Verticality

In studying screenwriting, I'm struck time and again by how many tricks of good screenwriting can be carried over to traditional fiction writing (stories, novels, novellas), often to the great benefit of the latter.

A common complaint about bad screenplays is that they're a lot of work to read, because the author spends too much time in flowery descriptive narrative. You can tell when you're reading one of these scripts: It takes you two minutes—instead of 30 or 40 seconds—to get through a page. (Once you've read some really fine scripts, and felt their rhythm, you can sense the snail-like rhythm of a "stinker" script instantly.)

Page 2 of the Alien script (shooting version).

In the screenwriting world, we say that bogged-down scripts often lack verticality. (Charles Deemer gives an excellent summary in his post on "Making Scripts Vertical.") The idea comes down to this: Your eye spends an awful lot of time, in a slow-moving piece of writing, simply going from left to right (LTR), parsing word by word through one sentence after another after another. (Obviously I'm talking about English and other alphabetic/LTR languages.) This is what one might call horizontality; it's the basis of all alphabetic-LTR writing, because letters and words occur sequentially. But every once in a while, your eye gets to drop down vertically on the page—when there's a new paragraph, a subhead, a section break, a new chapter heading, an inserted block quote, a bulleted list, etc. Anything that makes your eye drop down is verticality.

Your brain keeps track of the ratio of verticality to horizontality. It begins to ache after a while if there's not enough verticality.

Horizontality is tiring. Why? Because it's linear, and that's not how cognition works. Processing linear text requires a highly specialized area of the brain. Perception (involving the senses of the body in conjunction with the whole brain) results from experiences taken in episodically, not always in a particular order, as a collage of disjoint bits that may include memories, ideas, emotions, smells, sounds, what have you.

Many of the great art movements of the early twentieth century can be understood in the context of an escape from the shackles of linearity. A photo, like a reaistic painting, maps one area of light or dark (in the photo) to a similar area in the subject; in fact the verb "map" implies linearity of just this sort. Impressionism attempts to break from linearity so as to allow the brain to do what it does best: assemble meaning from disjoint bits. Likewise, a common stylistic trope of postmodern fiction is the telling of a tale as a pastiche of disconnected and not always time-ordered pieces. This sort of storytelling (think The English Patient) engages the brain in a different way than straight narrative, often to stunning effect, since nonlinear processing centers of the brain are enlisted in the attempt to render the overall meaning.

If you have any doubt as to how hard (cognitively speaking) linear, horizontal writing is for the brain, try reading the scroll version of Kerouac's On the Road (available in the 50th anniversary edition from Viking/Penguin), the version that reflects Kerouac's original rendering of the story as a single long paragraph. Somewhere around ten pages into the 300-page-long paragraph, you'll be wishing for an indent, a section break, or some other "break" from linearity. The single-long-paragraph device takes getting used to.

Screenplays are intrinsically highly verticalized. They're broken up into short pieces that vary a great deal in terms of indents and margins. Thus they tend to be much easier to read quickly than a novel. But (as I said earlier) even among screenplays, there are those that read easily and those that feel like work.

Take, for example, the following bit of narrative, adapted from Alien:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert, each wearing gloves, boots, and jackets, enter the air lock. All three are carrying laser pistols. As Kane touches a button, a servo begins to whine and the inner door quietly slides shut; then the trio pull on their helmets.

That's not how the scene appears in the final version of the script (written by Walter Hill and David Giler, based on an earlier screenplay by Dan O'Bannon). Here's how the script was written:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert enter the lock.
All wear gloves, boots, jackets.
Carry laser pistols.
Kane touches a button.
Servo-whine.
Then the inner door slides quietly shut.
The trio pull on their helmets.

Telegraphic; staccato; almost poem-like. The "before" version is what you'd read in a novel (or a not-so-great screenplay). The second version, from the Hill-Giler script, is experiential, sensory in its telling. Two entirely different ways of handling the same content; two ways for the brain to process the information.

In your novel (you know, that one you've been working on all month?), before you get too tied up in Proustian 900-word sentences and Pynchonesque paragraphs that ramble on for pages, have a regard for the cognitive load imposed by linearity. Consider introducing a little more verticality.

Lighten the load.

Your reader will thank you.

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8 Rules for Better Dialog

When I was an undergrad at the University of California, Irvine, I was privileged to take a course in playwriting under William Inge, who won an Oscar for Splendor in the Grass and a Pulitzer for Picnic. For ten weeks, ten of us wrote one-act plays, then listened to Inge read from them.

William Inge

Inge had emphysema (he smoked continuously throughout class), wheezing more than talking. He could barely speak. What I most remember him saying, as he looked up from someone's homework assignment, is: "Do real people talk like this?" 

Good dialog is hard. Finding out how bad a piece of written dialog is usually requires nothing more than reading it aloud. (Actors are a help. But in a pinch, you can just stand in front of the mirror.) Still, it's surprising how much bad dialog you can find in novels, stage plays, screenplays—not only amateur-written material but a lot of professionally written stuff as well. For me, bad dialog always stands right out: Wooden characters who speak in complete sentences, never using contractions, never interrupting each other, always spewing bland phrases that reinforce their predictable (and undifferentiated) personalities; characters whose swear words don't even sound right.

I don't claim to be an expert here, but I do believe (based on reading as much awkward, wooden, silly dialog as I've read) there are rules you can follow to keep yourself from writing the Worst Dialog Ever. In that spirit, I present the following eight easy rules for writing better dialog:

1. People use contractions (don't, I'm, you're, etc.) when they speak. Only prigs and ESL students use fully expanded forms.
2. People swear in normal conversation, but not as often as you think.
3. Characters should interrupt each other. Because that's how most conversation is.
4. Write for low syllable count.
5. Use many periods, few commas.
6. Avoid patois unless you're Mark Twain, which you're not.
7. Let subtext (not the actual spoken words) carry the scene, when possible.
8. Don't be boring.

I'm tempted to add one more rule (for screenwriters): Don't insert explicit beats in dialog. Years ago, it was common to insert "(beat)" here or there to control tempo. You'll find opinions divided on whether this is still an acceptable thing to do. My advice? Play it smart and refuse to resort to "(beat)" in your script. Control tempo with sentence length, punctuation (including ellipses where necessary), the (very) occasional wryly, action description, and so forth. Can you imagine Hemingway or Fitzgerald inserting "(beat)" in the middle of a conversation? Think how comical and intrusive it would be if novelists inserted explicit beats in dialog to control tempo. You wouldn't do that in a novel, because it would make for a patently awful reading experience. Why should your screenplay read that way?

The enter-a-scene-late/leave-early rule applies to dialog. We don't need to hear characters greet each other, except maybe at the start of a phone conversation. Likewise we don't need to see/hear them say good-bye, unless the whole scene is about parting.

In one scene of my screenplay Greeners, two characters (principals in an investment firm; a father and a son) are about to discuss the day's dismal results. I can think of a million boring, straightforward ways to begin the discussion. (E.g.: The son says: "My God, what a day," or "How was your day?" or something equally banal.) What I ended up with is this: The father, sitting at his desk, collar loosened, disheveled and dejected, pushes a few papers away. As the son (standing nearby) points a finger at the papers, the old man pulls a bottle of Scotch out of his desk and says: "Don't even ask."

"Don't be boring" is probably the most important rule you can follow. Even when characters have to say ordinary things, try to spice it up. When my main character, Dylan, has to talk to a fast-food drive-up menu box, I could have had him say "I'll have a sausage-egg biscuit and a large coffee." Instead, he says: "I'll have a sausage-egg biscuit and a large, black, coffee. Black. With extra coffee." A few seconds later, when the cashier recognizes him and starts motor-mouthing (because she's so excited to see him), he answers her over-animated "How are you??" with "Sixty-forty"—and then she goes on talking. The fact that she doesn't stop to ask what "sixty-forty" means is, in itself, a subtextual clue that she's more interested in hearing herself talk than in what he might have to say. Likewise, the fact that he chose to say "sixty-forty" (instead of "so-so" or "can't complain," or something equally vapid) suggests that maybe he already knows she's not going to pay attention to whatever he has to say. Plus, it gives the audience something to chew on. Is he saying things are sixty percent good and forty percent crappy, or the other way around? What, exactly, does he mean by "sixty-forty"?

When you write dialog, consider what I call orthogonality. Two characters, when talking about their conflicting needs/desires, will tend to speak to their own individual concerns more than to the other person's concerns. (Joe wants to talk about the raise he didn't get at work; Mary wants to talk about Joe Junior's bad day at school.) This is what I call orthogonality. You can use it to build realistic-sounding dialog that accentuates (rather than amalgamates) the characters' differences. You've seen this technique used a million times in TV shows and movies. David storms into Tyler's office and says: "Why the hell didn't you tell me we lost the Frankenhammer account?!" Tyler takes a sip of coffee and says: "I'm fine, thanks for asking. How about yourself?" That's orthogonality.

So, to the foregoing list of 8 items, you can add two more:

9. Don't use explicit beats.

10. Exploit orthogonality.

There's more to good dialog than just following these rules. But if you follow them, chances are you'll at least avoid having someone ask you (after reading something you labored over for hours, days, or weeks) "Do real people talk like this?" 

If you'd like to take a look at my WGA-registered screenplay, Greeners, write to me. (Tell me something about yourself.) My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas.

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Lessons from the Script

The screenplay draft is complete. It ended up at 114 pages rather than 112. Boo hoo.

Here's some of what I've learned so far.

The books all say that screenwriting is hard. And it is. IMHO, it's harder than poetry. Makes writing a novel seem like a stroll on the beach.

Screenwriting is a lot like a stroll on the beach—Omaha Beach.

In his book On Writing (a fine book, BTW), Stephen King talks about how he develops stories. Basically, he creates interesting characters, puts them in a dramatic situation, and lets them figure it out. There is no conscious attempt to plot or create subplots; the characters do what they must, inevitably (given their proclivities and their situation) do. King merely transcribes. He gets all the way through a novel this way; following the headlights all the way to the destination, so to speak.

It works for King because he's a master at what he does, and the form (the novel) allows it.

Screenwriting is so constraint-intensive, there is precious little room (although there is some) for organic story growth. You almost have to come at it with a complete structure in mind. Screenwriter Matt Bird has a story structure checklist (encompassing character development and all sorts of other things) that's 100+ items long. You're not going to hit even a third of the points in that list using an unprepared "structure it as you go" approach. If you can, well, congratulations; maybe you're channeling Robert Towne; in which case please accept my unworthy bow as I exit stage-left.

Alien would work well as a silent movie. The dialog augments the story.

You'll run out of room. Guaranteed. Budget 32 pages for Act I and you'll go sailing through that mark like a drunk through a stop sign. Set an absolute page limit of 110 and you'll be at 120 before you know it.

Therefore the best advice I can give you is: Enlarge all margins and tab limits at the start, just a smidge, so you'll get fewer words per page. You'll gladly kill any number of grandmothers later to widen them out again.

Another tip that may keep you from busting your page count: One day when you're thoroughly blocked, write the ending. Write the final two scenes (more, if you can) of the script, complete. Behold: Your "active writing area" is now bookended by the already-written beginning and the already-in-place ending. You have less surface area in which to work, and the paint dries faster, forcing you to up the pace. Which you were wanting to do anyway, right?

Thirty pages seems like a lot in the beginning. But when you've got just thirty pages left to write, it's never enough.

Let actions and situations do the talking whenever possible. Let characters speak only if and when they must, and even then, let subtext, not the actual words, tell the story.

Never forget one thing. Watching a movie is an act of voyeurism. Hence, all dialog is overheard. Hence, no conversation needs to begin at the beginning. Think of the times you've overheard a conversation (whether at a bar, a social function, standing in line, or whatever) in real life. Did you ever hear the actual start of the conversation? Chances are you came along in the middle. Yet within a few seconds, you figured out the essentials of the conversation (who, what, where, when, why) from context. That's how all movie dialog works. The film viewer is an eavesdropper, not a court stenographer.

Take a scene, any scene. Cut the first line of dialog. Does the scene still work? Yes? Then why did you ever think you needed that line of dialog?

More often than not, dialog is about subtext, backstory, misdirection, and/or foreshadowing, not just what's going on at the moment. We can see what's going on at the moment.

Dialog, properly done, wears a hairpiece. It's never bald.

It helps to know something about stage magic and its crazy stepsister, comedy. Both are all about misdirection.

Would your script still make for a good moviegoing experience with the sound off? Alien would play damn well as a silent movie. My Dinner with Andre would not. Look at your script with dialog turned off (in your head, at least). Which did you write? Alien, or My Dinner with Andre?

I was fortunate, with the script I just wrote, to have a multinational story, with lots of non-English-speaking characters (but zero subtitles, thanks). Try it sometime. Write a scene that involves foreign nationals, speaking their native tongues, using no subtitles, with the idea that the scene has to be understandable to anyone, of any language. See how far you can take it. Can you still make the scene work? Why or why not?

There's more to tell. Suffice it to say, the screenplay-writing process has taught me a lot. And I thought I already knew a thing or two. I was right, as it turns out. I knew a thing. Maybe two at the most.


If you'd like to see my (WGA-registered) screenplay, drop me a line. My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. Inquiries held in strictest confidence. Please mention your Twitter handle (if applicable).

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