Description and dialogue

Screenwriting rules are not rules per se. They're guidelines, particularly aimed at beginners, but no-one is going to count lines of description or reject something because of it unless the writing itself is bad. A screenplay should be all about the writer's individual voice, and if your voice needs 2 or 3 or 4 lines of description, and it works and people are receptive to it, then how you do it practically is less important.

I wouldn't go over 4 lines of description at a max but that's just me. I've read plenty of screenplays that frequently do and it only ever bothers me if the writing is bad.

VMMV

Rules are guidelines against overdoing something or relying on things that just don't work.

For example in x-men. When wolverine wakes up in the house there's a line. "He can feel someone poking around in his mind. He doesn't like it." Obviously we can't see that someone is poking around in his mind nor can we film it, but it gives the general feel to the scene. It gives everyone working on it knows what's going on. It gives it the right feel and cuts down on more writing.

The rules are to keep you out of bad habits until you have enough experience and ability to decipher when to use those rare tools and when to not.

Two rules that you cannot break.

1. Don't bore your reader.
2. Don't confuse your reader.

Those two things will guarantee rejection. Everything else requires wisdom of when best to apply them.

plantpot said:

I wanted to ask about description and dialogue. I have been told there is a rule of 4 lines or each max. But I was wondering about all action scenes. There seems to be a lot in Psycho (original).
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/psycho_revised.html
Is this an exception tot he rule?

Click to expand...

I don't mean to hamper your creativity, but I've heard from a few script readers (who a script usually goes through before it gets to a producer) that readers with look at the white space in your script and basically pre-judge it. This isn't because they're lazy, but because they have to read a lot of scripts and most of them are bad.

If you're writing a script on speculation, it's a good idea to break up action in chunks of no more than four lines by finding natural breaks in the action.