Description and Word Choice: Say What You Mean
Mark Twain, that quotable old bastard, once said that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter –'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” Screenplays might live and die by their dialog, but those little action paragraphs in between need love, too.
Nothing's sadder than watching a writer use a word they don't fully understand to convey a meaning they don't really intend. When the close-enough-is-good-enough instinct takes over, script readers find themselves dealing with descriptions of “five-star hovels,” and “star-crossed lovers” who are apparently destined to be together. Poor word choice and bad description stick out like sore thumbs, but when an action paragraph gets everything right, it becomes invisible. When the reader forgets that they're reading because they're so caught up in the vivid action of the scene, you'll know your description's done its job.
Set every scene. Don't make me wonder what room of the house they're in, or why somebody just started talking when you didn't even tell me they were present.
When you're reading fast, sometimes those scene headings just disappear. The reader's brain just skips right over them, especially very short or nondescript ones like “INT. KITCHEN,” or “EXT. BAR.” Often this leads to an awkward reader double-take, with a reader not realizing that the action has skipped to the other side of the continent, or wondering how a character has seemingly teleported in from somewhere else.
Make sure this problem never comes up by setting every single scene quickly and clearly. Remember that who is there is more important than what is there. This example is confusing and overwritten:
EXT. BUS SHELTER – NIGHT
The building is dark, lit only occasionally by the headlights of passing cars. Waiting by the bus schedule board is Rob. Tina lights a cigarette and hands it to Jimmy. Natalie is also here.
This is better:
EXT. BUS SHELTER – NIGHT
Rob, Tina, Jimmy, and Natalie wait at the bus shelter.
See the difference? After you've said who is actually present in the scene, then you can go nuts on the description. (Although I'd argue that we all know what a damn bus shelter looks like already, so why not jump straight to some action or dialog?) In the first example, details get lost. The reader starts to subconsciously jump ahead. If that first example were how you chose to open this scene, I can almost guarantee that the reader would be surprised when Jimmy started talking, as his name is the most heavily concealed by the action writing.
Note that I intentionally made the writing in the first example feel passive and muddy through the use of crappy writing like “is dark,” “waiting by the bus schedule board is Rob,” and “Natalie is.” More on this later, but for now it's enough to say that most writers who write like this also have a problem with setting scenes and burying character names.
So what about when you do have to describe? Everybody knows what a bus shelter is, but what does an alien spacecraft or a Lebanese street festival look like?
The perfect descriptive writing is succinct and generalized but also evocative. What I mean is that it's short and to the point, it doesn't go into specifics, yet at the same time it deftly conjures an image in the reader's mind.
So how would you describe that alien spacecraft? The crappy version would go into detail about how it's forty feet long, made from a highly reflective crystalline and steel alloy, astronautically streamlined and engineered to travel in a variety of atmospheric conditions, blah, blah, blah. The better version might be: “The ship hangs in the sky, jagged and gleaming.” “Jagged” covers the engineering and the shape; “gleaming” suggests the material it's made from. That's what I mean by generalized but evocative.
Even better, compare it to something. Metaphor and analogy are like shortcuts straight to the reader's brain – they'll do all the work for you if you let them. You could say the ship was “jagged and gleaming, like a glass sculpture frozen mid-explosion,” or “jagged and gleaming, like a dagger carved out of a glacier.” Those are two very different kinds of jagged gleaminess (not actually a word), but they both describe a very complex cinematic visual in one short, economical sentence.
Set your scenes fast and set them well. Give a sense of where we are in every scene, and for god's sake, tell me who's there. Film's a visual medium: readers don't just read – they visualize. Help them to see what you see when you close your eyes.
Continuing our theme of “what's with all the overdescribing, Sparky?” we come now to the question of when to describe a scene and when to leave it all in the reader's head. I mean, everyone knows what a bathroom looks like, right? A cubicle farm, a dive bar, a boxing gym – we all have vivid images that spring to mind when we hear about those places. So when would you bother describing them in a script at all?
When it reveals character, that's when.
If it's a space the character spends a lot of time in – her bedroom, her desk at work, her car – and we're seeing this space for the first time in Act 1, then you have license to go nuts on that description. Well, not completely nuts – try to keep it to three or four lines – but a little bit more nuts than normal. You might describe her wallpaper, her coffee cup, her dog, the computer she uses, her bedspread, or any of a hundred potentially revealing setting elements.
But you can go deeper than that. It's often much more effective to hint at how she lives through description. For example, one side of her computer desk might be covered in coffee rings and unwashed mugs, her bed might be perpetually unmade, her door scratched and marked where the dog always tries to get in.
This kind of description does double the work for you – not only does it set the scene, it also reveals backstory. The more backstory you can reveal in the description, the less your characters will have to reveal through dialog. The audience will be able to infer what has happened from the combination of setting and casual dialog. This is what's known as “elegant,” and elegant is what you want to be.
A great example – to continue with the “boxing gym” suggestion from a few paragraphs ago – is the gym in the television show LIGHTS OUT. The main character, a former heavyweight champion fallen on hard times, bought the gym for his father with the money from his title winnings. The gym is set up like a shrine to the champ; photos of him and articles about him are everywhere. There's a banner hanging over the ring that reads “Pain Is Temporary, Pride Lasts Forever.”
But as we learn more about this guy, we come to realize that the message on that banner is ironic – he lost his pride when he lost the heavyweight title. He feels like he gave in to the pain and quit boxing because his family couldn't take it any more, and now all those triumphant articles are just salt in the wound. Even more ironic is the fact that not only does he not have the pride, but the pain wasn't so temporary after all. You see, all those years of getting punched in the head have left him with pugilistic dementia, which will eventually kill him. How's that for backstory and character from a single setting detail?
You can pull off this trick, too. Just figure out what you want to communicate about your character's backstory or emotional state, then find the best location to send that message. Then all you have to do is choose the right words.
Go easy on the caps-lock in those action scenes. There's a fine line between capitalization for emphasis and sounding like the Unabomber.
I understand, I really do. You want your screenplay to be a gripping read that hooks in the readers and leads them inexorably through page after page of tense, exciting story. But there are ways to do this that don't involve taping down the Caps Lock key and digitally shouting your head off like a drive-by Internet forum poster.
Too much caps can kill a script for the same reason overcapitalized You Tube comments hurt our brains: it sounds like the writer is yelling at you. Everything written in all-caps takes on a desperate, urgent tone. You might think this is perfect for fast-paced, action-heavy scripts, but sometimes it can overwhelm the reader.
The confusion seems to have arisen because many style guides will tell you to use caps for sounds, while many professionally written scripts available on the Internet instead use caps for emphasis. This has led to many amateurs writers attempting the unpleasant combination of caps for sound and caps for emphasis, resulting in more caps than the time the Avengers cloned Steve Rogers. Look, I like caps as much as the next guy, but that is too much caps.
Nowhere is it written in stone that you must always use caps for sounds. In fact, if your script is gripping and well-written, most script readers won't notice if you're not doing it. There's also no law that you can't use bold, italic, or underlining to emphasize certain parts of your script.
Personally, I use caps for all sounds (MURMUR, CLAP, SHRIEK, WHISTLE, BANG, etc.), italic in dialog, and underlining for major action, or to emphasize certain important details that the reader really shouldn't miss. I don't use bold because I think it looks weird on-screen in my choice of screenwriting software, but you may very well decide you want to use it. The key here is that you choose a system and then stick to it slavishly throughout the entire script. You can't start off using underlining for key action and italic for key dialog, only to switch them around halfway through the script. That's liable to confuse and piss off your script reader.
Finally, one sneaky use of caps is as a lure to lead the reader's internal camera around. What do I mean by that? I mean that by capitalizing key words in an action paragraph you can force the viewer to imagine the shots in the order that you imagine them. Check it out:
INT. RESTAURANT
The bell in the doorway jangles as –
The FRONT DOOR swings open.
Two men. Italian leather SHOES. Nice suits, dark ties. Hair slicked back. They wheel their SUITCASES inside – dark leather Louis Vuittons.
Behind the counter, Tony looks up from his newspaper. Checks his WATCH –
It's a shade after five thirty.
Tony SMIRKS.
TONY
Yer late.
Aaand scene. It ain't Shane Black, but it'll do.
What did you imagine when reading that scene? It's likely you heard the jangling bell, then saw a medium shot of the door opening. Then you saw the camera pan up from the two men's shoes, up to their suits and ties, and finally to their faces and hair. Next you saw a close-up on their luggage being wheeled in. Then you saw Tony appearing from behind his newspaper, followed by an extreme close-up on his watch as he checks the time, and finally a close-up on Tony's face as he smirks.
This is how you lead the viewer around a scene, by using capitalized words as the landmarks. Be careful with this trick – it really only works with fast-paced, thrilleresque scripts, as it imparts a certain urgency to everything. Also, if used poorly or too often, it'll end up fatiguing and annoying the reader.
Don't refer to someone as a “dark shadow” or a “mysterious figure” if we already know exactly who it is. This is directing the script through description.
Don't get too caught up in describing the special effects unless they're important to the plot. The director, the editor, and the CG folks will do their own thing with it anyway.
‘Wise beyond his years” is a character description cliché – and not even a very useful or informative one.
Your characters should never “start” to do anything, like “He starts running,” “She starts to LAUGH,” and so on. Action is immediate; they either do something or they don't.