I have a blog over at Blogger that I forgot about for several years, and which I plan to get back into, because I am still a scientist and lover of all things tech. Well, I was looking over it and realized that I like the posts there much more than anything I have posted here. After some thought, I realized that it was because over on that blog, I was writing naturally. I wrote the way that I think. Here, I have been trying to be a bit more professional, and have reigned in my natural speaking (and writing) style, mainly so I don’t say anything that might offend anyone. But that has left my posts sounding stilted and unnatural, so I am going to just start writing as I normally do. But even that is not good enough; I need to think and write like a screenwriter.
Maybe that’s one reason I’ve been struggling with my screenplays. I have been approaching them as though they were college English essays, concerned about proper grammar and style. But after reading several screenplays for very popular and profitable films and television series, I realize that it’s the story that counts, not how flowery your writing is. Look at the script for World War Z, for instance. An English professor would fail the hell out of it. Incomplete sentences, bad grammar, etc. But, it does what it is supposed to do- it tells the story in a way that a director can easily know what is supposed to be happening, and then make it happen.
My problem is that I am still writing to be read. Of course, you want to write in a manner that keeps a script reader’s attention and moves the story along, but I tend to forget I am supposed to be writing something that will be seen. I need to learn to think like a director, cinematographer, film viewer, and, of course, screenwriter- not a novelist. I’m actually writing too much! I’ll give you an example. I was reading a few scripts from my favorite sitcoms yesterday. Some Seinfeld, Married… With Children, and others. I realized that the characters in sitcoms don’t actually do much talking. One line of text is the norm. In Seinfeld it’s often just a word or two. More than just what they say, it’s the actors’ portrayal of the character that makes the situation funny. Compare to the sitcom pilot I just finished. My characters tend to have over four lines of dialogue each, every time they speak. I’m trying to tell the viewer (and reader) who my characters are, and what their personalities are like, rather than show them. I’m still writing as though working on a book rather than a half-hour TV show. For feature length films, the characters can be a bit more wordy, but even then they speak much less than my own characters. Films are about action and doing, not merely speaking.
So, anyways, yeah. It’s quite a change and one that will be difficult to make, but it helps reading all the screenplays you can get your hands on. And learning all you can about how a movie is made, and the roles of the various people involved in production. Don’t approach your script like it’s a book. If you want to be a screenwriter, you must think like a screenwriter. Who’d have thunk it? And as always, keep learning, reading, and writing!
A Screenwriting Journey 