by Charles Deemer
All writing that’s meant to communicate implies the existence of a reader. And readers are different. The reader of The New Yorker has different expectations from the reader of USA Today. Learning about the particular readers for whom your work is intended is part of understanding the marketplace.
This is where the beginning screenwriter often fails. She writes a spec script without the necessary understanding of the needs of the spec script reader and the unique and terrible reading environment in which spec scripts usually get read. As a result, the beginning screenwriter writes in a style that’s against the best interests of his story, and of his own budding career. In this way, far too many writers are failing in a tough marketplace without really getting a fair shot at success. And the tragedy is, this beginner’s error can be easily fixed.
I once was a reader for a direct-to-video production company. In recent years, I’ve been a judge in screenwriting competitions. In each case I was shocked to see how many beginning screenwriters were shooting themselves in the foot by misunderstanding what I wanted them to be doing. Indeed, sometimes I could reject half the submissions in the first few pages because I was too harried, with a large stack of scripts to consider, to take the time to find a story in all the over-written prose on the page.
It was story I was looking for. Not great writing, but great storytelling. Readers for a production company are even more harried than I was because they have a particular task, called “coverage,” to complete—and they generally get paid by the script, not by the hour. Coverage is a quantified evaluation of the screenplay, answering such questions as “does the story have a clear hook?”, “does the protagonist have clearly defined goals?”, and “do the characters have unique voices?” Different companies use different particulars, but it all boils down to the need of the reader to find these specific items in your screenplay, and find them quickly. This means an “easy read” is much preferred to a “difficult read.”
What makes for an easy read? Lack of text density, for starters. Lack of verbosity. This means a script with little verbal clutter. Unnecessary words—whether unnecessary descriptions, unnecessary actions, unnecessary verbal flourishes, unnecessary grammatical complexity—get in the way of a clean, quick reading and understanding of the story. Readers don’t take screenplays to the beach to enjoy your great writing. Screenplay readers read with a movie in mind, with the particular needs of their company in mind.
A spec screenplay is part business proposal and part blueprint for a movie. It’s read first by an over-worked, under-paid wannabe screenwriter like yourself, who wants to fill out that coverage form as quickly as possible. Verbosity does not befriend him. Clean, clear, crisp prose driving a fast-moving and clear story befriends him.
Consider this: how easily can your screenplay be skimmed? The easier, the better! You have to get past this first reader before your script will be taken more seriously. This first reader is a clearing house. Fail here, and you’re done with this company. And you fail if your writing gets in the way of your story.
Think about that: you fail if your writing gets in the way of your story. To say this about all forms of writing except screenwriting is ridiculous. Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Faulkner, we’re sorry, but your writing gets in the way of your story. But this caveat accurately applies to spec screenwriting! And it applies because of the terrible environment in which these scripts are first considered: read by a reader with a high stack of scripts just like yours, needing to fill out “coverage” as quickly as possible, who can become very irritable if your script is so wordy this becomes a difficult task.
Needless to say, this is a horrible environment in which to participate. But it’s the reality. If you want to be verbose, you can always go off and write your novel. Otherwise, don&#8217;t over-write. Your story deserves a fair shake.

Writing for Harried Readers

by Charles Deemer
The students who enter my screenwriting classroom at Portland State University bring with them considerable language habits. Some write well, some not so well, but all of them have been taught the principles of “good writing.” It’s a shock, therefore when they learn that many of these values are not important in screenwriting and, in fact, may even be detrimental.
Beginning screenwriters over-write. This appears to be a law of nature. And one of the reasons they over-write is because they apply some of the principles of “good writing” that have been preached to them since elementary school. They therefore have some things to unlearn as well as new things to learn about writing a spec script for film.
The learning curve here is not difficult, but the change in attitude can be. And one the first rules of good writing that students resist giving up is the notion that sentence fragments are “bad.” In standard prose writing, this is true enough. But in screenwriting the sentence fragment can be an important visual tool, too often ignored. Perhaps no screenwriter uses them with more frequency and consistency than Harold Pinter.
<div id="attachment_5370" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-French-Lieutenant’s-Woman.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5370" class="size-full wp-image-5370" alt="The French Lieutenant’s Woman" src="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-French-Lieutenant’s-Woman.jpg" width="600" height="175" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-French-Lieutenant’s-Woman.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-French-Lieutenant’s-Woman-150x43.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-French-Lieutenant’s-Woman-300x87.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>The French Lieutenant’s Woman</div>
Let’s get right to the evidence. Here are the first sentences of random scenes from Pinter’s extraordinary screenplay, The French Lieutenant’s Woman:
Charles sitting at a table, examining a fossil through a microscope.
Ernestina half dressed.
Charles under an overhanging branch.
Charles and Sarah staring at each other.
Anna, with glasses on, reading a book.
Sarah sitting on the ledge, looking out to sea.
Pinter offers dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of scene openings with this grammatical construction: the sentence fragment. I’ve been teaching screenwriting for several decades but I don’t recall a single student ever opening scenes this way. The standard approach is this: Charles is sitting at a table, Charles and Sarah are staring at each other, Anna is reading a book, and so on.
So what’s the difference here? What is the difference between writing, as Pinter does, “Anna reading a book,” and what virtually all of my students would write—“Anna is reading a book”? What is the difference, in screenwriting, between using a sentence fragment and expanding it to become a complete sentence?
The difference, it seems to me, is subtle but crucial. When a student writes, “Anna is reading a book,” the image here is diffuse, the focus balanced between Anna, the reader, and reading, the activity, the verb “is” acting as a kind of fulcrum in a scale. That’s what sentences are, balances between nouns and objects, held in balance by verbs.
But Pinter is up to something very different. He takes the diffuse image and sharpens it: Anna reading a book. The subject here clearly is Anna, and Anna alone, and there is no balance here, no distraction from the real subject, Anna. Pinter writes with far greater visual strength and focus. Anna reading. That’s the subject of the shot, the image in our mind as we read. We see Anna.
This is how Pinter establishes most of his scenes, with a scene fragment that brings the subject of the scene, the subject of the shot, into clear and uncompromising focus. Not only does this make the script a quick, very visual read, it emphasized the visual focus of the scene by beginning with it. And the sentence fragment, with or without the gerund form of the verb, is the tool with which Pinter accomplishes this.
It’s a powerful and easily-adaptable technique—and yet it astounds me how few screenwriting students have embraced it. The brainwashing they’ve received about not using sentence fragments apparently wins out.
I see no down side to using this technique. It’s visual, it’s focused, it’s more quickly read… the sentence fragment is a tool every beginning screenwriter should learn how to use.

Writing for Harried Readers

What Can We Learn from Harold Pinter?

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