Script writers make the best story editors. In my time of running critique groups for London Writers’ Café, I internally cheer when I learn there’s a screenwriter at the table for that night’s session. Why? Because while prose writers are considering whether their description of how a character handles their wineglass conveys enough ‘gravitas’, and if the side-eye they’ve described is too oblique, screen writers are usually asking the most important questions, such as where’s the story? And, where does it start?
Knowing when a story starts is something it can take prose writers 40,000 words+ to learn, and the idea that it probably doesn’t begin until page ten of a first draft and every word written before that doesn’t deserve to be there is one of the best editing tips a novelist can learn. This is where screen writers truly shine. Script writers think in action, in scenes, in characters interacting with their environment. None of this beginning a story with a long internal monologue about the shapes of the leaves in a character’s terrible childhood buried in rhetorical questions about life, love and what’s the meaning of it all? Script writers cut through the words and pin down the architecture of the story.
I mean, screenwriting is not for the faint-hearted – as most of the story actually lives off the page – and creating believable scripts is a case of how much you leave out. Subtext, power shifts, and characters shown perpetually in action are the name of the game and so many prose writers try too hard to hold hands, nay, drag readers through paragraphs and paragraphs of too-detailed descriptions (exposition, blergh), resulting in slow-as-mud pacing. In screenwriting, from what I understand, that’s a firing offence.
Conversely, prose writers can teach script writers much about the value of detail. In my limited reading and review of scripts, it’s often the case that there’s a lot of action, a lot of talking/moving/fighting etc. but a characters moves from scene to scene without any emotional or spiritual repercussions being shown. When a form demands that so much is left out, it’s easy for script writers to forsake vivid details that convey a character’s internal journey faster than another two scenes combined – because they feel it’s indulgent or overwritten. I say, forget that, choose your details as carefully as you do scene settings – your script will lift to an entirely new level. If in doubt, next time you seek a beta reader, ask a prose writer.
By Lisa Goll
Lisa is chair of London Writers’ Café, an events community for London’s writers to gain constructive feedback in a relaxed and informal setting. As you can tell, she connecting with writers of fiction often and can be found yakking away about books, film and creative coteries @LisasShare
Posted by a member of the London Screenwriters’ Festival team.
