Simplify the writing and decrease the friction.

The Story and Plot Weekly Email is published every Tuesday morning. Don't miss another one.

This week in the ​Story and Plot Pro​ community, we broke down the structure of the 2006 thriller FLIGHTPLAN, which relies on an overly complicated master plan from the antagonists.

We tend to focus on story structure in these breakdowns (this is a community-wide thing we do inside Pro – it’s fun and very helpful), but there was no joy in finally realizing what the mysterious plan was – and that’s a big reason why the third act didn’t work for many of us.

It was one of those implausible plans that had at least half a dozen single points of failure. That is, if any of those single things go wrong, the entire thing fails.

Then on Friday, I was ​helping a writer​ on his first 20 pages, and I was referencing this very same concept, except now, I was talking about an overly complicated sentence on his first page!

I talk about the overly complicated sentence a lot. Comparing it to an overly complicated plan for a heist is new.

It reminded me it was past time to talk about the former in a Weekly Email.

The overly complicated sentence.

Part of telling stories through motion pictures is choosing what the audience sees and focuses on, and the editorial choice of how we want the audience to feel about it.

My goal when writing on spec is to:

Evoke the emotional and visual experience of watching the movie on screen.

The more complicated the sentence, the more difficult it is to do that.

Like the overly complicated heist, the overly complicated sentence has multiple single points of failure.

It creates friction with the reader.

If one thing goes wrong, the whole thing can fall apart. This could mean the reader visualizes the wrong thing or nothing at all.

Perhaps they get confused and need to go back to reread. Any sentence that needs to be read twice is a failure.

They may even understand the information, but they’re not visualizing a movie – they’re reading a narrative instead.

Any of these may mean you lost control of the reader’s experience. Which means you have not done your job as well as you could.

We are taught towards complexity.

Most of us acquired the bad habit of complicated sentences in school. Academia rewards it because our job there is to prove that we can do it. And as we measured our own growth, we got little dopamine hits with them, too!

All those words, all those clauses, and we still wrote a single, grammatically correct sentence! Simple sentences are for kids, right?

Or so we thought.

But when we write for an audience, we have a different job. We have a specific intention. Whether it be an emotion, an image, or anything else.

We measure our success solely by whether we achieve that specific intention or not.

And more often than not, the simpler and cleaner the sentence, the more effective the sentence is.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

So let’s get out of the theoretical and into some examples. This is something from one of my UH students (Go Coogs!)

What’s wrong with this sentence? Nothing. On its own, it’s okay. Not great, but it’s fine. It’s a grammatically proper sentence.

But that doesn’t mean it serves the writer’s intention well.

Even beyond the past tense/present tense issue, this is a very different sentence in a screenplay than it is in a short story or novel.

In a screenplay, we’re asking it to do a lot of work simultaneously. We are letting the words tell us information directly, rather than through the images in each moment.

And that’s not how we watch a movie.

A movie is active, and while there may be 24 frames per second, it’s still only one frame at a time.

One moment at a time.

Since we are trying to evoke that experience of watching a movie on screen, we are going to write one present moment at a time, too.

If we try to cram too much into that moment, it feels like something other than a movie.

The compression of time feels rushed and more like, well… writing.

Look at all this sentence is trying to do:

1. She’s African-American.
2. Her name is CAIDI DONNE.
3. She’s 18.
4. She strides up to the gate.
5. To the bouncers.
6. She’s determined.
7. She’s flashing a flyer.

That’s a lot to pack into a single moment! Unlike academia, where we formed this habit, we don’t get points for squeezing everything into one sentence.

In fact, it hurts us.

Better to divide it into multiple sentences. Sentences that try to do too much tend to weaken each part.

Simple is better. Clear and purposeful is better. One moment at a time.

Since this is a movie, these moments will come in the order the audience would experience them if they were watching the movie. You could call it the cinematic order.

The audience notices action first.

So write the action first, and don’t interrupt the action with details that wouldn’t interrupt that action in the movie.

And then use your writing to create time.

Paragraphs are particularly useful for this. As we talk about in my classes, paragraphs are our primary instrument, not sentences.

If we use our writing to create time, we then create the moment the audience absorbs the other details right after they notice the action. So…

This is the action. This is the thing we notice first. THEN, we let the reader catch the details of the girl. Let them see the movie first. Then follow that with…

We are, in effect, giving the reader a closer visual to absorb more. And then follow that with the next action.

This sequence of sentences allows the moments to happen one after the other – like a movie – rather than all at once.

But does all this matter?

I spend far more time and energy on my action lines than I do my dialogue. I do what most writers do: I fight over every word, every sentence.

It’s a lot of work. A lot of effort.

One might ask, is it worth it? Is this:

Really that much worse than:

One time? Not really.

I mean, sometimes you’re talking about .01% better here and .02% there, right?

More stylistic preference than anything else.

But over time? Yes. The latter is better.

Over a hundred pages, enough of those small percentage points add up. The screenplay feels more confident and less rushed.

It feels like the writer is more in command, and the relationship shifts to one of trust.

Just like a good movie.

It’s worth the effort.

The writing matters. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Is it the only thing? No, of course not.

Unlike a novel or short story, a screenplay is a step toward something else. Its greatest value is the movie it promises.

And fun, emotional, stylistic writing cannot make up for a bad story underneath.

But that’s not what we’re trying to do.

What we’re trying to do is make that great story underneath easier to identify.

The Story and Plot Weekly Email is published every Tuesday morning. Don't miss another one.

​ Tom Vaughan
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