Year: 2008

So, last week I gave a rant that was mostly designed for the novelists and short story writers who regularly look here (all three of them). This week I thought I’d put something out for all the would-be screenwriters who’ve become loyal followers of this blog (both of you).

The rest of you… I have no idea why you keep coming here.

Over the past few months I read scripts for three different screenwriting contests. Two of them are fairly well known. I’m not sure of the exact number, but I probably read well over 200 screenplays in that time period, and I was just helping out part-time.

Seeing this many scripts is, in some ways, a wonderful learning experience. Not only did I get to see the same mistakes made again and again and again (thus reinforcing the fact that I will never commit the same mistake) but I also got to see the entire review process through the eyes of a reader and share my thoughts with other people on this side of the line.

That being said, two important things to remember as I go into this list…

First, readers are human. They generally have to read about a dozen scripts every day (The Stand by Stephen King has fewer pages than a single day’s worth of feature scripts), and they’re usually only making fair to average pay doing it. They get frustrated, they get bored, and they will make snap judgments even when they’re trying to be as fair and impartial as possible. Every time you make it easier for them to render that judgment—one way or the other—you’re doing them a favor.

Second, reading scripts is not about mining for gold, it’s a weeding-out process. For most readers, the job is not to find the best of the best, but to clean away the worst, the barely-adequate, and the mediocre for the higher-paid people above them.

As an additional side note, I’ve determined a simple truth I call the 50% rule. It holds for screenplay contests, and I bet it also counts for anthologies, job applications, and blind dates.

If you take any body of submissions, about half of them will have no business whatsoever being there in that group. These are the submissions where the reader knows by page two there’s no point in turning another page. Maybe it’s because they submitted a western to a sci-fi contest, or vice-versa. Perhaps there’s a 120 page cap and it’s a 200 page screenplay. It could even be handwritten in crayon. One way or another, when you look at the odds for a contest, remember that half those people aren’t even going to be your competition. Or, awful as it may sound, you won’t even be theirs.

Here’s ten of the most common reasons why.

Typos

Yeah, can you believe I’m harping on this again? When I first wrote the “Contest Beat” column for Creative Screenwriting (recently resurrected as “Eyes on the Prize”) I interviewed dozens of contest directors and asked each of them what were some tips for aspiring entrants. Across the board, the answer that every one of them gave was spelling and grammar.

Now, a random typo is not going to sink your chances. We all make mistakes, and readers know that, too. If I’m going through your script and there’s a typo on every page, though… Heck, there were a few screenplays I looked at where I wasn’t even thirty pages in and I’d lost track of how many there were.

Whenever you hand off a manuscript you’re trying to convince the reader that you are an advanced writer. You’re ahead of the average Joe or Jane, someone who can do more with words and letters than just sign their name, send a text message, or scribble a shopping list. The absolute, bare-bones basic tools of writing – any writing– are spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. If you aren’t a master of the basics (you, not your word processor’s spellchecker), how can you hope to do anything advanced?

Apostrophe S

You could argue this goes under typos, but to be honest it’s in a class by itself. Messing up an apostrophe S will stand out on the page like a flare. There is no worse mistake you can make. Seriously. None. As I said above, we all make mistakes now and then, but it’s obvious when a writer’s just throwing down random apostrophes and getting a few right by sheer chance.

Knowing the difference between a plural, a possessive, and a contraction is past basic—it’s a fundamental part of the English language. Stop writing, go get some grammar books like Eats Shoots & Leaves or even just the MLA Handbook and actually read them. Promise yourself, as of this moment, no more guessing or taking wild stabs in the dark. A real writer has to know how apostrophe S works.

Excess Title Info

You would be stunned how many scripts were submitted to these contests with things like MY TITLE—crap draft right on the first page. One didn’t even use the crap, but a more vernacular form. No, I’m serious. Sometimes they’re in the file name with electronic submissions, which is also a bad time to see MY TITLE—(other contest’s name) Submission. Even just plain old MY TITLE—1st draft. Only your first draft? And you thought it was ready for a contest? Well, okay… I guess that’s better than the script that was copyrighted back in 2001 and probably hasn’t been changed since…

Don’t give a reader any reason to prejudge your script. Strip off any and all draft numbers or extraneous comments to yourself before you send it out. I’ve got over a dozen screenplays to read today, and honestly, if you’re going to hand yours off and tell me it’s crap right up front… well, you’re saving me some time, thanks.

The script is about a writer

Seriously, you would not believe the percentage of scripts that are about novelists or wanna-be screenwriters. Out of 150 scripts I read for one contest, nineteen of them had writers as a main character. That’s almost one out of every seven–over 14% of them! They were all awful and not one of them advanced.

Not to sound harsh, but no one cares about the day-to-day struggles you go through as a writer. Trust me, I do it for a living, I know. They also don’t care about the day-to-day struggles of a thinly-fictionalized version of yourself. And they also don’t care about the sheer joy of the creative process, the way impossibly beautiful women and handsome men are drawn to creative types, or the wild, quirky, and outgoing nature every writer has.

And for God’s sake, it’s the worst ending in the world when the writer-character finally sells their book or screenplay, everything is now wonderful and perfect in the world, and they win the Pulitzer/ Oscar/ whatever…

The story never addresses things

It’s okay to have mystery in your story. It’s okay not to reveal everything. Heck, it’s even okay to have wild, absurd coincidences. Many movies and shows have had success by not fully explaining who that cigarette-smoking man is, why that girl down in the well is so evil, or what the heck is going on on that damned tropical island. We all like this sort of stuff, and when it’s done well it what makes your story the one people talk about and remember for ages.

However, these things still need to be acknowledged. A story can’t just get away with “it’s a secret” and expect that readers (and an audience) will just accept it. A reader can see the difference between a real mystery and a bunch of awkwardly-withheld information. It’s also apparent when a writer is keeping a secret and when they’re just trying to be mysterious because… well, people like mysterious stuff.

You can get away with a lot of bizarre stuff if your characters at least acknowledge the mystery or absurdity of it. On the show LOST we found out that someone on the plane was travelling with a pregnancy test. Yet before the audience even had a chance to mock this little bit of deus ex machina, one of the characters did. “Who travels with a pregnancy test?” laughed Kate, trying to calm her friend Sun. And with that, this ridiculous coincidence was addressed and allowed. A few years back in an issue of The Incredible Hulk, writer Peter David had sidekick Rick Jones saved from an exploding Skrull warship because he always wore a mini-parachute under his clothes in case he had to escape from an exploding Skrull warship. When Bruce Banner pointed out how absurd that was, Rick looked up at the sprawling cloud in the sky and said “ What do you mean? I needed it, didn’t I?”

Again, there’s nothing wrong with mystery and coincidence. Just make sure it really is a mystery, not just an attempt to look like one.

Crowd scenes

I read one script that introduced twelve characters in the first ten pages, plus a handful of minor ones. The record was seventeen in the first five pages. As I recently explained to a friend of mine, this is like pouring out a truckload of gravel and asking someone to take note of what color stones they see.

Pace the introduction of characters. If you tell me ten people walk into a room, you don’t need to give me all their names, genders, physical descriptions, and character quirks all at once. We can get to know them as the situation arises.

Confusing names

This may sound a little foolish and obvious, but if your story has characters named Paul, Paula, Paulina, and Paola (and one short I read did) it’s going to be very, very difficult for a reader to keep track of who’s who. Confusing as all hell, to be honest. I mention it because I saw a double-handful of scripts that all suffered from this problem and it was one of the factors that kept most of them from making it to the next level of the competition. If you look at many published novels, you’ll see it’s actually rare to get multiple characters whose names start with the same letter—it just makes for an easy mnemonic. You’re more likely to see Andrew, Bob, Cedric, and Dave than to see Andrew, Angus, Bob, and Bill. The Matrix had Neo, Morpheus, Smith, Trinity, and Cypher. Casablanca has Rick, Elsa, Victor, Louis, and Sam. Raiders of the Lost Ark had Indy, Marion, Belloq, Sallah, and Toht. Even with the huge squad of Colonial Marines in Aliens, the only double-up is Hicks and Hudson.

On a somewhat similar note, if you have a wedding planner named Leslie who’s male, make sure it’s plain and obvious he’s a man. Likewise, if your grease-covered auto mechanic Charlie is a woman, it needs to be clear up front she’s a woman, with no ambiguity at all. Nothing frustrates readers more than to get ten pages in and realize they’ve mentally assigned the wrong gender to a character, because it means they have to go back over everything they just read. So be careful with names like Pat, Chris, Sam, and so on.

Nothing ever happens

Most professional script readers will give you to page ten and then stop reading if they’re not gripped by your words. If your writing in and of itself is phenomenal, they might go along with you until page twenty or so. However by page twenty if there isn’t a definite, solid story happening, your script ends up in the large pile on the left. One script page is roughly one minute of screen time (a little less, actually), so try to find a movie where at least the basic story hasn’t been set out for the audience by twenty minutes in.

If your story (your real story) hasn’t begun by page twenty, look back over your script and see what is happening in those pages. Is it vitally important to the character? Is it advancing the story? If not, you may want to trim it out, or perhaps move it to a later scene.

Pointless changes

A common storytelling device is to take a known story (either fictional or historical) and change an element to put a new spin on it. Disney used to do this quite often with their animated versions of stories like Robin Hood. Another way to look at this is the “What if…” method of storytelling. What if aliens did build the Egyptian pyramids? What if a time traveler killed Kennedy? What if someone won the lottery?

The catch here, of course, is that such a change implies other elements of your story would change. If your team of agents find evidence Kennedy was killed by a time traveler and then continue to deal with the OPEC crisis… what was the point? Why bother to have your main character win the lottery if winning it doesn’t change a single thing in their life?

If you’re going to have a major tweak like this in your story, there should be a reason for it. If you’ve decided to tell the history of the Maya with cgi geckoes acting out all the parts… it should be apparent why.

Short brads

Yeah, this is stupid and it really shouldn’t have anything to do with how your script is received… and yet…

Few things are more frustrating than having a script constantly fall apart while you’re trying to read it. You turn the page, the brads bend, and suddenly you’re holding a pile of fanning papers. And the last thing you want is for a reader to be going through your screenplay and feel constantly frustrated.

If you’re alredy investing forty or fifty bucks to enter a contest, go the extra few feet and get the right size brass brads. You want the big, beefy ones that are over an inch and a half long– enough to go through 120 sheets of paper and have plenty left over to bend back.

There they are. Ten things that crop up again and again, most of which will guarantee you a place in that large, left-hand pile.

So go look at your writing, and make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

Details are prickly things.

I prattled on about them a bit in characters, about how some writers will spend paragraphs on shoes, jewelry, spoken languages, or what have you. Details also came up a bit under the suspension of disbelief, and how getting them right or wrong can save or kill your story.

As it happens, both of these can be symptoms of a problem. This problem is a lot more common in prose than in screenplays, but I’ve seen it both places. It goes by the self-explanatory term overwriting, but I’m going to explain it anyway just in case. After all, if I didn’t, I’d have to go do the dishes and then nobody wins.

Overwriting is when a story gets bogged down with details. It’s when the author starts describing every aspect of a character or a set of actions. Each step of a walk down a hall, every single garment while getting dressed, each hand gesture in an active conversation. Some people may look at such overwritten passages and argue art or depth or beauty of language or some such. My rebuttal is those are all wonderful things when actually present, and there’s also a reason the phrase “starving artist” has stayed in the English language for so many, many decades.

The overwhelming majority of the time, overwriting slows your pacing and pushes the reader inch by inch out of your story. It’s information they don’t need or can figure out for themselves, and the other word for that sort of information, as you may remember, is noise. For example, while I’ve started writing this little rant I checked my email, switched to a different playlist in iTunes, had several sips of Diet Pepsi, talked to the missus, and scratched myself once or thrice. None of it was important to what I’m writing here, so none of it came up here. It’s all just useless details that do nothing to advance the information I’m trying to put forth and you’re trying to read. The same holds true for fiction, be it prose or screenplays. If it doesn’t need to be there, why put it there?

Let’s take a look at two interpretations of a scene and get a feel for which one conveys the required information.

“We’ve confirmed it,” said the voice on the phone. “It’s Mendoza”

“I’ll be right there,” said MacLeod. He hung up the phone and picked up his keys from the phonestand. He walked across the living room and reached for the doorknob. He opened the door, stepped outside, and closed the door behind him before locking the main lock and the deadbolt.

MacLeod walked around his house to the parking slot in the alley. He unlocked the heavy padlock and unwrapped the chain that held the gate shut. He pushed the gate open, got into his car and twisted the key in the ignition. The car backed out with a squeal of tires and a faint scrape from the front driver’s side brake pad that needed replacing. Then he got back out, pulled the gate closed, and re-wrapped the chain. The padlock went on with a snap, he sat back down in the car, closed the door, and shifted into first, switching smoothly into second as he rumbled down towards the main street.

At the end of the alley MacLeod downshifted as the car lunged out into traffic. He turned right onto Alpine, then flipped his directional and took a left onto Beech. He made another right, upshifting as he did, and roared up the Carver on-ramp onto the freeway, accelerating into the leftward-arcing curve with a gradual increase of pressure on his foot.

“We’ve confirmed it,” said the voice on the phone. “It’s Mendoza”

“I’ll be right there,” said MacLeod.

He hung up and left the apartment. Less than three minutes later his car was roaring down the freeway.

* * *

That’s a bit extreme, I admit, but it gets the idea across. They both tell you the facts you need to know, but the first one’s massively overwritten. There comes a point when a writer is just spewing out excess information, be it in their dialogue or in their prose (action blocks for all you screenwriters).

I was looking over an acquaintance’s manuscript a while back and came up with an interesting way of looking at it which may be clearer. “It’s the difference between a cooking show ,” I explained to him, “and a show someone cooks on.” If you flip on the television, on one hand you’ve got folks like Emerill, Martha Stewart, or Bobby Flay. On the other hand there’s Luke and Sooky from Gilmore Girls. They’re all cooks. They all usually have food with them when they’re on screen.

However, you don’t expect Emerill to spend half his show talking about how his date went last night with the woman he met during an open house at his daughter’s school. Likewise, something’s wrong if Luke spends fifteen minutes in the middle of each episode explaining how to make a perfect grilled ham and cheese or why you should always cook french fries in vegetable oil with a few shakes of salt in it. In one case, being a cook is the sole point of the show. In the other, it’s just one small element of the show.

As you’re writing out chapters and scenes, be aware of what they’re actually about. If it’s about an obsessive-compulsive, maybe you do need the list of every dry cleaner bag in his or her closet and the shapes of all seventeen Tupperware containers in the fridge. If it isn’t, well… maybe things would move along a little without all that stuff.

Go look at your writing and see.

I’ve noticed, among some folks, an ongoing confusion between the how of writing and the what of writing. In some cases it passes confusion and just becomes deliberate ignorance (which seems to come with those accompanying screams of “ART!!!”). While there are common threads, one is not the other, and as a professional writer it’s important to know the difference..

How is the unique part of writing. It’s that artistic bit you always hear about when people do research, write extensive outlines, symbolically burn their first drafts, and consume mass quantities of food, booze, and drugs while they search for that one, elusive, perfect word. Was the night hot or was the night humid?

How is unique to each of us as writers. That’s why I have my one golden rule— What works for me might not work for you. And it definitely won’t work for that guy. We’ve all got our own personal quirks and habits and preferences that lead to a finished novel or screenplay or short story.

I got to speak with Kevin Smith a little while ago, and he explained that he only writes a few pages at a time. Then he smokes a lot, goes back, and rewrites them. Then he smokes a bit more, goes back, does some more editing, and moves on to the next scene. By the time he’s done, his script is effectively on his third or fourth draft.

One gent I know writes fairly successful action-adventure novels—three or four a year. He’s got it down to a system where he can plow out thousands of words a day on a notepad, and then the act of typing it up actually becomes his second draft.

Stephen King tends to write in the morning. Neil Gaiman writes at night (or so I’ve heard). My girlfriend needs near-silence to write, and I… well, I had to get a nice set of headphones when we finally moved in together.

There are a lot of habits that work for a lot of people, a few habits that only work for a few people, and vice-versa. In the end, how is when you get to do whatever you want. It’s when you look at all these suggestions about morning routines or dealing with writer’s block and say “No thanks, I’d rather do it this way.”

Three cheers to any of you who write for four or five hours a day, every day, at the same time. Power to you if you always squeeze in some time at the end of the night with your word processor before going to bed. If you can only write on Sundays in a clown suit while standing on your head and using voice-recognition software, congratulations. Not only are you writing regularly, you’re going to make a fascinating interview subject some day.

Now, on the other hand, we have what your finished writing is.

This part, alas, is not so subjective, no matter how hard some folks may like to shriek otherwise.

You must have characters who are believable within their world. The story has to be engaging and has to move along at a pace that will keep readers awake—and it needs to actually go somewhere. Your spelling and grammar need to be perfect.

As many people like to point out (including me), there will always be exceptions to these rules. But they’re exceptions, by definition, because they are the rarity. If you want to do this for a living, the what of your writing is probably going to have to fit within a very common and popular set of guidelines. If you’re going to assume you can be the exception… well, I won’t say that you can’t be, but you’d best be ready for a very long, very strenuous uphill battle.

What it boils down to you is that it’s completely acceptable to write in a clown suit, and feel free to smack anyone who tells you differently (just remember, you’re a writer so odds are they’ll hit back much harder than you). However, writing in a clown suit does not give you cart blanche to say your writing is flawless and beyond question. How you do it is not connected to what you’ve done.

At the end of the day, no matter how we got there, we are all being held up to the same yardsticks. If someone doesn’t measure up, it’s no one’s fault but their own.

So… put that clown suit back on and get back to writing.

I talked a bit about this a while back, but then while talking with the missus the other day I realized an even better analogy for what I was trying to say. And I thought to myself, “Hey, it’s been almost four months and that last post is sooooooooo far down the page now… I mean, no one actually scrolls back on these things, right?”

So…

The rules for writing are a bit like the rules for driving. They weren’t made up by pulling numbers from a hat or throwing darts at a board. People went through lots of trials and setbacks and discussed things with lots of professionals. They looked at past examples that didn’t do so well and ones that were wild successes.

The 55 mph speed limit isn’t just the law, it’s a good, practical idea. Many engineers have shown that most vehicles gets the best ratio of fuel efficiency/ speed at this point. It’s also a very survivable speed in case of accidents, and traffic records show far fewer serious accidents happen at this speed.

Now… does this mean you should always drive 55, no matter what?

Not really. In fact, if the crosswalk ahead of you is filled with nuns and orphans, it might be a good idea to hit the brakes. Same thing in a school zone or residential area. Sometimes 55 is just way too fast.

By the same token, if your girlfriend/ boyfriend/ husband/ wife is in the passenger seat bleeding out from a traumatic injury, going a little faster than 55 might be advisable. The police may even quietly congratulate you for it. To be honest, they’d probably be more than a little suspicious if you insisted on driving the speed limit while your loved one was dying next to you…

In fact, most police officers will tell you that sometimes breaking the speed limit is okay. There are times you can sail down the highway at ten or fifteen miles over the limit and the state trooper driving next to you won’t bat an eye. And there are times you can scrape against 57 miles per hour and they’ll have you on the side of the road instantly. Anyone who’s been driving for a while knows this, and is probably aware of when you can an can’t do it.

So writing is a lot like driving. There are rules, those rules are there for a reason, and editors and agents will punish you if you break them. Sometimes.

For example… some people like to thump their screenwriting bibles and say that you should absolutely never use voice-over in a script. Know what though? Casablanca begins with voice-over. So do The Prestige and Dark City. Layer Cake has almost ten minutes of voice-over from Daniel Craig’s unnamed drug dealer before anyone actually speaks. The Matrix starts with voice-over from two people discussing the main character. The Oscar-nominated short (later expanded to a feature) Cashback is brimming with voice-over.

Are these movies wrong, somehow? Didn’t they work?

The ever-quotable agent Esmond Harmsworth once pointed out that mystery novels should always happen somewhere people want to go on vacation. They happen in Las Vegas, in London, or in the Florida Keys. However, in the same discussion he mentioned one or two manuscripts he was looking at that were set in small towns—but were good enough to overcome breaking that standard.

Your job as a writer is to know when you can break the rules, and by how much. Unfortunately, this is something that cannot be taught or quantified. You just have to learn through practice, the same way it took you a couple of years, a speeding ticket, and a few harsh warnings to figure out the exceptions to the speed limit. Anyone who ever gives you a checklist that says “Rule #3 can only be broken if conditions A, B, F, and Q have all been met” is lying to you. There will always be a clever new way of breaking rule #3 and getting away with it. Always.

The real trick is knowing you’ve actually found that way.

So… go write an exception to the rules.