Writing for Professionals

WRITING FOR PROFESSIONALS

What entices someone to read your script?

You’ve slaved for hours, days, hopefully longer over this piece of work and now you’re ready to send it out- so what entices people? There are a host of standard answers to that question, and there are many ways to answer it, but I’m going to direct you to one particular way of thinking.

What is a script? A document that tells a complete story in the fewest possible, effective words.
It’s a blueprint, a mechanism by which you tell a story and hopefully engage the imagination of the reader- but it’s also so much more than that.

A script has to engage the reader on many different levels.

To a proof reader, it has to be grammatically correct and use descriptive English.
To a producer, it has to be marketable.
To a director, it has to inspire that thought of “I know how I could direct that”
To an actor, it has to inspire them with a character that they have to play.
To the costume designer, it has to inspire them to clothe your characters in a subtle way that speaks volumes about the character.
To a cinematographer / director of photography, it has to inspire them to want to shoot this from the camera angles that leap into their mind.

This advice is hardly new or ground-breaking, but some will have never heard (read) it before, others will have ignored it.

Truth is, if you want your script to stand out, you have to engage the professional who will read this after you and your work should have them beating a path to your door to become involved.

So how do you do that?

What happens when you invite a plumber to fix your heating, or a leaking tap? Do you stand there and advise him on what bracket to use, what pipes to install or what insulation to wrap around your boiler?

If a lawyer goes through your legal papers, do you analyze and criticize his or her work at every stage and tell them how to apply the law?

Of course not: they’re professionals, or tradesmen, and they know what they’re doing.

Kind of like the actor, the make-up artist, the stunt choreographer, the producer, the cinematographer, the director, the set builder….

So why are you writing a script with camera angles, clever lines like “we fade through the wall into…” (I did that one once), detailed fight choreography (a major bone of contention amongst writers- “if you’re gonna write fight scenes, you’d better know how to fight!” one writer told me once) or direction (we close on her face, see the reflection of her children in her tears) and so on.

So the next time you write a script, invite a film professional around to sit at your shoulder and tell you how to write.

Does that sound painful? It does to me!

So, how do you avoid this?

Direction. Leave it out of your script. Cinematography- same.

Now a script has to give basic detail to paint a picture, and some details are necessary, but a script has to strike that fine line between painting a picture and engaging the creative talents of the people who will eventually read it.

There is a lot of advice on how to write a script and how much detail to insert. There are also different guidelines for submission to television as well as cinema- yes, there are standards and all writers have to now the standards covered by the basic rules of script writing, but each and every production company prefers scripts to be written to a standard they accept.

This happened to me recently- I wrote a film script to the standard of the film industry, but attracted criticism from a producer who compared my style to that preferred by a UK Television network.

My crime? If you describe a scene (setting, characters), move away to another scene on the same time frame and return to that first scene, every time you return, I was asked to re-describe the scene from scratch and detail who the characters were each and every time.

So be aware- there are different standards of submission (which doesn’t help the writer) but the basic rule of this article applies- strike a balance between descriptive writing that engages the professional reading your work, and avoid straying into the realm of prescriptive writing that interferes with those professionals.

A script is a way of telling a story in the minimum possible descriptive words to tell an effective story – it’s always worth reading over your work and asking yourself the question- “have I struck that balance?”