clarity. Remember that your screenplay is not a work of art in and of itself the way a book is. Your screenplay is simply the blueprint that will guide the actors, the director, the editor and the team of hundreds who will work to bring the story you wrote to life on screen. It’s not meant to be read, so it does not need to be phenomenally written in brilliantly creative prose. What it needs to be is a clear, efficient guide that tells the story in a way that anyone reading the script can understand. A young teen or smart fifth grader should be able to easily grasp what is going on. Anything more elevated and you’re not being clear and simple. If your story is good, it will stand out and get noticed, whether your language is beautiful and poetic or not. If your story is lacking, then the most amazing, gorgeous prose and perfect use of the English language won’t help save your screenplay from the reject pile.

As noted in the last post, have as many people as possible-of all educational levels and ages-read your script. Ask them if they understood what you were saying and if the action description is clear. If it is not, rewrite those sections that gave people trouble to make them clear and precise. Omit the big showy vocabulary words that impressed your creative writing teacher and choose simple, common words that everyone clearly understands and knows how to pronounce. Screenwriting is the place to showcase your storytelling and dialogue writing skills, not your expansive vocabulary. Save the imagery and flowery prose for your novel. In screenwriting, clarity reigns and clarity is the style element you should strive for above all others.

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.

Everyone who has ever taken an English class has heard the old writing advice that you should write what you know. This sounds logical enough, but taken literally, it is incredibly limiting. Most of us, by definition, are average people leading average lives. Writing only what you know makes it seem as if we can never use our imaginations to create new worlds, bizarre situations, or characters who do things we would never dream of doing. This is obviously not true, as successful writers have always written about both their everyday, known lives, as well as impossibly amazing realities no one had ever dreamed of before. Without expanding our writing parameters to include any and all possibilities, we are limited to a very dull set of stories set in the present or very recent past.

Some writers should take this advice literally. There is no shortage of stories about people’s everyday lives, and many of the most touching emotional dramas and poignant portraits have come from real-life experiences and writers simply recalling things that have happened to them. But if you grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and were born in 1983, you aren’t limited to that geographical location and that 26 year time period.

As I touched on in my post about research and fact-checking, if you do your homework, you are free to write about anything you want. Write about a historical time period you love, just make sure you get your facts straight and don’t accidentally feature your characters using a device that wasn’t invented yet. Write about an imagined fantasy world that you have created, just be consistent and make sure you outline how this world works.

You can and should still write what you know in terms of your character arc. Of course you can try to write about a character with experiences nowhere near your own, but the best stories, no matter where or when they are set, are about emotional experiences and thematic elements that the writer understands on a deep level. Your story may not take place in Chicago in 1992, but if you experienced, say your mother dying in childbirth, you can use your experience-what you know-to write a poignant portrayal of someone in post-World War II New York whose husband died in the war. The experience of loss, survivor guilt, and the feeling of being abandoned are consistent with your own experiences, regardless of the setting.  Maybe you’re an expert on breeding miniature schnauzers, because your family did that. This might make a boring movie, but if your character has a dog, it should probably be a mini schnauzer because you’re familiar with the breed and can more realistically portray what they are like. You may not have lived in rural France, but traveling there and researching about daily life there will give your setting credibility nonetheless. As you write down your ideas and develop outlines and stories, you’ll find that you know more than you realize, and you can use your experiences to craft compelling characters whose decisions, motivations, and character arcs are realistic and believable, even if the world they inhabit is something you have never seen.

Carving out time for writing is something all writers struggle with. Whether you have a day job or not, distractions, stress, writer’s block, and everyday life often prevents us from sitting down and writing as much as we should.

Make writing time an integral part of your schedule. Every day you find time to brush your teeth and eat. You make time weekly for things like cleaning your house, spending time with friends, grocery shopping, and paying your bills. Screenwriting needs to become one of these things that you always do. If you are too drained at the end of a stressful workday to write, make writing something you do on the weekend, or get up a half hour earlier and write first thing, before other obligations eat up your time.

Writer’s block, and the fear of the blank page is something that all writers face. If this is an issue for you, take the pressure off. For the first few weeks on your new project, don’t limit your thoughts. Sit down and aim to write for a specified period of time, with no limitations on format. Just write. You may go off on some tangent that has nothing to do with your script. You may be more comfortable writing in prose form, or handwriting notes. Whatever gets you over your fear and gets you writing is okay. You can go back later and take these ideas and use them for your screenplay, or perhaps they will lead you to an idea for an entirely new story. Don’t stifle your creativity, just force yourself to sit down and write for a specified number of hours per day or per week, whatever fits logically into your schedule and your writing style. If you make the goal too unmanageable for your life, you’ll ignore it. If you parse it into easy to manage segments, you’ll be less likely to ignore your writing time.
Once you’ve given yourself time to creatively explore your ideas and write freely, you can start developing a plan for your story. You will already be in the habit of writing regularly since you’ve taken away the fear of writing by opening your mind to other ways of writing. The next step is to narrow the focus and create an outline so that you have a path to follow. Writer’s block doesn’t always come from fear. Sometimes it comes from being overwhelmed with where to take a story, or unsure how to proceed from an idea. This is where an outline is invaluable and will help you stick to your goals and complete your screenplay. When you have the outline completed you can devote each daily or weekly writing session to completing a particular part of the outline. You won’t get stuck because you’ll have a clear plan in place, which will guide your writing and give you the tools you need to successfully complete your screenplay.

After going over the ways to make a character likable, I want to point out that your characters can and should be flawed. Every hero in a film needs to have experienced some trauma in their past that has caused them to react to the world in an unhealthy way. The experience that they will go through during their story-whether it is meeting the love of their life, accomplishing a career or personal goal, or changing the world-will heal this wound, teach them that they have to live life in a healthy way again in order to be fulfilled by accomplishing their goals.

We know from Storytelling 101 that a well-written script involves a protagonist with a goal who tries to accomplish this goal but faces opposition, which he or she eventually overcomes. Opposition comes in two forms-external and internal. The hero cannot accomplish their goal because the antagonist, circumstances, or forces of nature are preventing them from getting what they want. For example, in Shrek, Shrek cannot be with Fiona because she is betrothed to Lord Farquaad. This is the external opposition. But Shrek is also wrestling with his own internal obstacle. He lacks the confidence he needs to admit his feelings, and he has been hurt and rejected in his past for looking different, so much so that he has shut down and decided it’s better to be alone than to open up and face possible rejection. He is forced to overcome both obstacles before he can accomplish his goal, and finally be himself and live a full life.

In crafting your characters, delve into their past and determine what happened to them that made them the flawed, incomplete person they are today? This is usually something that happened in their childhood and deeply affected them. Write out that scene, in prose form, so you can fully explore their life before you put them into your screenplay. This event will most likely not be a part of your script, but it can and may come out in dialogue. Whatever it was, it has created in them a fear of doing the one thing that they will be forced to do in the climax of your story. Overcoming this fear is the only way they can accomplish their goal and achieve true happiness and an authentic life.

If you’re a fellow child of the 80’s or younger, you were no doubt reminded of the fun children’s book of the same name as this new movie. But this movie has greatly improved upon what was just a cute, simple children’s book based on a funny and innovative premise. The movie is hilarious and uses many of the screenwriting principles I’ve been discussing. It’s a great example of how much poetic license you can and must take when adapting a book into a movie. Most books, even the ones more complicated than a children’s picture book, don’t translate easily into good films.

What stood out most to me about what made this film good was how intensely visual it was. Of course, it’s yet another computer animated wonder that takes advantage of the stunning images you can create using this awesome new medium. And since it’s also playing in 3D, there are plenty of gags and stunts intended to take advantage of this unique tool. But even if this had been a live action film, the visuals would have been impressive, and you can learn a lot about how to tell a story visually by watching this film. It’s not based on dialogue and discussion, but, as all films should, relies primarily on images and action to tell the story.  And while I don’t want to give away all of the fun details, I will say this movie features a ghetto blaster made of Jell-O. What more could you want?

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is also dynamic. Every scene involves change and moves the story forward. It features an active hero with a goal that he pursues until the very end. The writers employ the techniques I discussed here to make us like the hero and relate to him from the very beginning. As the story progresses, they continually challenge the hero, making things more and more difficult, forcing him to work hard for every accomplishment, and most importantly, it is always the hero who is in charge, forced to save the day, and rely on his intellect and wit. No one helps him and nothing comes easy. This is an adorable, well done film that adults and kids will enjoy. I highly recommend you go see it, and pay attention to all of the elements discussed above, think about how you can use them in your own screenplay, even if your story doesn’t involve a monkey battling live gummy bears to the death.

“Show Don’t Tell” is a basic writing tip that is nonetheless an essential part of successful screenwriting. This simple rule can help you decide what makes sense for the script and what doesn’t. Instead of telling your reader about a character, show them, by what the character does. In a novel it’s okay to write what the character is thinking, what happened to them in their childhood, and why they are acting a certain way. In a screenplay, you are limited to what we can see and hear on screen, making background information, internal thoughts and feelings inappropriate.  If you tell us that “Sarah feels happy,” how will we see that this is true? Better to write that “Sarah smiles and walks with a bounce in her step.” This shows us Sarah is happy.

The same is true when describing a location. Show us what each new place looks like by providing key visual details. Instead of saying “the building is old,” describe the peeling paint, neglected lawn, and broken windows.  Because screenwriting must be terse, it is a constant struggle to find the perfect words and the most visual and important details to use in your script.

It is particularly difficult to make this distinction when writing for film, because you are using a “telling” medium, the written word, to define what will eventually be a “showing” medium, a film. Writing that is meant to only be read-novels, short stories, articles, etc.-can rely on telling because there will always be someone reading the written word. Writing that is not meant to be seen-screenplays and stage plays-need to provide details that show both the reader and the future potential viewer what is happening regardless of whether they are reading the written word or watching those words coming to life on screen.