I have recently started screenwriting, and let me tell you, it has been a shock.
The basic principles remain the same. If anything, they are even more important because the structure of the story – the GMC, the plot points –give a film its structure and focus. You want to both fulfill genre promises in three acts, and be unpredictable.
Here’s where it gets fun.
You then need to whittle it all down. You’ve got 110 or so “pages” to capture an entire novel’s worth of work, in a way that captures an audience and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.
That doesn’t mean sacrificing character depth, nuance, or any other writing quality. It does mean changing how you write. Even if you’re not planning on screenwriting, I am learning a lot about how to improve my prose in general, especially for genre novels.
Here are a few tips I’ve learned (so far!):
Do you really need all that?
Screenwriting showed me how much of my “voice” wasn’t entertainment, but rather a crutch, throat-clearing. I’m not going to strip it out entirely, because that would be an overcorrection, but I am being much more mindful of when I slip voice in, and when I’m just being lazy.
Where am I repeating words or phrases? If I’ve just said something, do I need to then explain it in exposition as well, even if the observation is funny? If the exposition is funny, is there a way to either incorporate it in the dialogue or perhaps tweak it so it’s not a direct echo? Can I streamline it?
Screenwriting is all about lean and mean. If you needed to kill your darlings before, this can feel like a downright slaughterhouse. I wanted to tear my hair out on my first revisions, certain that I simply couldn’t cut another word without losing the feel of the story. Nevertheless… I could, and I did.
How?
Choose your tools.
If you’re a cook, you may have heard the famous Alton Brown say that if a utensil only has one purpose, it shouldn’t be in your kitchen. Same goes for prose.
Let’s say you’re opening a book. A down-on-his-luck man is sitting at his favorite bar, drinking away his sorrows because his ice rink is going out of business. A woman sits next to him and offers him a large sum of money, enough to more than save his ice rink, if he goes back to his old skill set: a hit man for the mob. Kill one man, “a bad man” she reassures him, and he’ll have tax-free funding. After some back and forth debating, she leaves him her card and tells him to consider it.
Pretty simple, right?
Now what if I told you to put that on one page, and make it compelling enough to hook us into the second. Not just a summary, like above.
You have your tools: setting, character (both description and POV), exposition, dialogue. You just need to make the right choices, and they need to do more than one thing. That’s where the force multiplier comes in.
You could open with a one-sentence hook, an observation in exposition:
A woman like that, in a bar like this, always means trouble. Usually the bloody kind.
She is then described. No sexpot here (twist) but rather a tidy, round faced accountant type. She heads off his attempt to flee, volunteering to buy him a drink since he only (and noticeably) had water. Others in the bar are jeering him (shortened, in exposition, not in dialogue) showing he’s a regular, these are his friends. They don’t know what’s going on.
She tell him she hears he’s got a nice little place, an ice rink… shame, the troubles he’s having with it. If only he had some other skillset, she knows people who would pay good money for talent. He sends her away, nervously tugging at the frayed hem of what was once a nice shirt. When he gets up to leave, an envelope falls out of his jacket pocket. Unnoticed, she’s slipped him a large amount of cash and a business card. He pays off his outstanding bar tab and is able to get the drink the bartender denied him earlier. He needs it to think.
Make good choices.
You might argue: Hey! That doesn’t cover everything in the summary!
Which brings us to my next point.
Does the reader need to know something explicitly, and do they need to know it now?
The important part in the above opening is what you want the reader to experience: curiosity. That comes from hints. He knows she’s trouble, through no obvious signs. He’s familiar with “bloody” which suggests his experiences weren’t necessarily legal or safe, so killing, or at least violence, is implied. An envelope full of cash is is also suspicious. The large bar tab says he’s been having money trouble for a while and is upset about it. So now we see that she’s probably an inciting incident, he’s got a goal of saving his ice rink, but the conflict is he’ll have to revisit a past he’s trying to forget.
Subtext.
The other thing I’m learning from screenwriting? It’s all about subtext.
You may be familiar with it in terms of dialogue. The adage is only 10% of what a person is thinking or feeling is actually said aloud. A lot is also communicated through body language and facial expression.
Beyond that, you may have heard about “on the nose” dialogue. That’s when your characters say exactly what they mean, as directly as possible.
Here’s an example:
Villain: Are you still here?
Hero: Yes. I won’t leave until I stop you.
Villain: Who are you? No one. Just another American who has been brainwashed to believe he’s extraordinary. Do you think honestly think you’re a hero?
Hero: Not a hero, but I am heroic enough to do what’s necessary.
Villain: You won’t be able to defeat us.
Hero: Trust me. I will fight, and I will win.
This is terrible. Beyond no one talking like this, it’s blunt to the point of pain. And it’s boring. Who are these people, and why do we care?
Compare it instead to this, from the movie Diehard, which says pretty much the exact same thing:
Hans Gruber: [on the radio] Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there?
John McClane: Yeah, I’m still here. Unless you wanna open the front door for me.
Hans Gruber: Uh, no, I’m afraid not. But, you have me at a loss. You know my name but who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne? Rambo? Marshal Dillon?
John McClane: Was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers actually. I really like those sequined shirts.
Hans Gruber: Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?
John McClane: Yippee-ki-yay, motherf&*%er.
This is multi-purpose dialogue. It gets across what’s happening, the conflict between the two (conflict is always key!) and also differentiates the characters: Gruber’s clipped, erudite speech patterns versus McClane’s insouciant slang and swearing. It’s a bit longer, but it does the job beautifully. It;s also laden with subtext: it never comes right out and says the things above – but you know exactly what they mean.
Different ways to learn.
Screenwriting isn’t the only way to figure out these tricks, obviously. One of the best ways to improve actual wordsmithing, in my opinion, is studying poetry, for example. Even songwriting, or how music is composed, is eye opening.
No matter where you look for inspiration and instruction, I strongly feel we should always be pushing to keep learning, and keep growing as writers.
I’ll (hopefully) be sharing more as I get deeper into this process!