Welcome to Hacksville...

There is quite a strong online screenwriting community which seems to mainly consist of screenwriting hopefuls who will blog about every positive comment they have ever received from a professional in the film and television industry, and actual screenwriting professionals who complain about how poor, clichéd, and mistake ridden the scripts from screenwriting hopefuls are.

A blog I enjoyed reading was Screenwriting Tips...You Hack. It is written by a script reader called Xander Bennett and it basically consists of the don’ts of screenwriting. This blog is a collection of short, snide tips about screenwriting, originally in the form of Tweets. In this blog, there is a range of technical, plot, and character tips. Some examples are:

Screenwriting Tip #18
Don’t use “air quotes” when they’re “completely unwarranted”.

Screenwriting Tip #42
Don’t have your protagonist’s family members keel over dead in lieu of having an actual Act 2 Dark Point. Random events like this should be the icing on the cake of your protagonist’s misery, not the sum total of it.

This is quite a good point. There should not be coincidences in a screenplay in Act 2. Coincidences are anti-climatic. They are a cop-out and undermine the process of setting up and establishing the elements in Act 1. They are unsatisfying to read.

He also makes snarky comments about clichés in screenplays.

Screenwriting Tip #40
There shall be no characters climbing out of bathroom windows to escape bad dates, nor indeed bedroom windows to escape grounding. It’s shit. A gibbon with a typewriter could probably do better.

Screenwriting Tip #62
‘Ethnic Guy Who Swears Five Times In Every Sentence’ isn’t a character, it’s a bad SNL sketch. (And Apatow already did it better than you.)

Look at his blog for more tips.

Totally scripted! Part two.

A point I raised in part one of ‘Totally Scripted’ was that screenplays are generally filled with minimally worded and concise sentences. This is because each sentence in a script describes an image the camera will focus on. There is a mirroring relationship between the length of description of a object in a screenplay and the length of time the shot is shown in the film.

For example, if a screenplay simply said ‘apple’ it would be a one second shot of an apple. But if the screenplay said ‘a single green apple glistens in the sun’, it would be a five or six second shot of the apple. If the screenwriter simply wanted to have a longer shot of the apple, but with nothing special about it, they would write this:

Apple.

BEAT.

In theory, it should take the same amount of time for a reader to read the script as it should to watch the movie.

The often quoted adage “less is more” is very appropriate for screenwriting. Viewers are very familiar with film logic and do not need to have things spelt out or over explained. If there is a close-up on a knife, then the viewer will make the connection that the knife has some relevance. Maybe it is the murder weapon, or it is the key to unleashing a powerful warlock whose life mission is to wreck havoc onto the world. Chances are, unless it is a red herring, if it is written into a script than the image or object has some meaning or relevance to the outcome of the story. It would be cut out in the editing process if there was none. Screenplay audiences are assumed to be intelligent and adept at understanding film logics. Read screenplays if you enjoy not being treated like a person with a low IQ.

Totally Scripted! Part one.

As a reader, scripts can be very satisfying to read. Even as a standalone without having seen the film or with the intention of seeing it. The actual script is very visual as the purpose of a script is to show what the viewer sees, not what the director envisages. What is written in a script is exactly what is shown on the screen.

For example, if the screenwriter wanted to have a close up on a dagger dripping with blood, the script would say this:

Dagger drips with blood.

It would not say:

The camera does a close up on a dagger dripping with blood so that the viewer can see how gruesome the murderer was.

Putting what the writer wants the viewer/producer/director to feel in the script is pointless because this does not translate onto screen. There is no way for the writer to tell the viewer that they are meant to feel horrified by the gruesome murder, unless they see images on the screen that make them feel that way (or unless they are watching the directors commentary). The viewer cannot know that the murder was meant to be gruesome until the images they see on the screen evokes that sense of feeling in them.

Scripts are good to read because they use concise, minimal language. If as a reader, you get annoyed by texts bogged down by descriptions, and you do not like reading books that have the quality of a best-seller, you should read movie scripts. Hundreds of scripts can be downloaded for free on-line from IMSDb and other sites that offer a free script library.

A novel way to use screenwriting.

Most screenplays use positive and negative story beats. Alternating story beats aids the progression of the story, creates and resolves tension so that the viewer is not in a continual state of depression or euphoria, and keeps the viewer interested by adding different emotional elements to the story.

Positive and negative story beats basically mean that something good will happen and then something bad will happen. If the storyline is depressing, like the main characters are being tortured in a POW camp on a Pacific Island that is about to be flooded due to rising sea levels, humour is often used as a positive beat to ease the tension that the negative story beats have created. A script cannot be completely positive or completely negative as there would be nothing to drive the story and the viewer would not want to keep watching. A story like this would not be satisfying to watch as there are no odds that are overcome or questions that are answered (even if the answer is that there cannot be anyway to know for sure).

While this is part of screenwriting convention, it can also be used in fiction novels. ‘A Spot of Bother’ by Mark Haddon is a good example of a novel that uses positive and negative story beats. Haddon is a screenwriter and author of the acclaimed novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”.

Another book I have read recently that uses positive and negative story beats is “Confessions of a Shopaholic” by Sophie Kinsella. If the story was just about the protagonist spiralling into debt and buying more clothing and accessories, and drowning her financial sorrows in alcohol because she is unsatisfied with her career as a financial journalist, the reader would stop reading as they would feel an overwhelming sense of despair and boredom. While her situation becomes fairly dire, humour plays a big part in dissolving tension and alternately creating tension to counteract the negative story beats.

In this book, when something bad happens, it gets worse and then it gets worse and then it gets worse again. The protagonist, Becky Bloomwood takes on casual employment working in a clothing store to make some extra cash to pay off the debt she has accrued. On her first shift, she spots a pair of jeans that she must have on sale. Unfortunately for her, a customer is going on a boyfriend sponsored spending spree and wants to buy these jeans. Becky decides The jeans are the most important thing to her, so when the girl takes them to the changing rooms to try on, Becky uses her power as a shop assistant and proclaims that the girl has too many items so she is not allowed to take the jeans into the changing rooms. Becky hides the jeans, and when the girl gets out she demands to try them on, but Becky refuses. The girl makes a scene, which attracts the manager’s attention. Becky is fired from this job, only after working there one day. When she is walking home she finds out her next door neighbour’s son, who her neighbours believe she fancies, is the boyfriend of the girl trying on the jeans in the shop.

If humour was not present in this situation, aiding the positive and negative story beats, this novel would not be enjoyable and satisfying to read.