The Purpose
Although this textbook is intended mainly for students in colleges and universities who are taking an introductory course in writing scripts for media, it is also meant for all writers making the transition to writing for visual media. It assumes that the reader begins with minimal understanding of the nature of writing for visual media. Most beginners have had a large number of experiences viewing visual media: films, television, and video. They probably contemplate the originating creative act that lies behind such programs without much idea of how it’s done. They may not understand visual thinking, or if they do, they don’t know how to set it down. They don’t know formats. In short, they don’t quite know where or how to start. This book is designed to get the beginner started. It is not intended to make fully fledged professionals out of beginners nor to deal with every type of media writing, nor all the issues of scriptwriting, but it does cover all the material a beginner will need to write viable scripts in the main media formats.
Other books offer more exhaustive and more specialized information about how to work at a professional level writing for film, television, corporate video, or interactive media. Broadcast journalism for current affairs and sports is another discipline that is well covered in more specialized works. A selected bibliography at the end of the book lists many of these more advanced books that focus more narrowly on a special type of writing for a single medium together with more general works and the sources quoted or referenced in the chapters that follow.
The Premise of this Book
This book is based on the premise that the fundamental challenge of writing for visual media arises in learning to think and write visually, that a script is a plan for production, and that visual media are identifiably different from print media. Although broadcast journalism overlaps visual writing in some of its forms, journalists have concerns about sources, objectivity, and editorial issues that predominate. Shaping a news story delivered to a teleprompter does not really require visual writing. If anything it is writing for the ear. Even though a news script might make allowance for B-roll and story packages, those inserts are not written in. Therefore, this form of scripting is excluded except for a mention of the format for a production script.
Although writing for the audio track has been part of the job of scriptwriting since sound was added to motion pictures some 80 years ago, writing for the ear alone concerns only words that are to be heard rather than words to describe a visual experience on screen. Our focus is a body of technique that is concerned with writing for audiovisual media that are based on sequencing images. Writing for radio, with the exception of a show like Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio, usually consists of writing radio ads, which are a form of copywriting and, therefore, guided by advertising concerns, or it is news and involves the journalistic issues already mentioned. Therefore, writing purely for radio is limited to radio public service announcements (PSAs) as an adjunct to visual PSAs. However, in context, writing dialogue, voice-over narration, and other audio concerns are given the importance they deserve.
Objectives
To become good at your craft, sooner or later you need to specialize. You need to hone and refine your writing skills for the way in which a particular medium is used. This does not mean you can never cross over from one form to another, but the chances are that if you are going to make a living writing for a visual medium, you will have to be good enough in at least one area to compete with the pros already practicing the craft. That is a few stages away.
To get there from here, you need to learn:
How visual media communicate
Visual thinking
Visual writing
Scriptwriting terminology
The recognized script format for each visual medium
A method to get from brain static to a coherent idea for any media script
The role of the writer in media industries
Secondary Objectives
Even if you don’t end up writing for a living, you may have a job that requires you to read, interpret, evaluate, buy, or review scripts. There are dozens of activities that require you to be able to evaluate the written plan that is the script. The script is cheap to produce compared to producing the script. You may need to be able to construe the final product from words and ideas on a page.
Some of the people who have to do this are producers, directors, casting directors, cinematographers, story editors, literary agents, studio and TV executives, film and video editors, and actors. Other positions in the visual communications industry might also require that you be able to read a script and deduce what it will cost to make a product that an audience will see. In addition to the people who have to evaluate and buy or reject scripts, these positions include art directors, set designers, talent agents, casting directors, lighting directors, and sound designers. Virtually anyone who has a role in bringing a script to the screen needs to be able to read the blueprint from which a program is made.
So even if you don’t succeed specifically as a scriptwriter, you still need to understand scriptwriting and what makes a script work well. You must be able to follow the way a script translates into narrative images that communicate to an audience. You must be able to read the coded set of instructions that a script embodies.
The Basic Idea of a Script
When musicians want someone else to play their music, they must write it down as notes in a form that other musicians can read, decode, and then turn back into music. This problem has been solved in the music world by inventing the musical staff, treble and bass, with a clear set of rules for describing what pitch, what loudness, and what rhythm should be reproduced. Even composers who don’t write music need arrangers to write it out for them because most music involves groups of musicians playing different instruments simultaneously. There is always a barrier between the page of music and the auditory experience of hearing the music. You can’t hear the score unless you are a trained musician. Even then, you need to play the notes to understand what the composer intended and create a musical experience for a wide audience, most of whom cannot read music or play an instrument.
Likewise, you can’t see the script for a film or a video. If you are a trained director or editor who knows how to read a script, you can visualize in your mind’s eye what is intended, just as a musician can hear in his mind’s ear what the music should sound like. You can translate a static page into a sequence of images flowing in a time line. Today’s nonlinear video editors display programs in a graphic time line, which is a kind of storyboard metaphor for the content of a program. In the end, the production process is needed to make the script into images that are accessible to all viewers even though they cannot read a script, frame a shot, or edit a sequence to make narrative sense.
Like all analogies, this one breaks down. Musical scores are used over and over again for numberless performances, whereas a script is used only once. So another useful analogy is the blueprint, the drawings an architect makes for a builder or contractor to erect a building. After the building is finished, the blueprint has little interest except perhaps for maintenance or repair. The person who buys a house or who lives in it might not be able to read the architect’s plans any more than the audience at a concert is able to read music or an audience for a film is able to read a script. The home dweller hardly thinks about the plans of the house, even though this person may have strong views about how successful the building is to inhabit. If you like living in the space, then that is a measure of the building’s success even though you do not necessarily know how to design a house.
Likewise, if you watch a TV series, like a movie, or understand a corporate message, you don’t think about the scripts on which they are based. You get an audiovisual, intellectual, and emotional experience. You laugh, cry, reflect, or go into a rewarding imaginative or mental space. So a script has little value except as a blueprint to make something. Think of it this way. You couldn’t sell many scripts of Star Wars or Jurassic Park (name your favorite movie), but you can sell a lot of tickets to see the movie made from it—millions of tickets in fact.
The term meta-writing, coined by the author, was introduced in the second edition to clarify and explain how visual writing works. The process of visual writing is elusive because it originates in the imagination before writing happens. Writing of any kind arises in the mind in some pre-verbal phase that seeks words to embody the idea. Languages are many, and the writing process is not confined to any particular language. Anyone who knows another language well can be faced with a dilemma of which language accommodates the idea. I am fluent in French and have written scripts, stories and letters in that language. Writing does not originate simply in words although words might enable the process. Writing for visual media involves yet another complexity, namely that the language used to describe the visual idea is not what the audience itself experiences. The language we use as visual writers is a referent for images or a construct of images that underlies the produced result and accounts for how and why it works. The term meta-writing refers to that ur-writing or pre-writing activity of the creative imagination. It is expressed as a concept, a premise, or some such pre-script document that then has to evolve through further elaboration in a treatment into a set of written instructions that become the script itself. That script is sustained by a vision that the audience grasps visually and not through words. So the audience is responding to what is in effect the meta-writing.
The website has a link to some CSX television commercials (www.csx.com/?fuseaction=about.tomorrow_moves). One of them consists of a montage of brief shots of all kinds of people breathing in. We then see another montage of the same people breathing out and swimmers racing. It incorporates the following text intercut with images: CSX trains move one ton of freight 436 miles on 1 gallon of fuel. Less fuel=less emissions. Good news for anyone who breathes. The tag line—“good news for anyone who breathes”—completes an idea that can only be assimilated visually. If you see this television ad, you understand it and know what it means. If you try to express your understanding in words, you might have difficulty. Expressed in words, something is lost. Let’s try and then view the ad on line.
We live in a gaseous atmosphere just as fish live in water. That atmosphere is being altered by human activity burning fossil fuels and changing the gaseous makeup of that atmosphere. This same activity also emits pollutants which contaminate the environment and impact the health of the human organism that must breathe that gas polluted with carcinogens and other particulate matter detrimental to the respiratory system. Reducing that pollution benefits everyone who breathes, indeed every animal that breathes (a shot of a dog exhaling is included). So if we can get trucks off the road and do the same job of transporting goods by rail, which uses fossil fuel energy more efficiently, we all benefit. We are a railroad. We understand this. Every year, our train operations reduce the amount of C02 being pumped into the air by over 6.5 million tons. It would take 152 million tree seedlings 10 years to absorb that much carbon. We want you to appreciate how important our older technology is for the survival of the planet and its life forms—you. Although railroads are old transportation technology, they are the solution for tomorrow.
Expressed in words, the idea is lengthy and somewhat clumsy; expressed visually; it is elegant and can be accomplished in 30 seconds. The tag line for the campaign is in words: How tomorrow moves™.
The transmission of a visual idea cannot take place without live action images that have to be produced. The audience then experiences the meta-writing. The audience gets the idea that started the whole process. This is why understanding how you do meta-writing is so important to visual writing. It happens before you write, but you have to find words to explain it to someone else so that it can be produced. Learning how to do this entails more than the traditional writing skills. It is less dependent on facility with language or fine expression than a capacity to think in images. This is meta-writing for visual media.
The Learning Task
Your job right now is to begin to understand how you put this plan, this score, or this blueprint for a movie together. Whether it is a public service announcement, a corporate communication, or a feature film, you have to figure out the process. You have to learn in what forms media industries communicate, buy, sell, and produce their ideas. You have to try it out before big bucks or your next month’s rent are at stake.
The most difficult part of writing is the constant revision. We have to rewrite and revise until we get it right. Writers whose work you watch on TV and in the movie theater have spent a long time studying how it’s done. One day, I was explaining this to a communications student who played on the college basketball team. I asked him what the coach had him do in basketball practice. His eyes lit up and he described some of the shooting drills. Then I asked him what he thought the equivalent drills would be for a writer. He wasn’t so sure and did not understand that a similar degree of practice is the foundation for successful writing.
We need to think about how we can score some points in this writing game. If you have to shoot thousands of baskets so as to be confident about sinking a foul shot, let’s think about what it takes to get to be good enough to score consistently in a competitive writing game. Some people will put in a lot of time practicing basketball because they love the game. Scriptwriters keep writing because they love the medium and they love to create. Isn’t it the same idea? Practice, practice, practice! Don’t give up! Don’t get discouraged when your ideas don’t work out right away, and, above all, enjoy the creative act, even if you don’t make points every time!
Conclusion
This book is about learning the fundamentals of scriptwriting. It is designed to take you from nowhere to somewhere, from no experience and no knowledge to a basic level of competence and knowledge of what the issues of scriptwriting are. It gives you a chance to explore your visual imagination and try out your powers of invention. Later, you can confront the full range of writing issues particular to each genre in each medium by taking more advanced media writing courses dedicated to specific media formats, or by reading more advanced texts, or by further self-directed writing experience.
In the end, you learn, not by reading alone, not by thinking alone, and not by talking about doing it, but by doing it. “Just do it!” as the Nike ad says. Write!