Hola, my fellow readers and writers!
I’m writing this newsletter from the rocky, sun-coated shores of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. I have taken myself away on holiday for a much-needed break following an epic five-week writing sprint.
Alas, I did not spend the last five weeks feverishly penning a new novel. Instead, I have been writing a six-part comedy-drama series which is shooting in March.
March, this year.
As in, one and a half months away.
Burying myself in the world of scriptwriting has reignited a passion for the craft of screenplays. I have a few hours of produced films behind me as a writer, and I’d love to share the most important facets of what I’ve learned about writing for the screen.
Ah, the romantic nostalgia for screenwriting…
🎥 Four Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting Your Script
1. Who Are You Writing For?
Whether writing for the screen or the page, the goal remains the same. You’re still writing words on a page to evoke an emotion in your readers’ hearts and an image on the movie screen in their heads.
As always, the most important consideration when writing is: THE READER.
With a book, the reader is … well, the reader. Whoever picks up your book hoping to be moved and entertained, scared or aroused.
With screen work, the reader is the audience. First and most important, as always, know your audience. Write your story, characters and plot with heart, as you wish to see it on screen.
However, a screenplay is a blueprint for other people from which to build a visual product. It is a document meant for more than simply entertaining.
You have many different readers with different motivations. For example, in writing this particular project, I wrote a story aimed at 18-30 year-olds who love comedy, relationships, and have an interest in class dynamics. When penning the script — the blueprint — I had other readers to consider.
- My co-writer and co-director.
I created the concept of this show with my main collaborator Chye-Ling and we are (mostly) on the same page about why we want to make this show. We have done extensive work figuring out the tone, the comedy, the heart, and the characters. When I write, I ask myself: Will Chye-Ling (the collaborator in question) get this? Will she see what I’m seeing? - Our producer.
Joyce is our second reader and she’s in charge of the money, but she’s also a watchperson for our broadcaster, our department heads, and our audience. When I’m writing, I’m asking: Will Joyce think we can pull this off? Can we get this outrageous scene past the broadcaster? Will the production accountant allow us to spend money on this stunt? - Our collaborators.
A film or television production set contains an extensive array of skilled practitioners. We have our DOP (Director of photography, sometimes referred to as a Cinematographer) who’s in charge of how we capture the story on camera. We have our Art Director who’s in charge of production design, sets and props. Wardrobe, Makeup, Safety, Schedulers, Sound, Lighting, Music Composer. Each of these people will read the scripts and see two things: opportunities to shine, and a shopping list. - Our Cast.
The wonderful actors in charge of bringing the words to life with their own bodies and mouths and hearts. They will, of course, be reading the scripts and picturing how best to portray the character. There needs to be enough words to paint a clear picture of a real person, but also not too much to be prescriptive. An actor needs a certain degree of autonomy over the character so they can feel ownership over them.
With all of these readers considered, the screenplay needs to be many things at once: entertaining, informative, and most importantly, concise.
Why is concision the most important? Because as a rule, each page of script equals one minute of screentime. So, for a 22-minute episode, we are limited to 22 pages.
And those 22 pages add up quickly.
Look at all that white space!
The correct formatting of a screenplay is a meticulous craft to learn. Let’s dive deeper.
2. How Do You Format for Screen?
Learning the formatting of screenplays is a trip. If you’ve acted before or been involved in any sort of screen production, the look of a script will be familiar to you.
It’s familiar to me because I’m a big nerd. Films have excited me since I was a young boy and I would regularly skip classes at high school to hide out in the computer room reading movie scripts and learning how they were formatted.
Since then, I’ve worked on gigantic films (The Hobbit trilogy back in 2011-2013), independent films, theatre plays, TV shows, commercials, music videos and short films. All of these mediums use a broadly similar format.
That’s an example of a scene header. It tells you where the scene takes place (INT means interior; EXT means exterior) and what time of day. Some productions underline the scene heading, some have two line spaces before it, and some only one.
Action is what you call the text which explains what’s happening in the scene. Then you’ve got Character Names, Dialogue, Parentheticals (brief information in brackets about how a line might be inferred), and Transitions (FADE IN, FADE OUT, CUT TO:).
The more you read scripts, the easier they are to visualise, and the quicker you can scan a page and feel how it might play out on screen. The formatting of screenplays has been set in stone for decades and there are strict industry standards which can sound insanely anal-retentive.
You will get judged harshly if you fail to use the correct margin sizes, and don’t even think about using a font size other than 12 point, or a font type other than Courier. Thankfully, there are loads of script-writing apps around nowadays that take away the headache of formatting.
Here are some examples of films and their different scripts:
Scripts are formatted to be a lot more spaced out and sparse than a novel’s prose. Which means the writers’ job is complicated by the need for precision and consicion.
3. What Words Should You Use?
In a novel, you can paint a picture. You can make a second last ten pages, or you can make one hundred years zoom by in the time it takes to read four words: One Hundred Years Later.
With a screenplay, you are confined by temporal chains. As I mentioned above, each page of script roughly equals one minute of screentime. So, you must exercise incredible restraint with your word count.
With trembling fingers, Georgina reached out for her lover’s hand. Myriad thoughts swirled through her mind like a cyclone, the debris of which reached out an stoked the fires of her heart. Would he reject her? Would he cast a withering look upon her outstretched fingers and simply turn away? Or would he, after a second’s hesitation, grasp her hand back? Pull her into a warm embrace? Kiss her? How would she know his true feelings?
Etc, etc. The moment of Georgina reaching for a dude’s hand can last pages. We can even go back into her memories and discover all the experiences that have led to her trepidation. But on screen, a person reaching for another person’s hand is open to interpretation.
Does it happen quickly? Slowly? Tentatively? Confidently? Either way, the screenplay version of the same moment might look like this:
Now it’s up to the actors and director to decide how the moment plays out.
When writing a screenplay, you must be efficient and economical. An infamous example of this is the script for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The Battle of Helm’s Deep lasts for just over twenty-two minutes in the finished film. In the script, it read:
Apocryphal or not, the sentiment can be interpreted as good advice. A good writer is sparing, allowing the filmmakers to fill in the white space.
This brings us to the final and most important difference between writing for books versus writing for screen:
4. What Do You Do With Your Ego?
To be a good screenwriter is to respect your collaborators. They are telling the story with you. The director, actors and editor will all take your script and transform it. They might butcher it, sure. But if you want them to elevate it, you must give them room to do so.
Pull back. Say less.
Your job is to tell a story for others to interpret. Every detail you include must be second-guessed.
Does this character need to have brown hair?
Do I need to mention the painting on the wall of this location just because I see it in my head?
Does this line of dialogue need to be ‘Stop! Back away from the car!’ or would the scene be stronger if I have the character gesture with his gun?
Overwriting dialogue is an easy trap to fall into. In a screenplay, every line of dialogue must do three things:
- Say something about the character
- Move the plot forward
- Be entertaining
If there’s a line that fails to tick all three boxes, you must consider removing it.
It takes a long time and a lot of effort to ‘finish’ a screenplay. The first draft is easy. You can just go wild, spewing your thoughts out, dictating the scene as you see it happening. The real-time is taken when you rewrite and trim. The irony is that making your script shorter takes a long time.
As Blaise Pascal said in one of my all-time favourite quotes,
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time
The point is, it takes time to be concise. And I would argue that it takes more than time, it takes impressive strength to restrain yourself. We all want the world to know how brilliant we are, but in a screenplay, you are only as brilliant as your ability to collaborate.
📣 Shout Out to: Writer’s Routine Podcast
Writer’s Routine is a wonderful podcast that I’ve spent many hours listening to.
Dan interviews authors and asks them specifics about their writing life, down to the font they use. The conversations inevitably go deeper than that and this week I loved listening to the episode with Terry Hayes, the author of I Am Pilgrim and the much anticipated The Year of the Locust which released this month.
Available wherever you listen to your podcasts.