Hi everyone. I’ve got a couple of newbie questions here (Just off the top of my head), but I’m not sure if this query has been answered (or debated) but I’ll ask it anyway.
In the terms of developing a script, what are the things that a novice should be looking out for?
I know novice scriptwriters, myself included, are common in making mistakes, especially in character development of the people in the script, the dialogue in the story, and keeping a person interested of what you are trying to tell, especially in the first act.
So, are there telltale signs that a newbie should be looking out for, in order to resolve a problem, or improve, in their scripts?
And one more thing. Is there a way to setup your characters in the first act without spoiling the story? Especially if you wish to keep the story (or characters) a mystery.
Well, you certainly don't want to keep the story a mystery -- not even if you're writing a mystery. And even if you want to keep the identity or the true motive of a particular character a mystery, you still need to establish what you might think of as an "establishing premise" for the character in question.
That is, whoever a character is, or whatever a character ultimately turns out to be, you really have a very short window of opportunity in which to convey to an audience a clear sense of what kind of person that character is.
For any given character, you're only going to have a handful of scenes in which to establish that sense of who and what that character is about -- to give an audience an "operational theory" from which they can move forward.
Now, as the story develops, the character may also develop, go through changes, or events may reveal that that character is not what we originally thought.
But for that to work, we had to have originally *thought* something -- that is, we had to have formed a clear sense, up front, as to what that character was all about.
How do you do that? You do it through action. By action I don't mean through visuals as opposed to dialogue. In dramatic terms, dialogue can also be action.
By action, I mean that we reveal a character by introducing them in in situations of stress, or of danger, situations that require them to make choices -- because those are the situations that allow us to understand them. To, as the saying goes, "see them in action."
They may behave well. They may behave poorly. Brave, cowardly. Smart, stupid. That's the point. They go it along. They stick with the crowd. However they behave tells us what kind of person they are. It gives us a sense of who we are dealing with.
Show a character in a situation requiring action -- decision. Then we will get to know who they are.
That is why it is very common for first acts to begin in the midst of action -- a minor crisis of some kind that knocks the protagonist out of his normal trajectory.
That's because so long as a character is simply someone who talks, we don't know quite what he's about. He must "act" -- so unless the talk is really action -- like he's quitting his job or divorcing his wife -- that is, the talk is actually the expression of the act, not just *talking* about doing something -- then we're not really getting to know him, in a dramatic sense.
So get your main character in the midst of action quickly.
Establish the premise of your story likewise quickly -- within the first few pages of your script.
If anything, we need to know what your story is about, even before we need to know who the main characters are.
Classic example -- we know what Jaws is about before we meet any of the main characters. We know it's going to be about that wanking great shark eating people off the shore of that island. That's because we meet the shark and see it eat somebody before we even find out who the story is going to be about.
Classic error of beginning writers -- not knowing what your movie is about.
Knowing it and not telling the reader what the movie is about until god knows when. End of the first act. Middle of the second act. The end of the movie.
Basically, if a reader is hitting page five or six and doesn't have a clear sense of what the movie is about, you are in deep trouble.
This isn't complicated. You've probably seen a movie recently. If somebody asked you what the movie was about, you'd be able to give them a reasonably short answer. And chances are, you'd have been able to give them that answer after watching just a few minutes of the movie.
Take something like The Seven Samurai - it's a three hour movie. In the first scene, some villagers see the brigands ride in and make plans to come back and raid the village when the crops ripen. Next scene, the villagers are meeting -- it's hopeless. The officials won't help. What can they do? Let's ask the elder. Third scene. They go to the elder. The elder says -- hire Samurai to protect the village. They say, we're poor. How can we hire Samurai. He says -- find hungry Samurai.
Three scenes -- we now know what the movie is about.
The trick to being able to convey in a handful of scenes what your movie is about is to know what your movie is about. In my experience, most of the people who complain bitterly about how hard it is to express the subtle nuances of the meaning of their movie in a handful of scenes and how it has to be expressed and developed gradually over the course of etc., etc., etc. -- in fact really can't enunciate what the movie is about because they really don't know.
We're not talking about thematic subleties. Just what you'd say if somebody asked you what that movie you saw last night was about.
There are twelve jurors who have to decide a murder case and it's eleven to one for conviction and the one hold-out has to convince the other eleven to vote "Not Guilty."
Now, this isn't spoken out loud, but audiences have basic story-telling instincts and the minute the first ballot is taken and we find out it's eleven to one -- we know how this thing is going to unfold.
And that's really the trick. It's understanding that even though you aren't there in the theatre or the living room that there is really a two-way communication going on.
Watching a movie is never passive because a viewer is always taking the information that you are giving him and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. Especially if you are writing something like a mystery -- but on some level with any kind of story, you have to be a sort of a mindreader, because you have to be continually playing the role of viewer, asking yourself -- what expectation does this image, this moment, this scene create in the mind of my audience -- and is that what I want it to create?
And if you work it correctly, they will feel what you want them to feel, and think what you want them to think, because you have foreseen their feelings and their expectations as you have developed your script, so that if you want them to expect one ending, you will have carefully crafted the scenes and moments to bring them to that expectation, so that when you deliver the surprise, you know that they will be surprised, because you will have planned it all out -- in exactly the same way that a comedian plans out a laugh when he writes a joke and he knows exactly where to pause, where to put each word and knows on exactly which word the laughs will come.
But for that to happen, you have to get over this idea of "writing for yourself." Writing is an act of communication. To write for yourself is much the same as talking to yourself. It's harmless but has no particular utility.
We write to communicate to others. To communicate ideas, feelings, thoughts, our sense of things. We can do that well or poorly. And craft allows us to improve the means by which we do it.
NMS
