When to describe something on the page.
Share information with the audience in the order they would absorb it on screen.
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Much of what I teach are simply principles. What I like about principles is that they make our decisions easier.
We don’t start everything from scratch.
We set our goals first, and then we use the principles to make creative decisions to best execute that goal.
Principles, unlike rules, are flexible.
This week, I want to get very granular on one of my favorite principles that help me with the action lines:
Share information with the audience in the order they would absorb it on screen.
In particular, I want to focus on when to share information about a character introduction, but it also applies to scene locations, objects, or anything else.
We often feel compelled to describe these things the very moment we mention them on the page.
We share their name in ALL-CAPS and then immediately go into parentheses with their age and our character description.
And every time, it reads like a casting call rather than watching a movie.
Mostly because it is.
Like everything, when we make the decision of when and how we’re going to describe a character, it is best to fall back on goals and principles.
And my goal writing on spec is:
To evoke the emotional experience of seeing the movie on screen.
When the reader closes the screenplay, I want them to feel like they just watched the movie.
Because of this, I have grown to dislike technical terms or anything else that makes it sound like a document rather than a movie on the screen.
For example, I see something like this often:
One small note: I personally dislike a character’s age inside parentheses!
I think this is mostly the influence of television on feature specs. A television script coming from the writers’ room is a production draft. They want to give casting something easy to copy and paste to describe the character.
For me? I don’t like it. Now, we all have preferences, and too often a young reader will mistake their preference for “how it should be done.”
Don’t let them fool you into thinking that, too.
My preference does not have to be your preference.
Still, you will not see that sort of thing in a script of mine.
Why not?
I think it’s clunky. And I don’t think it helps me with my primary goal, to evoke this movie in the reader’s mind.
On a spec script, the practical usefulness of a copy and paste for the casting director isn’t relevant.
I want SMOOTH.
I want the movie on the screen.
And when I am reading, I want to hear the writer’s voice, and DARREL (35, quick and aggressive) makes all of that challenging. It doesn’t sound like a movie. It sounds like a document.
So fall back on principles.
What is your goal and how do you achieve it? Now if we accept,
Share information with the audience as they would absorb it on screen.
And --
Nothing should take longer to read than it takes to happen on screen.
Then it would follow that:
The more detail you use to describe a character, the more disruptive it will be if you try to share it with the audience out of turn.
See the DARREL example above.
Trying to describe Darrel like you’re pausing the movie and then unpausing it feels wrong for the reader.
Sure, they get the information. But they’re no longer watching a movie. They’re reading.
You’re giving them data rather than evoking an emotion or an image.
Keep these two additional things in mind:
- We notice action first. Movement catches our eye.
- What a character does is almost always much more interesting than anything we will say about them.
So our hypothetical example could look like this instead:
I want to emphasize that neither describing the character immediately nor moments later is in itself superior to the other.
It comes down to how you visualize the scene on the screen and what emotion you are going for.
The following describes DARREL’s character almost immediately, but creates a very different visual and emotional moment.
Just as we would want it to happen on screen.
This is an important point:
When you describe the character, you have the opportunity to describe a moment in the movie.
Take it. Use it. Fill that beat.
Here is a great example from out in the wild.
The wonderful screenplay SOURCE CODE by Ben Ripley (which was made into a pretty faithful film directed by Duncan Jones and starring Jake Gyllenhaal).
Take note of the virtual shot list that Ripley creates with paragraphs. But what’s important here is how patient Ripley is before he describes Colter.
He describes Colter in the sixth paragraph! This is well-written stuff. To illustrate this point further, I moved the character description up in the scene and you can read the difference.
Not only is opening on action more interesting, but the description of Colter a few paragraphs down is more compelling as well.
It’s providing more details to a mystery. It’s answering questions about who this guy is rather than the reader wanting to get to the point. In addition, Ripley’s voice feels more in command and less rushed.
Here is the excellent first page from SOURCE CODE.
The guiding principle here is to clarify for yourself the emotional effect you want. That’s your goal. And that’s the criterion you use to make your choice.
All you decide is which order will best help you achieve it.
Like everything, the key is intentionality.
It must be intentional. Don’t do anything out of habit, ignorance, laziness, or because you think you’re supposed to do it that way.
- What is the goal?
- What is the best way to achieve it?
These are the only things that matter.
And making conscious choices towards these things makes all the difference in the reader’s experience.
See the movie in your mind.
Evoke the movie on the page.
And just like someone recommends a movie they love, you want the reader to see your movie and recommend it to others.
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