Nobody Asked For It
I read a bunch of YA novels last year in anticipation of tackling one myself. Mine didn’t sell, but I had a lot of fun writing it, and I had even more fun doing all of that homework. Among my favorite authors was Ben Philippe, whose The Field Guide to the North American Teenager is a must-read for fans of sensitive, empthetic, funny coming-of-age stories. Philippe is a terrific writer, and I’ll read anything he cares to publish (he has also, in the past few years, become a TV writer, having joined the staff of Only Murders in the Building).
Philippe’s memoir, Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend: Notes from the Other Side of the Fist Bump is worth a read too. He’s witty, self-effacing, honest about being Black, Canadian, an immigrant, a friend, a boyfriend, a son. And a writer.
In one section, he describes the best writing advice he ever received:
During a seminar break, a visiting professor, casually and without meaning to, successfully imparts that: “Nobody needs to see this story that’s in your head. Nobody asked for it. For most of your first readers—classmates, potential agents, underpaid slush pile readers—it will be work. So, it’s only polite to make this unnecessary, unsolicited thing remotely interesting.”
Funny, yes, but also an astute piece of writing advice that we rarely, if ever, think about.
Good Reads
I wasn’t a very good student, and a big part of this is because I hated doing homework. Somehow, I’ve made my entire job an endless cascade of homework. All I do is read and write and make notes.
Even if an executive or showrunner or fellow writer loves reading—and I do love reading—seeing a pile of scripts on your desk feels like homework.
So, as writers, the best thing we can do for anyone reading our work is to make the reading experience as pleasurable as possible.
As director Christopher Landon told me about the script for Happy Death Day, “everyone was like, ‘okay, this is unusual, but let's try it because it's fun to read. So if it's fun to read, it's probably going to be fun to watch too.”
My conversation with Simon Allen (creator, The Watch) took a long tangent on just how difficult the business of writing really is. “The problem is, when you write, you're so far away from making a show,” he said. “And the reality is that, chances are, you probably won't get it made. That's just the economic reality. So why not write something that's just a fucking amazing experience to read? Like the most amazing experience you can make it?”
All Aboard for Funtime
I’ve been thinking of the prose of screenwriting lately: the descriptions, the action. Why is it that I’m happy to read these passages in books, but when I see a block of text in a script, I have to take a deep breath before tackling it? What I’ve come to is that the descriptions and action lines in scripts too often aren’t giving me an emotional experience in the same way that the characters and their dialogue does.
Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole are the co-writers and co-directors of Blow the Man Down, one of my favorite movies of 2020. Krudy talked about learning from scripts that are “good reads,” including Rian Johnson’s Looper:
The script is a really fun read. It's written to be read really fast. And I appreciated that about it. It has this ‘beatnik’ quality… you know it's a noir by the way he describes things. He uses sentence fragments and like, just says one word [in descriptions]. That was really influential for understanding how to communicate tone on the page.
Johnson’s scripts are fun reads. The prose is evocative and precise. His scripts are emotional experiences. More than anything, though, Johnson makes you feel like you’re watching the movie. Here are a couple of pages from Brick, his first feature:
It’s little things in this that sell the mood, the picture. His description of the school theater as “a brown chunk.” The sentence fragments that build momentum, that feel like movement: “Kisses the freshman’s forehead, purring.” And toward the end, that he says Brendan “growls.” Tells you everything you need to know about the character, the tone, the feel of the scene.
By the way, Rian generously has made all of his scripts available on his website.
A few other names come up again and again when it comes to models for fun and easy-to-read scripts. Deirdre Mangan (Roswell NM; iZombie) worked as a reader and had to read all kinds of scripts from all kinds of writers. This gave her a good idea of whose work to emulate. “Frank Darabont, for instance makes the most readable scripts,” she said. “Shane Black too. You’re laughing at the action description as much as you’re laughing at some of the dialogue.”
Here’s a quick sample from The Long Kiss Goodnight, for which, in 1994, New Line Cinema paid Shane Black a then-record four million dollars.
And I mean, I get it. It’s visceral, it’s funny, it moves. In short, it feels like the movie.
Speaking of short. Jonathan Goldstein, who wrote Horrible Bosses, Spider-man: Homecoming, and Game Night, among others, with his writing partner John Francis Daley, says, “if you can convey with few words what you’re trying to achieve it’s so much more effective than a page full of description.”
When he first arrived in LA, he worked as a reader at ICM “sitting in the reader’s room and talking to agents and reading three scripts a day and just seeing how it all worked and learning what’s good, what’s bad.” He cites Andrew Marlowe’s script for Air Force One as the former.
“I remember thinking,” Goldstein says, “this is silly but it’s great. It's just such an effective, well written script. You could tell a competent writer from a less competent one.” Even now, he and Daley “try and say as little as possible.”
David Slack (Person of Interest; Magnum PI) started in animation, where descriptions are exhaustive. “If a character’s going to pick up a pencil, you have to write that they pick up a pencil and capitalize that, because somebody's got to draw that pencil.” He then went to work on Law & Order, where the style of scripts was very much the opposite. “McCoy and Borgia walk and talk. Dialogue. Cut to,” he describes it.
Ultimately, his personal style landed somewhere in the middle, and Slack echoes Goldstein’s call for brevity. “The thing you want to create for a director is room for them to do their job. So first of all, don't write too damn much. It's easy to be verbose, it's hard to be brief.”
“We're a visual medium,” Slack says, “and I think that in the writer-driven portion of a visual medium, we can forget that.”
The phrase “kill your darlings,” meaning, to edit out your “most precious and especially self-indulgent passages for the greater good of your literary work,” is usually attributed to William Faulkner (not exactly a lean writer, by the way). The quotation actually comes from British novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch. In his 1914 lecture “On Style,” he railed against “extraneous Ornament”:
If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
First, Readers
What this comes down to is to think of your readers first. Until they become practical production documents, your scripts are tools for selling. Selling this particular story, yes, but selling yourself as a writer. And one key to successful sales is to make your customer the focus of your presentation. In this case, the customer is your reader. So, write your first draft for yourself. Have fun doing it. Write fast and write from a place of passion. Fill it with typos.
But the second you start rewriting with the intention to show your script, you’re writing for the reader.
Don’t give your reader any reason to not engage fully with your script. This starts at the most basic level. When I asked Charles Murray (Clone Wars; Sons of Anarchy) about common mistakes that new writers make on the page, he didn’t hesitate to respond “spelling.”
His fellow panelists Amy Aniobi (Insecure) and Ben Wexler (The Grinder) agreed:
ANIOBI: Oh my god, yes. Typos are a killer. Especially if there’s a typo in the first five pages, I’m just kind of like… come on.
WEXLER: We might all be nerds in that regard, but it fucking rankles me. It just tells me you didn’t take the time.
ANIOBI: You didn’t care.
MURRAY: It’s the last line, because you have programs that will make that will make your script look like another script, so the only thing that’s left is what you’re putting on the page. And usually it turns out to be typos.
Typos, basic grammatical errors; this stuff all counts. Don’t give your reader an excuse to be taken out of the script. It’s the same reason we give characters names that start with different letters. It’s easier to keep track of them. You want to keep the reader in your brain, not their own.
All of which is important, but it’s not the most important thing.
“The essential thing,” says Castle Rock creator Sam Shaw, “is there's writing that feels alive on the page.”
No small task. But if you can be honest and pour your own emotions into the work, then the reader is going to feel it on the page.
Richard Hatem (Titans) says to “trust that you will do really great if you can write something that can make somebody cry. Or feel an emotion.” He says to remember that your readers are people, humans, who want to respond emotionally to your work. “Typically the assistants or the creative development people are people who are in the business because they went to a liberal arts college and they love reading Jane Austin… I've found that, typically, the people you are writing for are really interested in ‘oh my god, I got so sad; oh my god that broke my heart; I love those guys’. That will get you far.”
“I think that there's always a tendency to write from a cerebral place. But I believe intelligence in narrative runs throughout the whole body,” says Ed Solomon (No Sudden Move; Men in Black; Bill and Ted). He continues:
Does it affect me emotionally? I write from a place of body, a feel of empathy, empathy for human beings, putting myself in their headspace. And once I feel them subjectively, I can write from that subjective place.
Ultimately, your readers wants to be taken on a journey. We want to be moved, to laugh and cry and be invested in characters we’ve just met. We want an emotional experience, the same experience reading that we’ll get from the movie that we can’t wait to greenlight. Now that’s entertainment.
Thanks for all this great advice condensed in one post!