Blog

Last week, I covered some of the most important advice I’d ever gotten about screenwriting, that the actors were the audience of a script, which I had never really considered to that point, but once I heard it, I realized how much sense it made. But that statement only laid the groundwork for the most important advice I was given about screenwriting.

The most important advice I was given about writing a script was to tell the story through the dialogue.

When the judge of the screenplay competition that I was having the Zoom call with said this, I felt it was counterintuitive. Movies are, after all, a visual medium. Why would you tell the story through dialogue?

But I quickly realized how sound this advice was.

The reason is that while a movie is a visual medium, a script is not.

This also built off the advice I covered in the previous post, that the actors were the audience for a script. Since they’re the end user, it only makes sense that they’re the ones who are facilitating the advancement of the story.

This was an adjustment for me, as my method of storytelling actually had an origin all the way back to grade school. I still remember when I was in fifth grade, whenever we had writing assignments, usually to tell a story in one to two pages (and we mostly stuck to one page, occasionally bleeding over into the start of a second) our teachers (our classroom had a divider, so I only had one teacher, but the divider was often opened so that both teachers could give joint presentations to both classes once) gave the “guideline” to not just make the story all dialogue.

This guideline made sense for the class. They were trying to develop our ability to write, even if we weren’t going to be writers when we grew up. But the reason they gave for not writing a dialogue heavy story was to “not make it like a TV show or movie.” That was fair advice, because we weren’t writing either of those. They were also trying to get us to write incorporating other writing devices, maybe incorporating other senses beyond just what we would hear, maybe what characters would feel or sense. Without using the crutch of just relying on dialogue, we might even develop atmosphere…or themes.

It’s funny to think that this note from my teachers actually stuck with me all these years, that I still don’t place an overreliance on dialogue in my stories, and that when my characters say something, its because they have something to say. But it created this conflict for me when I got this counter advice during the Zoom call. I’d been writing for so long without the story being mostly dialogue, that this felt foreign to me.

It wasn’t until I re-examined the advice from both my fifth grade teachers and the contest judge that I realized I was not getting conflicting advice. The fifth grade teachers had insisted on not making the stories we were assigned to write mostly dialogue because “they were not a TV show or movie.” But now, I was writing a movie, and so my approach to storytelling had to change.

Just like the advice I covered last week, this might have seemed obvious, but I had brought with me a certain way of telling stories without fully assessing whether this was appropriate for the medium I was writing in. Once I’d gotten this advice, I could actually see how I was capping the potential of the screenplays I’d written for both Dig Down and Lock the Doors, because although I’d adapted them to the format of screenplays, I hadn’t fully adapted them to how stories are told in screenplays.

The second critique that I was given during my second script consultation for my screenplay of Dig Down had to do with the dialogue. And I believe it’s one the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten when it comes to screenwriting.

To give some context, although I hadn’t really written many scripts prior to this experience, I had tried my hand at it a few times. I’ve even read to of the most well-regarded books on how to write screenplays: The Screenwriter’s Bible, and Story by Robert McKee. Both books provide a fantastic foundation for how to write a screenplay, understanding what makes a scene, and even advanced concepts such as infusing subtext into the dialogue.

But – and it has been a while since I read them – they both didn’t have this advice. And to be honest, I don’t even think the judge who made the comment realized how profound it was for me. I attribute that to them just having so much experience in screenwriting, it was probably something they just assumed people know.

The critique I was given for my script was that the main audience for the screenplay was actors.

This is something that I never considered. To me, I always saw the screenplay as the written form of the movie it would eventually become. This is in some ways true, because it provides the structure to the movie, and if you ever read the script of a film you were familiar with, you’d be able to envision the scenes from what you were reading.

But after he said it, I realized how much sense it made. And in turn, how wrong I was about who the audience of the screenplay was. Because people don’t tend to read scripts, they watch the movie. So they can’t be the audience.

When he saw that, his constant harping about actors, and how the fury they would have about constant wrylies, and demanding to let them act, all made a lot more sense. It wasn’t about them trying to take more and more creative control of the film making process. They’re the end user, its about them being able to use the script as they see fit.

What I was doing was the equivalent of selling something and then telling the customer how they needed to use the product that was now theirs.

As big as this was, this was actually laying the foundation for the best piece of screenwriting I received. I’ll get into that revelation, next time.

My second script consultation for my screenplay of Dig Down was a mix of good and bad critiques. But not all bad critiques are negatives. In fact, I think some of the cons that were brought up during the discussion were not only positives in the long run, but were some of the best advice I’ve gotten about screenwriting.

I’ll start off with something small, because I had heard it before – the overuse of wrylies. In screenplays, these are written under the character’s name, but before the dialogue, in parathesis. They’re direction to the actor of how they should act or deliver the line. It might be something like (beat) or (pause) as a quick way to direct them how to act, or something like (shouts) or (whispers) for delivery. These got the nickname wrylies because early screenwriters would constantly write (wryly) as a way they wanted the actors to deliver these lines.

The general rule or guidance is to use wrylies sparingly. While writing novels writers have more leeway and can use them more liberally, it’s because books, novellas, and short stories aren’t a collaborative effort. It’s up to the writer to determine the amount of details they want to share to convey the story. In screenwriting and stage plays, this is a more collaborative medium, and using a lot of wrylies takes away from the actor’s ability to make decisions on how best to perform the role.

One thing the judge said throughout the consultation is that actors will constantly be demanding “Let me act!” and that’s fair, it’s what they’re being hired to do. The wrylies should only be used when it’s absolutely necessary, and part of the criticism that the judge gave me was that I should write the script so that it’s obvious how the actor should perform for as much of the dialogue as possible.

Admittedly, this would have removed most of the 17 wrylies I had in the script, which I thought wasn’t that much (and actually was down considerably from earlier draft, and the novella itself), but I can now see was too much. This didn’t eliminate all of them, and I did know that I would keep one instance, where I have a cop talking to Rob, and then into his walkie-talkie in one scene. I included a wryly for when he’s talking to the dispatcher, and then when he shifts his attention back to Rob. While I did feel that given the context of the two sentences it would become obvious eventually what needed to be done after reading a little more of the scene, I felt it would be best just to have the clarification in the wryly wright when it happened so the actors wouldn’t be confused until they read on and understood what was going on in this exchange.

This note, although from a criticism of how I wrote the screenplay, greatly benefited both the script of Dig Down, but could also be applied to any future screenplays I wrote.

I’ll get into the best advice I feel I’d ever been given on screenwriting, next time.

I needed to go for a walk immediately after my second script consultation for my screenplay of Dig Down concluded. While I had done this after the first consultation to process the meeting, this time, it was more to clear my head.

As I said, this second consultation didn’t go as favorably as the first. The first had set a high bar, and while I may not have been expecting this consultation to be quite as receptive and positive, I had expected that both conversations would have felt like they were in the same ballpark. It ended up almost feeling like we were talking about two different scripts.

As I outlined over the last few weeks, most of the consult was spent on things that I had done wrong in my script, and there was almost next to nothing in terms of positives in the screenplay that should be played up and expanded on. That itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it might be a mentor’s style to be overly critical until all of the shortcomings are either eradicated or so miniscule that they don’t have much of an impact, and that can work well as a teaching style for some as once all those weaknesses have been addressed, those same tough mentors will then heap on the praise.

In the moment though, and the immediate aftermath of it, the meeting just felt like it was a disaster. I have acknowledged in these posts that the judge had made some fair points. But there also were a few instances where while I could see where they were getting at, I did push back a little bit, explaining the reasoning behind the creative choices I had made. Even with that, while I think the advice given was derived from their experience in the business, and ultimately was helpful, it did sometimes feel like I was being dismissed with stock answers.

This had persisted so much throughout the entire ninety minute meeting that even though I was given a copy of the recording to review the feedback at my convenience, I knew without looking at it that my face had slowly adopted a blank expression as the judge had just gone over one issue after another. I know I was digging my thumb into my forearm to keep my face from expressing any unpleasant emotions. As of this posting, I’ve never opened up the attachment to watch the video. I can recall it quite clearly, and I think it would only be disappointing to watch.

Whereas I felt empowered and on the cusp of breaking through with my screenplay, after this meeting, with not only the same story, but with the revisions I had made off of that first consultation, I felt like this was a medium I might not be able to write successfully.

This whole post might seem like its all a preamble to a conclusion that this was a traumatic negative experience for me, but while it definitely felt negative at the time, there were a couple of things brought up by the judge while he was laying out his critiques of my script that are the best advice I’ve ever gotten on screenwriting. To build off my analogy of the overly critical mentor, sometimes its through tearing down and tearing away all the flaws in the process and output that you can then make the strives you want to achieve what you’re looking to accomplish in life .The advice imparted in it that actually gave me direction for the next stage in my writing career.

So while this did feel like a disaster at the time, over the next few posts, I’ll go into why over time I felt this was probably one of the best meetings I ever experienced.

The last main negative that I felt was raised during the second consultation of my script for Dig Down was the character of Rob. The judge’s notes and comments weren’t that he was a bad character – in fact as I mentioned in the post about the positives, he felt that actors would be interested in the role – the negative was that the character was misunderstood.

The one comment that stuck out to me was when the judge said that in all of the situations Rob found himself in, there was never a time where Rob demonstrated his genius in figuring out a way out of them.

That to me was a problem because this was also said in the first consultation with a different judge, who had also suggested that one of Rob’s main motivations was his true love of Vicky. What this told me was that Rob’s true character hadn’t translated clearly when I adapted Dig Down from novella to script, because readers understood by the end of the story who Rob was.

While this is a big negative, with a little bit of distance, I actually had a positive takeaway from this. While it was true that multiple judges didn’t perceive the character the way I had intended, one of my objectives was to get important feedback as I adapted my story into a medium I wasn’t as experienced or familiar with. I didn’t expect my screenplay to be flawless, and these notes could help me identify areas that needed improvement. Getting two separate judges making the same remark was actually a good thing because it told me the way I had adapted Rob to this style of writing wasn’t working, and that I would need to make revisions so that he could be seen as the character was intended.

These were the three main negatives that were brought up during the consult. There were other areas of improvement mentioned as well, but just like this last point, I actually felt that there were a lot of positives to glean from them, so I’ll be including them in an upcoming post about the takeaways from this meeting.

As I said in my last post, there were unfortunately more negatives than positives in the second consultation I had for my script of Dig Down.

A second major negative that the judge focused on was the length of the screenplay. They reiterated several times that the length needed to be trimmed to 90 pages. This differed from what I’d been told in the first consultation, that if the script was good (which they felt it was) that the length wouldn’t matter, and so this became a negative for me on two levels.

The first, and deeper negative for my screenwriting, was that I now had conflicting pieces of advice. My goal for entering these screenplay contests was to get advice on what could be done to improve the quality of the story, and to ideally get it to industry standards. My expectation was that while some of the notes would vary, that there would be a general consensus on the main areas that needed improvement, providing me with a clear target of what needed to be addressed.

This conflicting advice was essentially a worse case scenario. If both judges, or most judges, honed in on the same aspects of the script that they felt needed to be changed, I would feel confident that addressing this would improve the script. But with two judges providing this level of feedback giving me two opposing viewpoints, I was now stuck with a decision – which one do I follow?

The one who was positive about my script said a long length would be okay if the script was good, but was this necessarily right? I could easily fall into a bias of following their direction just because they gave me a favorable score. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I should disregard the other judge, who while they listed more examples of negatives they found with the script, might actually be dispensing better advice because they’re pointing out all the areas where my adaptation was falling short.

In addition to this critical decision being posed to me, there was also the negative about the logistics to trimming down the screenplay. I had agreed that adding extra pages after the first script consultation didn’t feel quite right to me, that over 100 pages felt okay with how much I had packed into the story, but longer than that started to feel like the pacing was off. The judge for this second page believed that 100 pages was too long, and the way they kept reiterating that it needed to be trimmed to 90 pages left me believing anything over that was unacceptable.

This was probably an extreme opinion of this part of the call, but its just to give you context of how much this was stressed.

The problem I had with this was the same I had when I was first looking for an editor for my manuscript of Dig Down. One of the editors that reviewed my work complimented me on my writing, but said I needed to bolster my word count because the length was too small for a novel, which it was. The problem I had with doing that was that essentially doubling the length would devastate the pacing of the story, which is why Dig Down is a novella, essentially around half the word count of a typical book.

This was the flip side of that coin. The judge was asking me to trim close to a third of the screenplay. And while as we were going through it together there were definitely things that could more efficiently tell the story in this medium, and things that could also be cut, I felt that trimming this much of it would make the story as a whole feel rushed. There’d be no chance to sit and breath after tense sequences of Rob fleeing for his life, while at the same time absorbing the complexity of his relationship with Preston that had become so strained over the years.

I feel like too many movies today just rush through a lot of their plot points, just telling the audience how they should be feeling at different points in the story, rather than let them experience these moments and let them reach these feelings themselves. I didn’t really like the idea of my screenplay contributing to this. So while I agreed that there was definitely ways to trim pages from the screenplay, I felt that cutting so much was essentially changing key aspects of the story.

I’ll go over the last main criticism brought up in the consultation, next time.