As creative as we like to think we are, we writers repeat the same rookie mistakes again and again. Here are a dozen of the most common and glaring errors, culled from the pages of discarded scripts on their way to the recycling factory.
The temptation is great. The photograph of the grizzled fur trapper and his three-legged puppy would look marvelous on the title page, especially with the title set in 36-point Sasquatch and printed in leather-colored ink.
Don’t do it.
Keep the title page simple and clean. Title. Writer’s name. Contact information. All in 12-point Courier font. White paper. Black ink.
The title page won’t sell the script. But it can make a disastrous first impression.
Read more in “Title pages.”
Don’t sabotage your enormous creative effort by submitting a script printed in disappearing ink or stained with the drippings of last night’s Hot Pocket.
Competition in this game is intense. Neatness counts.
People who make movies take their margins seriously.
Seriously.
All of us have more words we’d like to pack into those few pages we’re allowed. Fuller descriptions. A longer chase sequence. Another conversation between that trapper and his dog. All writers face the battle of the bulge.
When we’ve written too many words, the solution is not to cheat the margins. The solution is to cut words. It hurts. You’re a writer. Be tough. Cut.
When we refuse to cut, when we instead alter the margins so that we can pack our pages with too many words, bad things happen. Pages turn more slowly. Reading our scripts becomes a chore. Readers notice. They tune out. They skim. They pass.
Don’t cheat.
Imagine opening a screenplay and reading these first glorious lines:
FAED INN:
FEMININ HADNS
grip black steal. Expertly disassembal a Glock nine-millameter. Click. Click. Click
The peaces of the gun are spred across a woman’s vanity. Her hands swiftly clean each peas of the weapon. Longue fingers, Soft skin
The gun goes back to4ether fast. Snap. Sanp. Snap.
While these words may introduce the most compelling story ever imagined, this screenplay will never go in front of the cameras because no one will read it.
Why should they? The writer obviously hasn’t.
Take the time to read what you’ve written. Not what you think you’ve written, but the actual letters and punctuation marks you’ve put on the page. That means reading slowly. Meticulously. Fixing the missing punctuation. The creative spelling. The inadvertent omissions. The “who’s” where you meant “whose.” The bit of dialogue that somehow got formatted as direction. The typos.
That stuff.
Don’t be too proud to ask for help. Not all great writers are great spellers. Or proofreaders. But they want their scripts to be taken seriously, so they find a way to purge their pages of mistakes.
Error-free pages communicate respect for yourself, your craft and your readers. Search out those errors. Destroy them.
Film and television writers can create in the imaginations of their readers something very close to the experience of actually watching a story unfold on the screen. But pages peppered with medium shots, two shots, wide shots and tracking shots intrude on that illusion. Further, they suggest that the writer doesn’t understand the line between the work of the writer and that of the director. Or is new to the game and simply doesn’t know any better.
Use shot headings only when you have a compelling reason to do so. Otherwise, get out of the way and let the story unfold.
Read much more about this in “How to decide when to create a new shot heading.”
Screenplays and teleplays do require shot headings, and writers should include them when they are needed. Consider the following:
FADE IN:
A supernova bursts in a colossal explosion of white heat.
A Shockwave of hypercompressed sound and light rumbles across the universe. Directly in the path of the deadly cosmic tsunami:
A familiar blue-green planet, third out from its sun.
Somewhere on Earth, a young girl wakes in her bed. Innocent. Unaware of the onrushing calamity.
This reads more like a short story than a screenplay, and demonstrates that the writer doesn’t know his craft. Instead, format the sequence something like this:
FADE IN:
DEEP SPACE
A supernova bursts in a colossal explosion of white heat.
A Shockwave of hypercompressed sound and light rumbles across the universe. Directly in the path of the deadly cosmic tsunami:
FAMILIAR BLUE-GREEN PLANET
Third out from its sun.
Somewhere on Earth, a young girl wakes in her bed. Innocent. Unaware of the onrushing calamity.
New shot headings are needed whenever the location changes, or whenever there is a jump in time. To read more about when shot headings are required, see “How to decide when to create a new shot heading.”
Short shot headings read more quickly than long ones. Building shot headings that include only the relevant information has the added benefit of focusing the reader’s attention where it belongs. Take the following example.
EXT. CEMETERY — DAY
Grantham reaches between the broken bricks and pulls out:
EXT. CEMETERY — CLOSE SHOT — RUSTED HANDGUN — DAY
The barrel is bent almost in half.
The vital information — that Grantham has produced a handgun — is buried inside an unnecessarily detailed shot heading. The EXT. CEMETERY location has already been established, as has the time of day, so those items don’t need to be repeated within the context of a scene that is plainly continuous. Besides distracting from the one crucial piece of information in the shot heading, the rusted handgun, repeating the location and time of day makes the reader pause and wonder if a new scene has begun. And the type of shot, a close shot, is implicit in the words “rusted handgun.” When a reader sees a relatively small object as the subject of a shot heading, what else does she imagine but a rusted handgun viewed from close range? Instead, write the sequence like this:
EXT. CEMETERY — DAY
Grantham reaches between the broken bricks and pulls out:
RUSTED HANDGUN
The barrel is bent almost in half.
Pay attention to the way standard format handles parenthetical character direction, which should begin on a new line, with a lower-case letter, and no ending period, like this:
CHARLOTTE
Lieutenant, order your men to dig
a trench there —
(points at cave
entrance)
— and another over there.
She indicates the armory.
Don’t embed parenthetical direction on the same line as dialogue:
CHARLOTTE
Lieutenant, order your men to dig
a trench there — (points at cave
entrance) — and another over
there.
And don’t finish a speech with parenthetical direction dangling off the end (unless you’re writing for animation):
CHARLOTTE
Lieutenant, order your men to dig
a trench there —
(points at cave
entrance)
— and another over there.
(indicates the armory)
Learn more by reading “Parenthetical character direction.”
Screenplays and teleplays demand vivid, economical writing. Every word must contribute to the script’s characters, visuals, action or attitude. All words that fail to contribute must be cut. Nearly every writer faces the need to slash surplus adverbs, adjectives, even entire sentences and paragraphs. Writers who refuse to cut test the patience of overworked readers and will almost certainly fail that test. After writing, cut, cut, cut, then cut some more. Give yourself a chance to make a strong professional impression as a writer who makes every word count.
Seasoned writers ensure that their pages contain abundant white space — that portion of the page without any words. White space allows script pages to breathe. A page with ample breathing room looks easy to read. Lack of this essential white space takes a strong psychological toll on the reader, who looks at a page dense with text and groans like a traveler forced to trudge through heavy mud.
Create white space by breaking long paragraphs into shorter ones. Break up long speeches with short bits of direction, or with dialogue from other characters.
Learn how to create white space in action sequences by reading the section “Add shot headings to break up long passages of action and lend a sense of increased tempo.”
Writers who write excessively long scripts don’t get read. The preferred length for a feature screenplay is 100 to 110 pages, with some comedies and animated features coming in even shorter. A script of this length is fast to read and manageable to shoot. A script that weighs in at 120 pages, once considered an appropriate length, is now viewed as too long. A script of 135 pages likely won’t even be read.
For writers in television, acceptable page counts vary from show to show. Before writing a spec (i.e “speculative”) episode of an existing television series, obtain a sample script and match the page count as closely as possible.
Descriptive passages in scripts, also called direction, are written in present tense prose, like this:
EXT. DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO — MORNING
A red Jeep rolls along Market Street. Turns south on Eighth. FOLLOW as it joins a line of oars turning into the San Francisco Hall of Justice. Catch a glimpse of Bobbie at the wheel.
INT. HALL OF JUSTICE
Bobbie plunges into the chaos of the 7 AM shift change in this big city detectives’ bureau. She pulls case files from her inbox and threads her way through the chitchat with absolute self-assurance. No pleasantries, no eye contact. Like she’s the only one in the room. Will steps into her path.
Scribes more accustomed to writing short stories or novels sometimes slip into past tense. Instead of “Will steps into her path,” they inadvertently write, “Will stepped into her path.” It’s an understandable mistake, but it’s also a tip-off that the writer is new to film and television and need not be taken seriously. The goal, of course, is to be taken as seriously as a third Coen brother, so search out this error during proofreading and destroy it.
Writers who train themselves to avoid these dozen deadly mistakes will give their scripts a chance for serious consideration in today’s environment of extreme competition for the attention of readers who can help them bring their stories to the screen.
No one has really, um, died from making one of these mistakes … have they?
No.
You say that 120 pages is too long for a script, but I see movies all the time that are longer than two hours. If it’s a page a minute, how long are those scripts, and how come mine can’t be that long?
Yes, we see movies all the time that come in at well over two hours. But it’s a safe bet that those movies didn’t begin as 180 page spec scripts. Titanic? Lord of the Rings? Not specs. Those deals were in place with studios before a single page was written. Different world, different rules. Unless you’re James Cameron or Peter Jackson and his brilliant co-writers, keep it under 110 pages and you’ll give yourself a shot at getting read by someone who doesn’t start out resenting you.
I heard a successful writer say that scripts should always have covers, and that those covers should always be that vibrant shade of electric blue. He says every script he puts that cover on sells.
And some of baseball’s hottest hitters credit the lucky rabbit’s foot in their pocket or the fact that they never shave after August 15. I think there’s probably something else at play. Like talent and hard work. In any case, use the blue cover if you want to. It won’t hurt anything. But a writer who sells regularly is doing more right than choosing a jazzy script cover.
I heard that same successful writer say that you shouldn’t use any commas in your script. He doesn’t, and he sells everything he writes.
See “Lucky rabbit’s foot” and “No shaving after August 15.” I don’t doubt that this writer sells a bunch of scripts, but it’s not due to the lack of commas in his work. Many equally successful writers use commas like the rest of the English-speaking world, to no ill effect.
I’m trying to follow your margins in Microsoft Word, but I can’t get as many lines on the page as you recommend. Is there a trick that will help me?
Yes. In Word, select Format, Paragraph, Line Spacing, then select Exactly and 12 pt. Word will then allow exactly 12 points per line, the historic standard for screenplays in Hollywood, and you’ll be able to fit the correct number of lines on each page.