Words on the page

–Christian

In the writer’s ongoing battle against clichés, he finds two basic
enemies: verbal clichés ("as easy as taking candy from a baby"),
and story clichés (the explosive with a count-down LED timer).

Eliminating the first kind is simply a matter of recognizing them and finding
something better to replace them. I work incredibly hard on the narrative description
in my scripts, tweaking it at least as much as the dialogue. With vigilance,
the night never has to be "as black as coal" or "as cold as
a witch’s tit."

The story clichés are harder to deal with, because certain genres carry
them along like parasites. Action movies sometimes have the ticking time bomb,
or mismatched partners, or heroes who somehow avoid being hit when a hundred
bullets are flying their direction.

The key — and this starts in the conception phase of the script — is recognizing
the inherent clichés in a genre, and figuring out how you’re going to
handle them. SCREAM did a masterful job pointing out, subverting, and ultimately
fulfilling teen-slasher clichés.

Sometimes, the best way to avoid story clichés is to look at the reality
behind every character, every setting, every decision made in your story. Is
Carla Ann really "a hooker with a heart of gold?" On closer inspection,
she might be a nervous, self-deprecating dreamer.

Does the police station need a squad room full of desks and detectives milling
about? Maybe your scene could take place in a courtyard, or by the photocopier,
or in the cafeteria.

Clichés are shortcuts. The more you avoid taking them, the more interesting
the places you’ll end up.

–Roger

There’s a common misconception that a screenwriter only writes the dialogue,
while the director handles the rest. Being a guy who writes a lot of action
sequences, I can say definitively that’s not the case — at least not in the
21st century.

Supposedly, when the screenplay for GONE WITH THE WIND got to the climactic
fire scene, it stated only this: “Atlanta burns.” Just two words,
but in the movie the sequence took several minutes.

In modern screenplays, at least those that make it into production, the action
written on the page pretty closely matches the action on-screen. A fight sequence
will almost never be written blow-for-blow, but will at the minimum give
a sense of the action, the stakes and the most important moments within the
battle. If you don’t believe me, flip through the script to THE MATRIX, which
you can find in most bookstores. The Wachowski brothers don’t label each punch
and kick, but reading the script, you get a very good idea what the fight sequences
will look like.

The same holds true with almost any action sequence you can think of. In GO,
I spend half a page describing the chase down the alley in Vegas, in which
the Riviera gets stuck sideways. Everyone reading the script — producers,
the director, studio executives — could see exactly how funny the moment would
be, which is how such an expensive and time-consuming stunt stayed in the budget.
Otherwise, it would have been the first thing cut.

The danger with properly-described action sequences is that if they’re not
written very deftly, they can slow down the read immensely. That’s why I spend
at least as much time working on these moments as the dialogue scenes. They’re
much less glamorous, and honestly, more difficult to write. But the ability
to write interesting and economical scene description is what distinguishes
the screenwriter from the playwright.

That, and the weird “gh” in the name. If a playwright writes for
plays, shouldn’t a screenwright write for screens?