Before anything else, here are a few practical tips, largely to do with making your work easier to read. It’s important to remember that your script will almost definitely go through the hands of a script-reader, someone with a huge pile of scripts to get through. Because of this, they will speed-read quite a lot of the page (all of it if you don’t make it interesting), and it’s up to you to present your material in such a way that it goes into their head as easily as possible. So…
Try to give your characters names of differing lengths: it’s a lot easier to take in who’s saying what if the speakers are called RICHARD, TED and MR. STEVENSON than if they’re called DAVID, JAMES and STEVE. (You don’t have to stick with these in the dialogue – in speech they can call each other whatever you want them to – just as long as their character name is consistent ahead of the dialogue and in the stage directions).
Put your scene headings (INT. POLICE STATION – DAY) in bold, it makes the location changes much more obvious, particularly during action sequences. (The Final Draft default doesn’t set them in bold, but it’s simply enough to customise)
Break up your stage directions into paragraphs, there’s nothing more tedious when you’re trying to read quickly than three-quarters of a page of unbroken text. Try to think of the action in terms of camera and break your paragraphs accordingly: when moving from one character’s actions to another; or when you think there’d be a cut from a medium-ish shot to a close-up; that sort of thing.
However, DO NOT WRITE CAMERA DIRECTIONS,
it works against you, in much the same way as writing huge, long chunks of description at the beginning of every scene does. This is information for camera and art department, not for an initial reader; the best chance your script has is if it reads at roughly the same speed on the page as it eventually will on the screen.
If information has to be imparted, do it within the scene, through the movements or action of characters; learn how to INTEGRATE, and you will do your work much more justice.
The basic mistake is to think that describing exactly what is in your mind’s eye gives the reader a more accurate picture of the location. It doesn’t, what it gives is a glut of information that blurs the initial image the reader will have in their head from the first sentence.
This is an example of how I think description is done best. Say your character is coming into a seedy bedsit (already, if you use those two words, it creates a fairly strong image in the reader’s mind), don’t give us half a page of the bed, the sink, the walls, etc. just give us something like:
JOHN walks into the seedy bedsit, its filth illuminated by a single, unshaded light-bulb.
Now there’s enough in that single sentence to produce an image in the reader’s mind that is more than enough to play the scene in. It doesn’t matter that the image may be bit different for each reader, the idea is to put them immediately into a place the action can take place in.
- LEARN TO LEAVE OUT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.
Like good music, good writing is as much about the beats you leave out as those you put in.
That said, you should really make the effort to write your stage directions as good as you possibly can, because if they aren’t interesting, they will get skipped and the reader will miss a lot of what is going on in the script. If the stage directions are economical, pithy and enjoyable to read, more of your script will cross that huge gulf between the printed page and the reader’s mind.
‘Mike Johnson’ is a scriptwriter