John August

Words on the page

Short answer sprint

Adaptation, QandA, So-Called Experts, Television, Words on the page

Questions have been backing up in the inbox for a few weeks, so I thought I’d do a Short Answer Sprint to work through a few.

questionmarkIf a friend or co-worker tells you an anecdote, or describes a character eccentricity of one of her relatives, and you use it in a screenplay are there any legal ramifications? I have no intention of using the name of the friend’s relative (I don’t know it), but the story and the relative are so funny and eccentric, respectively, that a very amusing character could be made from them. Do I need to get my friend’s permission to use this information?

— Derek

Legally, no. Ethically, yes. Particularly if said friend is a writer who might be planning to use it herself. I borrowed an anecdote from a screenwriter friend in Go: the moment when Simon accidentally sets the hotel room on fire. I changed pretty much everything about it, but I checked with him first to make sure he wasn’t planning on using it.

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questionmarkI’m writing a scene between a Chinese immigrant woman and a man from Mexico. Both characters speak in broken English, and I’m wondering how to correctly write broken English with a Chinese accent and speaking pattern, as well as how to do it for other languages. Do you just write the dialogue in “good English” and then somehow note that the character has a thick Chinese accent? How would you tackle this challenge and could you an some example or two?

— Jules Hoffman

No time for examples in a Short Answer Sprint. But when writing non-standard English, you walk a fine line between “giving the flavor” and “annoying the reader.” So here’s the simple advice:

1. Use the speaker’s words
2. Use the speaker’s grammatical structure
3. Don’t try to duplicate the exact speech pattern on paper

If you have more than two apostrophes in a line of dialogue, you’re probably overdoing it.

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questionmarkI’ve been building a bit of a gut. Too many years of balancing a day job with writing time and squeezing in food when I could led to some really bad eating habits. One of the perks, though, was that I became a “Shit Camel.” I could go for a week without taking a dump. Sure, it was a massive, hour-long endeavor that afforded plenty of reading time whenever I did take a crap, but it left the flow of work or writing largely undisturbed.

Now that I’m eating better and trying to work this fat off, I find that I’m visiting the john much more often and depositing much less when I leave. I hate that. This has been especially annoying in the past few days since I blocked them off for writing time only.

All this is to ask, what do you eat as a writer? Are you hunched in front of your Mac for hours on end like a crazy Korean gamer, with Red Bulls and candy wrappers scattered everywhere? Or do you have some kind of healthy eating regimen that keeps you energized? Just curious, because distractions of any kind really destroy my momentum.

— René Garcia

Writing is sedentary, and sedentary people tend to get fat. But most screenwriters — even the fat ones — defecate more than once a week. Yikes.

In terms of health, I eat pretty sensibly. If you’re trying to lose weight, South Beach is actually very easy and sane. Excercise-wise, I lift three times a week. (A lot of writers go to my gym, for reasons unclear.) I do less cardio than I should, but I’m walking 4+ miles per day picketing, so that kind of makes up for it.

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questionmarkI am a beginning screenwriter and I am very intimidated by plot design. I love reading good screenplays because the plots seem like clever puzzles where each piece fits snugly but unexpectedly into a grand scheme. When I try to construct plots on my own, however, I feel they seem contrived and unrealistic. It seems like a very intellectual process to me, even though the ultimate goal is an emotional one. Do you have any advice for someone struggling with this? I’ve read about three books on screenwriting, and they make plot structure seem so basic, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re creating from scratch. Any helpful words from you will probably do a lot for me.

— Jim

Screenwriting books make everything seem so tidy, when actual screenwriting is gory and difficult. Plot and structure are really just the answer to a single question: what happens when?

Look at your story from your main characters’ perspectives. What are they trying to do at each moment in the script? What do they know, and what do they learn?

Then look at it from the audience’s perspective. What do they know, and what do they expect will happen next?

A good plot keeps surprising both the main characters and your audience. Probably the reason your plots feel contrived is that you’re trying to drag your characters through some pre-determined series of structural benchmarks, rather than focusing on what’s interesting and surprising right now in this scene.

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questionmarkI read in your comments, some time ago, that you had a mix tape you listened when you wrote for “Go” to help you get in the right mood. Did any of that music find its way into the movie? If so, how did that happen? ex. did you suggest it to the music director? If not, why not? Wasn’t it a key factor in setting tone for you?

— Dan

None of those songs made it in the movie — and that’s fine. A playlist is a great way to help capture a certain tone while you’re writing, particularly when you need to get back into a mood. But it’s really just for your own preparation. Screenwriting is a lot like acting in that way, incidentally. Actors often have touchstones to help them get back into a role. Music is a great one.

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questionmarkAre you inspired to help new writers because you had the good fortune of a mentor when you were starting your career, or do you do it because you had to figure it out on your own?

— Annabel

I didn’t have a mentor, at least not for any significant period of time. I started this site because I remembered what it was like having 1,000 questions about screenwriting, and no good place to ask them.

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questionmarkStop me if you’ve heard this one, but do you think the stop of “Ops” was related to the imminence of the somewhat similar secret-adventures-’round-the-world “The Unit”?

— Matt Waggoner

The Unit is a lot like Ops — but done as a CBS show. I don’t mean that as a slam. They figured out how to take a potentially risky premise and turn it into something embraceable by a mass audience. What’s funny is that we met with Scott Foley for Ops (at Susina, the coffee shop featured in The Nines). He read the script and really liked it. We liked him, and would have cast him in a second. He’s an undervalued actor, and a nice guy.

But no, I don’t think The Unit derailed Ops. Our project hung around longer than it should have largely based on my name and the quality of the writing. It really wasn’t a Fox-appropriate show, and it’s for the best we never shot the pilot. (The two Ops scripts are in [Downloads section](http://johnaugust.com/downloads) if you want to read them.)

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questionmarkI’m in early discussions with a producer about writing a biopic. One thing that has come up in these discussions is the producer’s insistence that the movie adhere to a traditional three act structure and not be ‘episodic’ – and I agree with him in principle (I’m frequently dissatisfied by biopics for this very reason), but I also feel that the complicating factor in this case is that lives simply don’t unfold in three acts – they are, by their very nature, episodic. I was curious as to how you might approach this kind of assignment in terms of finding a three-act story within an episodic sequence of ‘true’ events.

— M

History is history. Movies are stories, and good stories have forward momentum. Your challenge is finding the thread(s) that keep the main character working towards a goal, with obstacles, setbacks, and moments of success. And that may not be possible. There are many remarkable people whose lives are surprisingly resistant to dramatic staging. There hasn’t been a great biopic of Lincoln, Da Vinci, or Einstein. [Amadeus](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086879/) succeeds because they elevated a fairly minor character in his life (Salieri) and told a largely fictionalized story through his eyes.

Don’t try to tell the story of a great person’s life. Tell a great story using the details of a person’s life.

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questionmarkThis may be kind of a loaded question, but have you ever read Stephen King’s Dark Tower books? They’ve just been finished, thirty-some years after the first book was started, and are so old fashioned and evocative of Rod Serling — like some weird combination of The Lord of the Rings, Sergeo Leonne’s Spaghetti Westerns and The Twilight Zone — that a movie adaptation has to happen eventually. The fan base is much too huge. Could you ever see yourself considering adapting this?

— J.R. Flynn

This is an example of how long questions sit in the box sometimes. [JJ Abrams is now adapting it](http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1574452/20071115/story.jhtml).

But to answer your question: sure. I could see myself doing it. But JJ Abrams or not, I try not to dwell on the projects I’m not writing, because that can drive one mad with frustration. As busy as I am (when not on strike), barely a week goes by that I don’t see a project announced in Variety which causes that spike of envy. If that ever goes away, I’ll probably quit.

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In the re-design of the site, I inadvertently got rid of the “Ask a Question” link. Until I find a good home for it, you can ask a question [here](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question).

The History Boys

Genres, Words on the page

I saw Alan Bennett’s The History Boys yesterday at the Ahmanson, and liked it quite a lot.

I think it’s important for a screenwriter to keep up with current plays, because the two art forms continue to influence each other. For example, at least in this staging, many pieces of connective tissue were pre-shot on video as montages, letting the story get off the stage for brief moments. There was also a flash-forward that would seem familiar to anyone who saw the third season finale of Lost.

A writer can get away with quite a few things on stage that are tough to pull off in movies. In the second act, a character remarks to the audience that since things seem to be going so well for everyone, the rules of dramatic irony dictate a sudden reversal. Which of course comes. ((In script jargon, this is called “hanging a lantern on it.” You address the plausibility problem by highlighting it.))

A more clever use of dramatic liberty is a scene in which one teacher tells another about a conversation he just had with a student. The conversation and the re-telling of the conversation take place simultaneously. It makes sense on the stage. It would be a mess on film. ((The big problem isn’t with continuity of time — film viewers have gotten quite a bit more sophisticated in that regard. The challenge is that a scene in a movie takes place in a distinct location: you’re either in the classroom or the teachers’ lounge. On stage, the scene can be in both places at once because the audience is creating the environments internally.))

Perhaps because they’re not photographed, plays take place in less naturalistic universes. They’re impressionist. So you forgive — barely — a scene in which students enter class, take their seats, have a heated discuss, and are then dismissed by the class bell. I don’t know much about the British school system, but I feel certain that their class periods are longer than five minutes.

The class bell rings a lot, frankly. I suppose that’s because the stage relies on entrances and exits, but it gets repetitious. But it’s a minor complaint, and a play worth checking out.

Using “we” in scene description

QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkI once saw a video of a table read from NBC’s Scrubs on their video blog. The show runner, Bill Lawrence, read the directions and the cast read their lines. He read something like “We see J.D. running up to Elliot…” or “We cut to The Janitor…”.

Is this good writing style or does he read the directions like this on the fly? Do you think that what’s really written on the pages is more like “J.D. runs to Elliot…” or “Cut to The Janitor…” without the “we”? Or are scripts always written this way?

— John
Austin

P.S.: Good luck with the strike! We’re all behind you!!

I feel like I’ve answered a similar question before, but I welcome the chance to have a post that’s not about the strike.

Using “we” in scene description is perfectly valid, and is (in my completely unscientific guessing) a growing trend. My hunch is that Scrubs scripts are probably written very much like how Bill Lawrence read it, particularly given the show’s use of quick sight gags.

Screenplays can be written from a completely neutral third-person perspective (“the car SLAMS around the corner, tires SQUEALING”) or a first-person plural “reader as audience” perspective (“we SLIDE ALONG the steel skin of the 747, watching as rivets POP one after the other”).

“We” and “our” and “us” bothers some readers, who rightly point out that anything you describe using these terms could be adequately described without them. But I find it a handy way to avoid referring to the camera. It keeps the reader in story-mode, rather than thinking about the script as a technical shooting document.

So use “we” if you want to. But there’s no reason to overuse it. Always spend the 10 seconds to ask yourself if you need the “we see” or “we hear.” If it reads as well without it, drop it.

Pre-Lap

Formatting, QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkThanks for posting [the script to The Nines](http://johnaugust.com/downloads). In it, you give some dialogue a “(PRE-LAP)” extension. This dialogue begins in V.O., bridges us to the next scene, and continues onscreen. Obviously, it’s a useful and commonly used device.

The term “Pre-Lap” makes obvious technical sense, but is it common enough for us unknowns to use in our scripts? I’ve seen some scripts that use “(BRIDGING)” or “(BRIDGE)” – or even put some explanation in action paragraphs. I’d hate to adopt “PRE-LAP” only to find that low-level readers think I’m making up my own neologisms, or using obsolete technical terms like SFX or M.O.S.

What would you recommend?

–bagadonuts

Pre-lapping is when dialogue begins before we’ve cut to the scene in which it’s spoken. Here’s an example from The Nines:

He turns his back to the foyer, listening to the instructions on the phone.

GARY

Nine leopards run through the jungle.

(listening)

I bought two cakes at the store.

His identity evidently confirmed, he hangs up. He looks back into the foyer.

GARY (PRE-LAP) (CONT’D)

The house is haunted. There’s a zeitgeist, or something.

EXT. UPSTAIRS DECK – DAY

Margaret has brought coffee and pastries from Susina.

MARGARET

Poltergeist, and no. Maybe they were rats. L.A. is teeming with rats. They live in the palm trees.

Often, it’s a choice made editorially, during post-production, but you can also write it in if it helps sell a joke or moment. It’s common enough — and simple enough — that I think most readers will understand it in context, even if they’re unfamiliar with the term.

You should know that some readers despise pre-laps, despite their usefulness. If you use them, you need to have a vigilant script supervisor, because these dangling lines of dialogue can find themselves forgotten in the rush of production.