Category: screenwriting

Well, since not one of you voted last week, I got to seize power again and decide what to rant about this week with no input or opinions. Viva Democracy! The system works!

So, speaking of things working, action can mean a bunch of things. It can be Yakko finally getting a backbone and standing up to his abusive boss. It can be Wakko fighting off cyborg ninjas from the future. It can be Dot running from a serial killer deep in the forest one night because she was doing naughty things at summer camp.

We all want to do cool action, because it’s fun and it’s memorable and it makes producers think “this would look great on the big screen– give that writer a quarter-million dollars!” But most of us have probably read a book or three with painful action descriptions, and any script reader can tell you about the dozens they dropped because the action scenes were sleep-inducing at best.

Probably the most common problem I see with action is a desire to put in all the action. Every single instant of it. Every gunshot, every punch, each flail of the legs as someone tries to climb up a cliff, and all the individual roars of an angry dinosaur.

Thing is, too much detail slows action down. It can be the most amazing bit of kung fu fighting ever, but each time the writer pauses to describe the harsh open-palm strike which is blocked with a swift overhand block which rolls over the wrist and into a hold to create an opening for two quick punches, one to the face, one to the… man, that should be half a second of fighting, but it’s two lines here. That is one slooow, overwritten fight.

Putting in all the action also tends to get messy from a vocabulary point of view. Bad enough the writer is putting in all seventy punches, but they also know that seeing “punch” seventy times on the page is going to get dull. So suddenly the combatants are punching, hitting, striking, whamming, banging, thrusting, pounding, blasting… It starts feeling needlessly complex, and yes, you should also notice that it starts sounding vaguely pornographic as well.

Now, compare all that to this…

Their hands were a blur of strikes, blocks, and counterstrikes.

I didn’t give as much information, but I did convey a much faster, intense scene, and with far fewer words. Fewer words means a faster read, which means a faster fight.

In my mind, action is a lot like character descriptions. You want to give broad strokes and only use fine details when absolutely necessary. Let the reader fill in a lot of it– because odds are they will anyway.

Action, by it’s very nature, is usually fast, so use this as a rule of thumb. If something is only taking a few moments to happen in your story, it should only take a few moments to read. If there’s an important detail that will matter later in the story, sure, add it in. But otherwise, keep it clean and simple.

Another key note… it has to be possible for the reader to visualize the action. One screenplay I read a while back had gladiatorial games where one man was pitted against three hundred. It actually said that in the script– “Now he fights 300 men with just his sword.” This was going on in the background, for the record.

Gigantic action scenes involving a hundred thousand people are cool, but they’re hard for someone to keep in their mind. That’s why such huge battles tend to concentrate on smaller, individual conflicts. In Tolkien’s The Two Towers, thousands fight at Helm’s Deep, but we’re mostly concerned with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. When Dan Abnett writes about the Tanith First and Only on a battlefront, he tends to focus on Gaunt, Mkoll, or Rawne, not on the regiment as a whole. Saving Private Ryan is about World War Two, but it’s mainly about this one small unit of soldiers.

Visualizing can also be a common knowledge problem. It’s cool that the author knows all the Japanese names for every kick, punch, strike, and block from each of fifteen fighting styles… but does the reader know them? Do they need to? From an audience point of view, it there a huge difference between a hail of bullets from an M-16 and the spray of lead from an AK-47? Anything that makes your readers pause to consider what’s going on is slowing down the action and it’s breaking the flow of your writing. Especially watch for this in genre material, where writers can be making up completely unique weapons and fighting styles. It’s great that Nimwadda is a Zonbovac master with his gwerttig, but it’s a lot easier to visualize if I’m told he’s a world champion axe-fighter… even if it’s a special goblin axe.

A special note for screenwriters. A lot of action stuff gets redone on set, for a variety of reasons. Time is one. Money’s another. Plus, let’s face it… most stunt coordinators have a better idea how to set up a cool-looking fight on screen than most writers do. That’s their job, after all. They’re also keenly aware of what’s possible– and what’s safe— for the stunt teams and actors to do. I heard a funny story from the live action Spawn movie, about the petulant writer/ director who was angry a stuntman wouldn’t do one stunt sequence he’d blocked out… because it almost certainly would kill the stuntman.

In a screenplay, worry about setting the mood and tone of an action sequence more than a shot-by-shot description of the sequence itself. The swordfights in The Princess Bride have a very different tone than the ones in Highlander. The slugfests in Rocky are not like the ones in Hellboy. Skim over the action itself, just make it clear what kind of fight it is, which way it’s going, and who wins.

As an example, let’s look at the lobby battle in The Matrix. Neo steps through the metal detector wearing a hundred guns he borrowed from his grandfather’s arsenal and then it’s mass carnage. From the moment we see Neo’s boots coming out of the revolving door to the moment he and Trinity step into the elevator is almost precisely three minutes, fifteen seconds of bullets, karate, acrobatics, and aggressive redecorating.

How long is it in the script?

About half a page. Ten lines.

Neo and Trinity walk in, he guns down the guards. More guards come, they’re gunned down, and our two heroes continue on their way, cool as ice. That’s it.

However, it’s still okay to note key elements of a sequence. In The Princess Bride, we need to know that Inigo and the Man in Black both switch hands during their swordfight, but we don’t need to know which steps their blades clash on as they work their way up the staircase. Watch a couple films with elaborate action sequences, like Equilibrium, Brotherhood of the Wolf, or even (dare I say it) Attack of the Clones. There are long stretches of action, but what stands out? What catches your eye? Remember the “hallway of death” in Equilibrium? We remember the auto-loaders in Cleric’s sleeves, his roll onto the “weeble” clips, and him kicking up the rifle near the end. There’s a lot more to the scene than that, but that’s all you’d need to focus on.

So that’s where the action is, if you’ll pardon the pun. And if you won’t, well… you should’ve voted when you had the chance.

Next week, we bring on the bad guys and talk about why John Saxon never got to play a good screen villain, but Alan Rickman did.

Until then, take action. And go write.

So, Booboo, this week’s title has two references. One’s pop culture, of course, but the other one hearkens way, way back to an article I read in Writer’s Digest when I was in my first year of college. This was when we were between sessions of the Continental Congress.

This is going to be a bit vague at first, so please forgive me.

The man contributing the article was a writer on a sitcom, and his boss had tossed one of his scripts back at him with the words “You have to earn the right to use the bear suit.” When the baffled writer asked for an explanation, he was told this story. I believe it was a Honeymooners episode in the original telling, but I’m not sure so I’m going to substitute in characters from another sitcom as I tell it to you. Trust me, it won’t make a difference…

So, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot decide they’re going to go camping up in the mountains. But Dot’s been a bit uppity lately so Yakko and Wakko come up with an idea. They get a grizzly bear suit and stash it in the car. When they get up there, Yakko will sneak away and put the costume on, then “attack” the campsite. Wakko will play along, Dot will get a good scare and get her comeuppance. Loads of fun.

Well, they get up to the campsite and Yakko heads into the woods with the costume, but he gets lost and can’t find his way back. Meanwhile, a real grizzly ends up wandering into camp and rummaging around. Dot is petrified and Wakko decides to have some fun with “Yakko” by making it seem like the bear is–

Look, do I really need to explain this any further? You’ve all seen this story at least a hundred times, yes? It was such a well-received gag everybody copied it. And continued to copy it. And they’re still doing it today.

The bear suit is a tired gag. It’s a cliché. It’s something we’ve all seen again and again and again and again, in books, comics, television shows, and movies. The two identical characters that confuse people. The funny new catchphrase or non-sequitor reference. The insane villain. The character who gets amnesia or loses their superpowers. All of these are things people have seen so many times they’ve gone past yawning and just roll their eyes.

Oftentimes, the bear suit is the path of least resistance. It’s the easiest way to deal with a need or problem in the writer’s story and the quickest way to create an obstacle. And a lot of people tend to jump at the first solution they can find, rather than look for the best solution.

And that’s really the problem. Since so many people jump at the bear suit, it’s common. It’s dull. Editors and producers have seen it a hundred times this month alone. If they’re going through your work and they find that dusty old thing laying around, your manuscript instantly goes into the big pile on the left.

Let’s try a little exercise. Here are three pretty standard plot devices.

–Two high schoolers get left alone in their palatial home when their parents go away for a week.

–Six teenagers head off into the woods to restore the old summer camp by the lake.

–A man completely focused on his career has to spend a long weekend with a flighty blonde who loves animals.

You probably got an immediate idea off each one. If your first thoughts were throw a wild party, get picked off by a serial killer, and fall in love, don’t feel too bad. What matters is where you go from there. Toss out that first thought and come up with another one. Then toss that one and come up with a third. Toss it again and scribble down a fourth.

Y’see, Timmy, this is one of those complicated points of writing where it’s hard to give a guideline. Often, when you’re writing, you want to go with your gut. You want your words to be honest and not have a lot of analysis and formulae and overthinking behind them.

At the same time, however, you want to be careful about going with your first thoughts, because odds are they’re a lot of other people’s first thoughts, too. This is also why serious writers have to read a lot, and why serious screenwriters need to see a lot of movies. If you don’t know what’s out there, you might already have the bear suit on and not even know it. Heck, yours may be completely moth-eaten and you think it’s going to scare someone in the woods.

Now, here’s the catch. As I mentioned above, you can earn the right to use the bear suit. If you’ve already got a solid track record, if everything around it is gold (or at least well-polished silver), every now and then you can get away with using the old gag. Christopher Priest used one of the most tired ideas in literature for the ending of The Prestige, but did it so well it still blew people away. Stephen King took the tired idea of the Indian burial ground and then took it past the first or second idea to very creepy and popular third idea.

Again though– that’s the exception, not the rule. If you want to do this writing thing for real, your first decision can’t be to reach for the bear suit.

Next week, I’m finally going to do a Michael Jackson memorial pop culture reference. I would’ve done one sooner but, well… I didn’t care that much.

Oh, and if you’ve got a few dollars to spare, I have been gently jabbed by mine editor to shamelessly remind you all Cthulhu Unbound 2 is now for sale. Check out the Amazon link over there on the side, pick it up, and feel free to mock my contribution to it.

And even if you buy it, shipping means you’ll still have time to go write this week.

So get to it.

This week’s really for the budding screenwriters who stop by here on a regular basis (all three of you). Writers of prose… next week I promise to have something for you, but feel free to read along. At the core of it, good writing is good writing, and while I’m discussing these things in terms of screenplays there may be a general tip or two to glean here. After all, we’re all just trying to connect with an audience beyond our mom, our significant other, or that weird guy with the beret down at the coffee shop.

Yeah, him. You know who I mean.

So, anyway, you smell that? That sharp tang in the air, like hot mint? That’s contest season, that is. And it’s in full swing. Time to clean off the desk, sharpen our quills, and win an award or three. Perhaps even some cash.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve watched the contest scene from both sides. I’ve placed in a bunch of competitions– and when I say placed I don’t mean I got the honorary quarter-finalist position everyone who entered got. I’ve also read for several contests and spent long weekends going through script after script, often seeing the same basic mistakes (and a few phenomenally original ones) again and again. So I know the kind of things that make a reader cringe and shake their head. In one or two cases, only the timely intervention of booze kept me from gouging my own eyes out..

A few months back I mentioned some of the basic mistakes which quickly add up to sink a script. In a few cases, they can sink it in one shot. If you’re getting ready to send a script out to Austin, AAA, or that great brass ring known as the Nicholl, you should probably check through those first and possibly save yourself thirty or forty bucks.

Once you’ve taken care of the basic stuff, here are a few more hints of things to watch for and avoid.

The Director’s Draft

Every now and then a script shows up littered with stage direction, camera angles, parentheticals, editing notes, and so on. I saw one fellow on a message board who was furious his feedback had told him to eliminate such things, and it had been counted against his screenplay. As he saw it, he was planning to shoot this film himself with his friends, so not only were these notes in his script acceptable– they were necessary!

Alas, they really aren’t, and as a screenwriter you have no business putting them there unless they are absolutely relevant to telling the story. There’s nothing wrong with writing a screenplay to direct yourself, but that’s a different type of script than what you send to a competition. It’s kind of like the difference between a spec draft and an actual shooting script.

When your script goes into a contest, it’s just a script. It isn’t the screenplay you’re going to make with your friends and it certainly isn’t the screenplay you’re going to direct. It’s just a screenplay, one standing up all on its own against all the others in the contest. And if yours is filled with a lot of camera angles and parentheticals that shouldn’t be there, well… that’s probably why it’s going into the large pile on the left.

Focus

I talked about this in a post a few weeks back, too, so you can look at that for more specifics. For now, just remember it’s always better to get one polished script submitted to a contest than half a dozen rough ones. No one’s going to win anything with the first draft of a script. Or even the second draft. Focus your efforts and don’t get distracted by every new idea that flutters across your mind’s eye.

Yes, Paul Haggis writes almost flawless first draft scripts. Crash was a first draft. So was Flags of Our Fathers. Paul Haggis has also been writing screenplays professionally for almost thirty years. He was a writer on Diff’rent Strokes, believe it or not. So when your writing resume is that long and you‘ve got so many Oscars you’re using them to prop up crooked tables in the kitchen, feel free to send a first draft off to a contest just for kicks.

Until then, go do another draft.

Therapy Scripts

There’s an interesting sub-group of screenplays that seem to have sprung out of some psychology movement or group coping session. Maybe a class exercise of some kind. Usually they involve someone telling off their mother. Or their father. Or their abusive boyfriend. Or their cheating husband. Many of these scripts involve female protagonists, but only enough so it’s worth mentioning. The overall feeling of them is you’re reading a story somebody wrote to help them work through some issues. The object wasn’t to tell a story, but to cleanse and purge or something like that.

The big problem with these scripts is there’s rarely anything to them beyond this big moment of therapeutic release. Everything leads up to that, and not much happens after it. That moment is all the character development and conflict in the script. So, in the end, it’s just a story about someone throwing out their abusive spouse or learning to trust again or yelling at their shrewish mom. And nobody wants to read that. Not even Oprah. Definitely not a contest reader.

Reality is not a Story Point

Closely related to the therapy script is the reality script. More often than not, the title page or closing cards reassure the reader this tale is, in fact, based on true accounts of me/ my parents/ my best friend/ someone I read about in a magazine article. These are tales of cancer survival (or not), orphans, Rwandan genocides, military struggles, and various other unsung heroes and villains of this world we live in. Alas, sometimes they’re also about struggling writers searching for someone to recognize their genius. Often, the fact this is a true story is stressed to give a certain validity and gravitas to what the reader is about to take in.

Thing is, no one cares if the story is true or not. Nobody. They just care if it’s a good story and it’s well-told. And in that respect, this tale of an orphaned cancer survivor in Rwanda needs to stand up against the story of a black-ops secret agent who teams up with aliens to save the world from prehistoric lizard men that’ve just reappeared with the no-longer-lost continent of Atlantis. Whether or not one is a true story is irrelevant. If one’s difficult to read and the other one isn’t, if one has flat characters and the other one doesn’t, if one’s boring and the other one isn’t– these are what decide if a script is any good or not. In the end, you are telling a story, and it’s either going to have its own validity or it isn’t. Reality just doesn’t enter into the equation for the reader, so it can’t for the writer.

If you want a few more thoughts on this, I talked about this aspect of writing in general way back here.

Musicals

Believe it or not, I’m a straight man with a long-time girlfriend who loves Broadway and even a number of musical films that have been made over the past decade or so (although she has made comments about some of the things in my iTunes library). Moulin Rouge was fantastic. Dreamgirls was fun. Across the Universe… not so much so.

The point being, though, musical screenplays are almost impossible to pull off as specs and they always make contest readers groan. Lyrics on the page are great, but you can’t assume the reader is going to be someone with a flawless sense of rhythm and pacing. Without the actual music setting the mood and the tone, lyrics are just poetry. Often very awkward and clumsy poetry. Which means they are awkward and clumsy lines of dialogue. And awkward, clumsy dialogue is the kind of thing that gets a script tossed into that left-hand pile.

It’s probably worth noting I’ve seen a few comedy scripts which tried to do parodies of other songs. However, unless you can absolutely guarantee your reader knows the song, this faces all the same issues as the original songs up above. Since most readers are also writers, that means they’re lonely, pathetic shut-ins… definitely not the type of folks you should gamble on knowing the latest Katy Perry, Audioslave, or Rhianna songs.

Fact Check Everything

Well, okay. Not everything. Any screenplay is going to have a degree of stretching the truth and perhaps even ignoring it once or twice.

However, in this wonderful information age we live in, you shouldn’t have any trouble discovering how tall the World Trade Center was ( Tower One stood at 1,368 feet (417 meters)/ 110 stories), if Karnak temple is north or south of the Sphinx (south, by several hundred miles), or when World War Two ended. And it’s important to know these things, because if you say the World Trade Center was twenty-three stories tall and WWII ended in 1951, people are going to call you on it. I know I did. A blatant error is going to stand out, and it’s going to be yet another thing that tells a reader this is not a professional, polished script.

I can admit I’m fairly well-read, and a little quirk in my brain lets me remember a lot more stuff than most people would believe possible. There are a lot of people out there with fields of expertise, though, and they’re going to spot stuff.

Consider this—who’s going to know how many rounds a standard M-16 magazine holds? Or how much it weighs? All sounds a bit obscure, right? Well, now consider in the United States alone there are over 2.28 million enlisted men and women in the armed forces (counting reserves). Let’s double that number to include retirees and folks who’ve been discharged for one reason or another. Now add in all the NRA folks and military enthusiasts who just like this sort of stuff. Suddenly there are a lot of people who are going to be shaking their heads at your “weapons expert” character.

If you can Google a fact, it should be correct. Unless you’ve got a truly spectacular reason why it should be wrong.

The Language Barrier

It’s been said England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. Feel free to add in Australia and make that relationship a three-way. While we may all speak “English,” anyone who’s traveled (or watched BBC America) knows there are words and phrases that change from country to country.

At the end of the day, though, Hollywood is in America, which means a screenplay going there for a competition should be using American spelling, phrasings, and formatting. It may not be “proper” in your eyes, but it will to your reader. If not, your reader’s going to get distracted by words that look (to his or her eyes) like typos at first glance, and then really distracted when he or she hits an actual mistake.

This is one of the easiest things to fix, though. Through the wonders of the internet, most of us have a friend or three who live in other countries. Get in touch with one of yours and ask them to look through your screenplay. Just go over it and spot some of the odd little differences in spelling, wording, and phrasings that work differently here than they do there. If you don’t have any friends, well… I think the nice lady at A Buck A Page charges pretty reasonable rates.

Remember, two weeks after deadline is not when you want to find out “Tim was nibbling on one of Sophie’s pasties” means something very different in the U.S. than it does in the U.K.

So, polish up, revise, and rewrite. The Page contest isn’t going to win itself, after all.

Next week… I have no idea what we’ll talk about next week, past focusing it on the prose folks. I’ll just start writing next Thursday and we’ll all see what happens.

So, we’ve all been at this for… what, a couple months now? Well over a year since I made that very first post, by my count. Of course, I took some time off so I can hardly point the finger if you did, too.

Anyway, let’s not nitpick. There’s not much time before the New Year and we’ve got important stuff to discuss.

What have you written so far?

I don’t want you to talk about what you’ve planned. Not interested in any great ideas you’ve had. Don’t care who you had lunch with, what clever software you bought, or what fascinating research you’ve done.

The question is, what have you written?

Easy question, right? How many words have you set down on paper? How many new Word documents or Final Draft files have been created on your computer since you first looked at this half-witted, rambling set of rants I call a blog?

At the end of the day, this is the first marker you have to pass if you want to be a writer. You have to write.

If you’re still getting around to it, playing with a few things, or trying to find the right time when you’re in the right mood—you’re not a writer. You’re one of those folks in the coffee shop who wears a beret, puts on a fake accent, and loves to tell anyone who’ll listen about how everything put out by Hollywood and the big publishers is complete crap and, oh, the fantastic work you would share with the world except there’s no one else as brilliant you to understand it.

Okay, you’re probably not that bad…

Stop and ask yourself, though. If you keep looking here and you haven’t written anything… why not? What’s been holding you back? What are you waiting for? Because believe me, it never gets any easier. If you can’t find the resolve to even get started, do you really think you’re going to be able to keep at it long enough to finish a novel? Or a screenplay? Heck, even just a short story?

Again, what it all comes down to is the writing. If you want to call yourself a writer, you have to write. That’s it. Not just talk about it. Not buy books or software to help you do it. It doesn’t even count if you read ranty blogs about writing.

The joy of this little failing, though, is it’s easy to fix. Just go sit down at your desk and write. That’s all it takes.

In the past year or so since I started taking this collection of rants somewhat seriously, I’ve paid the rent by writing a few dozen articles for Creative Screenwriting (including one about comic book movies I was pretty happy with). I got to interview a bunch of heavyweight filmmakers like David Goyer, Kevin Smith, and Zack Snyder. I also did a bunch of film and DVD reviews (and let me save you the trouble—Scorpion King 2 is just not worth it. Don’t sink to that level. You deserve better, seriously).

I’ve also written four short stories, two of which are being published next year in two separate anthologies. At the moment I’m working on two more which are both past the halfway mark.

I placed in three different screenwriting contests with my script Reality Check. It’s sort of a sci-fi, metafiction, comedy film. With giant monsters and spaceships. And enough genre references to make a geek’s head explode.

And there was the novel, Ex-Heroes, which was written in its entirety this year. It started out as a mild rant to a friend and then mixed with a few superheroes I’d made up back in high school. I got the contract from the publisher today, and if all goes well it’ll be on book shelves, Amazon, and Oprah’s reading list sometime next year.

Oh. And I managed to post here two or three times a month pretty faithfully. Well, until the eggnog showed up and productivity dropped to a crawl.

Now, granted, I’m in that lucky small percentage of folks who does this full time, but really there’s no real excuse for not writing. Stephen King wrote Carrie while he was teaching high school. David Goyer wrote his first screenplay while he was fetching coffee and making copies as an office PA. Clive Cussler started his long-running Dirk Pitt series (Raise the Titanic ring a bell?) while he was doing ad copy.

We must write.

Make that your New Year’s resolution. A page a day. Just one page. A mere two hundred and fifty words if you double-space. If you can write one page a day, you’ll have a short story by the end of January, a screenplay by the time May rolls around, or a solid novel this time next year. All that, out of just one measly page a day.

Happy New Year to all nine of you reading this.

Now go write that page.