Action Lines

I want to discuss little visual actions we didn't intend to be emotional, but could. These tend to be discoveries and can be a lot of fun. In these cases, it's not whether the line of action takes up too much space, but whether it takes up ENOUGH space to really work, and therefore be worth keeping.

One of the primary principles of my rewriting is the question, "What is the emotion I want to evoke here?" It's a simple question. I wrote a line. Either dialogue or an action line. There should be no useless words, so I ask myself, what is this line's purpose?

The goal of the screenplay is to evoke the emotional experience of seeing the movie. Anything that gets in the way of that, I avoid. I want the reader to envision the film and react emotionally rather than engage with the script as some technical document.

Many people repeat, "Don't direct your screenplay," when they should just be saying, "Don't use camera angles." But you should be directing on the page.

Let's give a few folks the benefit of the doubt, and maybe they don't understand what they're saying. What they actually mean is, “Don’t use camera angles” and they’re just kind of repeating what they’re told as, "don't direct the script."

Small things matter, because the small things add up. I am a strong believer in writing's cumulative effect over any kind of duration.

So I did that “passion polish.” I didn’t change any dialogue, I didn’t change the structure, or what happened in scenes. I just polished the action lines. That was it. It took me maybe a few days.