Screenwriting Article by William C. Martell - Description

20/05/2013 15:04Screenwriting article by William C. Martell - description

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16 STEPS TO BETTER DESCRIPTIONS

There are dozens of books, seminars, classes, and articles available on how to im-prove your screenplay s dialogue. By now your lines should have the pluck of Parker,the bite of Benchley and the soul of Steve Zaillian. Every line of dialogue you write isbrilliant. But film is a visual medium, and your script will probably have more de-scription than dialogue. Much more. Readers frequently complain about "too muchblack stuff" (description) and reject scripts for being dense and verbose (descriptionagain!). What can we do to improve the writing that comes between those brilliantlines?

THE WORD IS ACTION

My first step is easy: Don't think of it as DESCRIPTION, think of it as ACTION.Movement. Things happening. Describing a stationary object is not only boring, it'sprobably not necessary. The Production Designer will decide the floor plan of thehouse, the Set Decorator will decide how to furnish it, the Prop Master will add thedetails like family photos and nick- knacks. It's not our job as writers to describe anyof this stuff (unless it s REQUIRED by the plot). If the slug line says:

INT. JOE'S LIVING ROOM -- DAY

The reader will imagine a sofa, some chairs, a TV, and most of the details. We don'thave to mention them. Our job isn't to paint the whole picture, just give the absoluteminimum amount of information required to set the location. Sometimes, the slugline does it all.

Which means what comes after the slug line is ACTION. I use the Movie Magicprogram, and that's what it calls the element between patches of dialogue. We arewriting MOTION pictures, and what we are describing is people and objectsMOVING.



So the first step is to remember you aren't describing THINGS you are describingTHINGS HAPPENING. When we use our words to paint pictures, we aren't paintingstill lifes.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

There are times when INT. JOE'S LIVING ROOM -- DAY is too generic. The readerneeds additional information. The trick is not to bore the reader by completely de-scribing the living room. Instead, find the one (or two) details which give us clue tothe rest, and let the reader s imagination fill in the rest.

INT. JOE'S LIVING ROOM -- DAY

Pizza boxes and empty beer cans litter the floor.

***

INT. BOB'S LIVING ROOM -- DAY

A vase of fresh cut flowers on a doily on the baby grand piano.

***

INT. KEN'S LIVING ROOM -- DAY

A sleek sofa with built in remote controls faces a wall-sized flat screen TV.



***

INT. TED'S LIVING ROOM -- DAY

Wall-to-wall bookshelves create a fortress around an easy chair and lamp.

Four very different living rooms. Do you think these guys hangout together? Did you get a clear picture of Joe's sofa from thedescription of his living room? I didn't mention it in thedescription, but I suspect it's early Goodwill or maybe some-thing found on the side of the road. Now let's wander into Joe'sKitchen... let's take a look in the sink. What do you see? Nowlet's go into the bedroom... is the bed made? Are there dirtyclothes on the floor? With *nine words* I've described every-thing in Joe's apartment!

Now let's look at Bob's sofa. Does it look anything like Joe's? Imagine Joe's carpet...and compare it with Bob's carpet. Or did you imagine Bob has hardwood floors andPersian rugs? If we were to look in Bob's kitchen and bedroom, what would we see?Again, a handful of words are used to paint a picture.

Though I describe Ken's sofa, would you be confused if halfway through the sceneKen went to the wet bar in his living room and mixed a drink. Even if you didn't ini-tially imagine the wet bar, it completely fits in the room described. You don't have todescribe everything up front, you can sneak in description later on through actions. IfI looked in Ken's kitchen, I suspect I'd find a bunch of gourmet gadgets. Ken probablygrinds his own coffee beans.

Is Ted's living room brightly lit? What color is his easy chair? What we are doing islooking at the location as if it's a character, then finding the essential details that cre-ate the character of that room or place. The same way Lawrence Kasdan in *BodyHeat* describes Teddy Laurson as a "Rock and roll arsonist". Those four words giveus the essence of the character and sparks our imagination to fill in the details. Longhair? Tattoos? How is Teddy dressed? Four words and we *see* him!



They key is to carefully choose a detail which implies other details. To find an exam-ple or metaphor which sums up the entire location. That way you can describe thewhole room in one short sentence. Notice that this gives us clues to character as well.These are four very different living rooms and four very different people.

MOVING PICTURES

Because that element of the screenplay is *action* rather than *description*, the bestway to describe a location is through action. Instead of a boring static image, give thereader some action and sneak in a little description along the way. So, we combinethe first two steps, and come up with a third. The best place to hide a description iswithin action.

INT. JOE'S LIVING ROOM - DAY

Joe brushes away old pizza boxes, plops down on the sofa.

The reader is focusing on Joe, and doesn't even notice you slip in the description ofthe living room. No static writing, no "still life" feel. Economical writing which man-ages to do three things at the same time: Show things happening, describe thelocation, and illuminate character.

TWITTER IT

Screenwriting is distilled writing. Using the fewest number ofwords to create the greatest possible impact. Novelists canspend pages describing something in minute detail (Proustwrote seven volumes on a fellow eating a cookie and remem-bering his past), but we've got about 110 pages to get our entirestory across. Economical writing is probably the most importantpart of our job... And the most difficult part.

But how do you get rid of flabby, lazy writing? How do youfight the writer's natural tendency to be verbose?



One of my tricks is to imagine I'm sending a tweet - and I have 140 characters to getmy message across. Instead of splashing words on the page, I have to pick each wordcarefully. Relate the maximum message with the minimum characters.

Screenwriting is similar to Haiku, you have a limited number of words to paint yourpicture. The trick is tho chose words which IMPLY other words. Words which cannot only carry their own weight, but are strong enough to carry entire ideas and/orimages. If there's an art to screenwriting, it's knowing how to pick strong but simplewords.

Either while writing, or rewriting, I will take every sentence and try to find a moresuccinct way of relaying the information. In first drafts I might use a half dozenwords to do the same job a single word can do, or use extraneous words, or beataround the bush instead of finding a direct route to what I'm trying to say. By imagin-ing each sentence as a tweet I decide exactly what I want to say and figure out thebriefest way to say it.

CHOOSE YOUR WORDS CAREFULLY, MR. BOND

The key to economical writing is word choice. I may splash words on the page for myfirst draft, but while rewriting I try to find the EXACT word to match the situation.This accomplishes two things at once: creates quick, easy to read sentences... whichhave greater impact than their flabby counterparts.

Joe walks into the room.

"Walks" is too generic. There are probably a hundred synonyms for "walk", each de-scribing a distinctive type of ambulation. If Joe saunters in, strides in, struts in, strollsin, marches in, paces in, or bounces in; not only does this give us a specific type ofwalk, but adds to the action and character while removing boring overused wordsfrom your script.

ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING

Another trick is not to describe how something LOOKS, but how it FEELS. The Pro-duction Designer will decide what a room looks like, the Casting Director will decidewhat a character looks like... That leaves us describing ATTITUDES.



The script I'm currently writing, HARD RETURN, takes place in the future. Instead oftrying to describe an entire futuristic world, I used these sixteen steps to give thereader a quick impression, allowing the reader's imagination to fill in the rest.

EXT. URBAN JUNGLE, 2019 AD -- EVENING

The wreckage of civilization. Crumbled buildings, burned out cars, streets pockmarked by war. Downed power lines arc and spark on the street.

This place makes Hell look like Beverly Hills...

Except the battered twisted metal sign reads "Beverly Hills".

Night is falling. Fingers of shadow reaching out to grab anyonefoolish enough to be in this part of town.

That's the only time my future world is described in the script. Slug lines and actiontake it from here. Between the arcing and sparking power lines and the fingers ofshadow I show you how the future FEELS... frightening, ugly, dangerous.

A LITTLE POETRY



Goes a long ways. Using imagery, alliteration, homonyms andother forms of word play helps spice up your descriptions, but usethem sparingly. Too much poetry reeks of "cutesy writing".

Writing asides to the reader is also "too cutsey". Shane Black canget away with it, but chances are the rest of us can't. Remember,our job is to involve the reader in the story... Not jerk them out of

it with wry asides or amusing allusions.

Your writing should be both interesting and invisible, which means the word playshould service the script, not show what a clever writer you are.

BLACK STUFF

An easy step for getting rid of dense "black stuff" is to remember the Four Line Rule.No passage of action should last longer than four lines. If you have a big action scene,which lasts a page or more... break it up with spaces! Every four lines, put in a blankline. This instantly adds more "white stuff" to your script!

Another quick trick for long action passages is to have at least one line of dialogue onevery page... even if it's just a character yelling "Watch out!" This breaks up the page,and gives the reader a break from reading actions described.

STYLE ON THE PAGE

The best way to make descriptions easy to read is to make them FUN to read. To cre-ate the excitement you envision on the screen, right on the page. Develop your ownpersonal style of writing action passages. Style breaks up the page and makes yourwriting distinctive.

Using sounds like "BLAM!" or "CLANG!"

Writing single sentence action blocks.

One.Word.Sentences.Which.



Draw.The.Reader.Down.The.Page.

Anything that makes the script more exciting to read, and involves the reader in theaction. Experiment. After a few scripts, you will develop your own style and yourown 'voice' in descriptions. Developing a 'voice' is an important step in taking com-mand of the page (more on that, later).

CHARACTER

Do you think you could completely describe a character in fourwords? Lawrence Kasdan managed that amazing feat in his scriptfor "Body Heat". This is one of the best examples of clear, succinctwriting I have ever read.

"Teddy Laurson, rock and roll arsonist."

Kasdan manages to convey Teddy's occupation and attitudewhich allows us to imagine details about everything from number of tattoos to hairlength and personal grooming to wardrobe in ONLY FOUR WORDS! If he can do it,so can the rest of us.

In my script "Heart Of Glass" I described Lt. Bobby Mazeppa as a "Beach boy homi-cide detective".

Your turn.

ACTIVE WORDS

A basic, but I've read dozens of scripts which would have been greatly improved hadthe writers stayed awake in their high school english classes when the teacher said:Use active verbs.

Joe doesn't TRY to sit on the sofa, he SITS on the sofa. In fact, he PLOPS DOWN onthe sofa. "Try" is a weasel verb... it takes the power from the active verb.



("starts to" "begins to" and "ing": WALKS is stronger than walking.)

KILL THE WIDOWS!

In the wonderful world of typesetting, when the last word of a sentence carries overonto a new line of print it's called a widow . A single word which takes up an entireline of space. How wasteful!

I always do a rewrite to kill all of the widows. If one or two words from the end of asentence end up taking up an entire line, I rework the sentence until I can get it to fitentirely on one line. My goal is a widow-free script. Not only does this force me tochoose the correct words, eliminate useless or fatty words, and write clear, concisesentences; it also trims my script, allowing room for more important elements. Andthe script looks cleaner on the page!

NO BUTS!

The easiest two words to trim out of a sentence are AND and BUT. Usually thesewords are completely unnecessary. Cut them.

CONFIDENCE

Know what every sentence and every word means, and write clear enough so thatanyone who reads your script understands what you have written. Write strong sen-tences and strong images. Remember: You command the page. You control thewords. You control the reader. This is writing with confidence.

A reader friend of mine frequently complains about writers who don't command thepage. They seem unsure of what they're writing, filling their script with weasel verbsand beating around the bush with long, run on sentences. Don't fall into that trap.Know what you're going to write, write it.

YOU are in control of your script.

PAGE TURNERS



Not Paige Turco, that beautiful actress from "NYPD" and "PartyOf Five", but page TURNERS. Little cliff hangers at the end ofyour page which force the reader to turn to the next page.

I have been known to add extra spaces or trim entire lines justto end a page on a moment of suspense. If there s a momentwhere the hero is about to be killed but saves himself, I wantthe about to be killed at the end of one page so you have to turnthe page and keep reading to get to the saves himself part.

In fact, I've even added artificial suspense to the end of a page to keep those pagesturning. One of my thriller scripts had a scene where the hero comes home, and hisgirlfriend suggests they go out to dinner. Boring! The hero enters his apartment onthe second to last line on the page... So I added "Hands reach out from behind thedoor and grab him!" (page ends). At the top of the next page, we find out it's hisgirlfriend. Lines like this not only turn your script into a page turner, they addsuspense, reversals, and excitement.

LAST ONE

Fifteen different ways to make your descriptions as exciting as your dialogue. I'vesaved the most important step for last:

Screenwriting is similar to Haiku, you have a limited number of words to paint yourpicture. So imagine your location. Now look for the "high points" - the elements thatdistinguish this location from every other location. Make a list of all of the things thatshow the "personality" of the place. These are the things that expose the "character" ofthe location and turn it from a place into an active part of the story. Now pick themost vivid and evocative things on your list and use them in a one sentence descrip-tion of your location. Something that sums up the place and the people who live thereor frequent this location. The trick is to chose words which imply other words. Wordswhich can not only carry their own weight, but are strong enough to carry entireideas and images. Not just any word - the *right* word. If you think your descriptioncould use a little trimming, take a chainsaw to it. Cut without mercy. Most of us areso in love with our own words that we don't cut enough. Remember: Your writingcan never be too lean or too exciting.



FADE OUT

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