Voice

Are you talking about narration? How to string the elements together to keep the reader awake? Or are you talking about poetry?

By voice I think like English is spoken in different ways. In India we speak English according to the education and the state. I understand in USA also NRI" speak differently from blacks and Americans of New England. I think voice counts as I had such a comment.
padma

Question for you: how would you relate a funny story to your pals in a pub? Would you tell them "Bear with me, this is funny even though it might sound boring at first" and rely upon the punchline for laughs (which could be minutes away, even tho' it's a really funny punchline), or would you exaggerate everything in the telling, making amusing side comments and maybe even faces and gestures, for the sake of keeping the audience amused throughout?

I reckon that's what voice is -- the personal performance that holds the audience's attention and stops them from yawning. Except you're doing it with written words. Which kinda goes back to the oft-quoted basic advice to aspiring writers (not just screenwriters) to use stronger verbs and write as dramatically and visually as possible.

Shrug, I could be wrong.

-Derek

Here's a few very rough examples, hopefully my meaning will be conferred.

Boring Voice: Katie walked to the other side of the room with a limp. Her hand touched the floor as she did.

More Exciting Voice: Katie limped across the room, her nails clawing and scratching against the floor.

Boring Voice: An explosion. People run screaming. A car lands, smoking. A little girl cries.

More Exciting Voice: An EXPLOSION rocks the area sending a car flying. People run screaming, it's chaos. The car lands on a table, catching fire. Smoke curls up from its twisted frame. A little girl clutches her teddy bear and cries.

stuckupmyownera said:

How does a screenwriter make their 'voice' more interesting? I totally understand what it means, but in practical terms, where brevity is paramount and we're told not to put in anything extraneous but 'just tell the story', HOW do we go about it? And what is 'interesting' anyway? The story is interesting - isn't that enough?

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This might be the least helpful post of all but like icerose, maybe my point can be conferred.

Voice is one of those things that takes years to figure out and even longer to learn how to manipulate. As you grow as a writer, you learn how to look at things more subjectively. I think that is how you learn to manipulate your voice.

How do we go about 'just telling the story'? Personal opinion, you should be doing that anyways. It's a matter of learning how to determine what is necessary to the story and what isn't.

I normally try to write with a fixed point in mind as to where my characters are having to go, where the story is to end (as some would put it). That's how I keep focused on what is necessary to the story and what isn't.

What is 'interesting' anyway? - what do you find interesting? You find the story interesting but others might not. You find the characters interesting but others might not. You find the circumstances interesting but others might not.

There are a number of different factors that can be used to judge this question but to answer to question in context, It is *not* enough that only the story is interesting. For an hour and a half (maybe two) you have a group of hundreds, if not thousands, of people staring at a 2100 square foot screen. Why should they only watch a portion of it?

Being a screenwriter, I could assume that you like watching movies (if not, you're in the wrong field). How many times have you watched a movie and said: "Good story, bad execution" or "I liked the characters but the story sucked".

I can't count the number of times I've done it. Don't get me wrong I like most movies I see, I'm just very critical of them.

So to answer the last question, the hardest critic you will ever have to face is yourself. You have to ask yourself, taking into account everything "Would I watch this movie?" If the answer is yes, why? If the answer is no, WHY? You have to be able to answer those questions before the audience can ask them, because it can give you a head start to understanding how an audience is going to react to your story.

I hope this helps in some way.

As for practical approaches, I think Icerose had it pretty much right on.

"Voice" is the way you tell your story. It isn't on the page, as much as it is through it and all around.

For instance, three writers can be given the story of GOLDILOCKS. The story is the same. The same characters, the same beats.

But it's the way in which the story is told that is unique, as each writer brings his own voice to the fairy tale.

While craft can be learned, voice is an individual thing. It's developed and effected by things like life experience, mood, outlook and so on. It's an esoteric thing that is not easily defined, but rings through loud and clear when reading a script.

stuckupmyownera said:

How does a screenwriter make their 'voice' more interesting? I totally understand what it means, but in practical terms, where brevity is paramount and we're told not to put in anything extraneous but 'just tell the story', HOW do we go about it? And what is 'interesting' anyway? The story is interesting - isn't that enough?

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No, that isn't enough. A poor writer's voice will screw up a great story, just as an out of tune singing voice will ruin a song.

Good question, how do we improve our screenwriting voice?

Creative Exec is of course right. It's the art of writing if it could be described as anything.

a unique voice is something that is the theme for the movie. a few years ago movies had a climax scene where in certain dialog would explain something philosophical that the movie was about. it is a cliche now. then they started using subtext.

the Bruce Willis dialog at the end of 6th sense that his wife was his first priority shows that he cared and he was a family man to her notion that he had seconded her to his profession.

regards,
Ace.Inc1

stuckupmyownera said:

Good advice Derek, but what if you're describing something relatively mundane? A lesson at school. Family breakfast. A man lying in a motel room...

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Plan B, keep 'em short and sweet, get past the relatively mundane as quickly as possible.

-Derek

stuckupmyownera said:

But an adequate writer might be able to tell a story well but still lack 'interesting voice', right?

It seems to me that one person's 'interesting' could be another person's 'irritating', or 'over-the-top', or 'distracting', or any number of other negatives.

Thanks again, everyone.

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I don't think the voice should get in the way of or detract from the story. That can happen when the writer tries too hard to exhibit a unique or "interesting" voice.

An "adequate" writer, your words, has a voice, perhaps not an interesting voice but a voice nevertheless. His or her voice may not enhance the story, but I think it won't detract us from the story.

stuckupmyownera said:

How does a screenwriter make their 'voice' more interesting? I totally understand what it means, but in practical terms, where brevity is paramount and we're told not to put in anything extraneous but 'just tell the story', HOW do we go about it? And what is 'interesting' anyway? The story is interesting - isn't that enough?

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I don't know how to separate a story from its telling. So to say the "story" is interesting, so why isn't that enough?

Well, in that case, why don't we all just write treatments, and leave it at that, since the story is in the treatment.

Or just write coverage of the scripts that we haven't written yet. Isn't the "story" in those two pages. Why not just leave it at that?

If the "story" in some abstract sense is enough, why shouldn't it be enough?

Because it doesn't make sense to parse out the story from its telling.

And from the particular manner of its telling.

The ongoing complaint that, because screenplays demand brevity or that you are generally limited in terms of describing what's going on inside somebody's head, that, therefore, you can't convey all of the things that prose is capable of conveying.

That simply isn't true. Many great writers write sparely, find the right descriptive detail of dress or face or behavior to embody a character or the right handful of words to embody a place. Or the right few lines that establish the past that exists between two people and their current relationship.

Or set the tone for a story, or create a sense of place, or of time, or make us laugh, or be afraid, or move us to tears.

You don't need pages and pages to do any of those things. You don't necessarily need a lot of words.

Just the right words.

And you need the right words because you've got to do all of those things.

Establish character and place and time and tone and a sense of what went on before between the characters and make us laugh and cry and be afraid and do it in a hundred pages or so.

You see, most scripts are just plain bad and some scripts are great. But some fall into this valley of the in-between. They're technically okay. There's nothing you can point to that's really terrible. But nothing about them is really special.

They're just sort of -- okay. Nothing really bad. They hit their story points. The characters are okay. Things are paid off in a technical story way. But they never really grab the gold ring.

And if you want to sell a script, especially these days, you got to grab that gold ring.

NMS

second thought

stuckupmyownera said:

How does a screenwriter make their 'voice' more interesting? I totally understand what it means, but in practical terms, where brevity is paramount and we're told not to put in anything extraneous but 'just tell the story', HOW do we go about it? And what is 'interesting' anyway? The story is interesting - isn't that enough?

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Shyamalan said in an interview that he didn't want to do preaching after his first two films didn't fare well so I want to be corrected for that example as it was a wrong one.

I'm taking his route, the man's got experience.

my theme for all of my script/movies is one and the same: keep the ticket window busy, period.

regards,
Ace.Inc1

I agree that you can't really separate the story from it's telling. Therefore, I think a good ''voice'' is one that will adapt itself to the story it's telling. What I mean is that a good writer, in my humble opinion, has to objectively see his story and modify his way of telling it in order to properly convey the emotions, morals and messages the plot has to give.

Of course you can use complex and detailed sentences for everything that happens, but sometimes it's just not appropriate. For example, doing so in a scene where you want to show that your MC is bored out of his mind, that for him the time is moving really slow and that he can't wait for something to happen, will result in a contradiction between your story and what you wanted it to say. In this case, you might want to use really long and simple sentences, with ordinary words and basic structures.

On the other hand, if you are writing an action scene with a lot of stuff happenning at the same time, and you want that specific scene to have a lot of rythme and pace in order to create thrill and suspense, you WILL use short and direct-to-the-point sentences.

So yeah, I believe that's what makes a good ''voice''. Adapt it to what you want to say through your story and characters.

It was simply my 2 cents, hopefully it helps you out mate!

I'm not sure exactly what's meant by separating story from storytelling in the context mentioned above, but I can say that I've read many scripts that had within their pages good stories that were poorly told.

Unrealized potential is the status quo in script piles everywhere.

this isn't exactly what you're asking but for me I want to make sure each character has their "own" voice. I got feedback once about a scipt that everyone has the same voice. So now I do background stories on each character - just for myself. A person who had an abusive past for example may respond differently than a person who grew up rich and spoiled. So if I need a character to comment on something that is happening, I just try to put myself in their shoes, knowing their history, would she reply timidly, snobbishly, sarcastically, etc,

Good luck!

I feel to separate a story from it's telling is almost impossible. It can happen but it's really hard to do it.

Now there are plenty of times that a story is told wrong.

I feel a story will dictate how it is to be told. To deviate from the way the story requires itself to be told, is risky. It might pay off, it might not.

I personally feel that the structure of a story is basically the backbone of the story. They are unique to the individual. Basically the same but inherently different.