by Jim Mercurio
In Juno, after discovering that she is pregnant, Juno (Ellen Page) goes to the Women’s Choice Clinic. Outside, she sees an acquaintance from school, Su-Chin (Valerie Tian), who holds a sign that reads, “No babies like murdering.” After Juno walks past her, Su-Chin makes one last attempt to sway Juno.
SU-CHIN
Your baby probably has a beating heart, you know. It can feel pain. And it has fingernails.
JUNO
Really? Fingernails?
She considers the concept, then pushes open the clinic door.
After a clinical and cold greeting from the receptionist that contrasts with Su-Chin’s earnest and heartfelt perspective, Juno sits down to fill out some forms. Without any dialogue, the film capitalizes on the quick verbal setup of “fingernails” to visually show that Juno’s impending decision weighs on her:
Then she looks over and notices the FINGERNAILS of a nearby teen, who looks as nervous as she does. The girl bites her thumbnail and spits it onto the floor.
Juno looks away, but immediately notices another waiting woman, who absently scratches her arm with long fake nails.
Suddenly, she sees fingernails EVERYWHERE. The receptionist clicks her nails on the front desk. Another woman blows on her fresh manicure. Everyone seems to be fidgeting with their fingers somehow. Juno suddenly looks terror-stricken…
One sentence describes the look on Juno’s face, but then, as in this chapter’s earlier example of a woman discovering the idea of using a cage to hold a human, the film reinforces the beat in a more cinematic way with blocking that unequivocally captures her way of thinking:
We see that Juno’s chair is EMPTY. The receptionist cranes her neck and sees the front door drift shut. Juno’s figure recedes into the distance as she tears off down the street, running as fast as she can.
Another way to transform a scene’s visual throughline is to place it in a dominant setting.
Regardless of where you are in your writing or rewriting process, ask yourself if there is a location that would breathe life into a scene. You might decide to reuse an emotionally charged (one with a figurative glow or energy field) location or choose one with resonant meaning. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, setting a conversation about love between Michael and Julianne at a baseball game subtly reminds us that she sees love as a competition. The climactic battle between Kim and Julianne plays out in the same stadium, as women gather around them, playfully evoking the idea of a street fight.
Concept
Look for an overriding principle, metaphor, or gimmick that acts as a throughline for a scene and that might enliven it. Essentially, you should attempt to discover or to create a scene’s concept.
Maybe it’s as simple as the choice in Mystic Pizza, which turned a common romantic comedy trope—a scene in which a character complains to and receives advice from mentors and confidantes—into a monologue. In the Mystic Pizza scene from Chapter 3, “Dialogue: The Beats of a Missing Horse,” the beats are familiar: rationalizing, grasping for straws, looking for help, evading, and calling herself on her baggage. However, allowing Jojo to deliver all of the lines herself creates enough of a wrinkle that the scene plays off of its own generic cliché in a fresh way.
One of my students incorporated the setting into a scene’s concept and gave it some new life. She was writing a comedy about a virgin who happened to own an ice cream shop. When the soon-to-be love interest walked into her store for the first time, I asked if she could give him an introduction to the store and ice cream that would allow a fun compare-and-contrast to the other “first time.” Although the title of the script did not change to Fifty Shades of Vanilla, the what-if metaphor of the ice cream shop sexual encounter elevated the scene.
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen actually used subtitles onscreen during a conversation between Annie and Alvy to explicitly spell out the subtext. Here’s the dialogue and the accompanying subtitles:
ANNIE
I would like to take a serious photography course.
Subtitle: He probably thinks I am a yo-yo.
ALVY
Photography is interesting. It’s a new art form and a set of aesthetic criteria have not emerged yet.
Subtitle: I wonder what she looks like naked.
The humor completely relies on the subtitles to create the ironic contrast between the text and subtext.
Let’s say you have two scenes near each other in which two lovers have an embittered argument. To break up the repetition with some variety, you decide to play out the second argument through text messaging while one of the characters is trying to run a very important meeting.
Personally, I can be as lazy as the next writer, so I understand the first instinct to cut and paste the dialogue verbatim into text messages, throw in a few beeps and buzzes, and be done, right? Not at all. Our work has just begun.
Clinging to the original dialogue and producing a one-to-one adaptation of the dialogue into text lines would be a mistake. Once we commit to this premise, it becomes the concept of the scene. Now everything you learned in Chapter 7, “Exploiting Concept,” comes into play. We have to use our purposefully chosen limitation—the fact that the argument will unfold as text messages—as inspiration for as many of the beats as possible.
Calling on my personal struggles with my not-so-smart phone, I know that the frustration of autocorrect is rife for exploitation. An insulting slur could be changed to a nonsensical word that rhymes. Adhering to that concept, we can find organic spin-offs including:
• The recipient is confused at first before the intended message dawns.
• The recipient’s angry response references the word (“I can’t believe you called me a…”) and has the same or different autocorrect issue.
• The sender, in desperation, tries to resend message or explain autocorrect if the “wrong” message actually has a contrary or contradictory meaning.
Although you might have to discard the dialogue from the original scene, you can mine it for inspiration that will work within the new concept. For instance, a character raising his voice might become him yelling at the phone or pounding it with every keystroke.
This new scene would have similar emotion and importance, possibly with more humor, but it now plays out in a novel way, exploiting a clever concept.
Subjective Style
In Chapter 9, “Advanced Scene Writing: Breaking the Rules with Style,” we saw some advantages to approaching the scene in which The Hippy asks for a raise from The Man from a subjective style and perspective. Not only were we able to eliminate a page of banal dialogue (The Man’s canned response), we changed the audience’s experience from objective bystander to active participant. We aligned the reader and viewer with The Hippy’s emotional experience as he sweated, clenched his fist, and tuned out The Man’s actual dialogue.
The choice to approach a scene from a subjective perspective can have such a dramatic effect that it’s almost as powerful as adding a new concept.
Let’s say a child in his bedroom listens to his parents argue. Visually, you could show a literal point-of-view shot of the parents seen through a cracked-open door. However, if your early draft includes the entirety of the parent’s lengthy argument, a subjective style could have a more significant and transformative impact.
Stay in the bedroom with the child while he covers his ears or puts his head under a pillow to drown out the noise. The words of the adult could become distorted or even replaced by expressionistic sounds. An elliptical writing style would also allow you to eliminate a page of long-winded and possibly trite dialogue:
DAD AND MOM
I can’t stand it when… You are… Yes, constantly. Constantly! Not right… she’s only eight years old… no accountability… learn to grow up… what kind of role model are you?
This approach allows the audience to identify with the child’s confusion as he tries to understand grown-up conflict. It emphasizes the emotional toll on the child rather than the specifics of the verbal bat
tle.
Compare this to the earlier scene from Juno that used a subjective approach to brilliantly externalize Juno’s internal conflict. Juno’s choice about her pregnancy does not consist of a rational debate of pros and cons. We experience the weight of her emotional doubt right along with her as the entire world, for her and us, comes to be about fingernails.
Expressionistic Style
In supernatural or magical realism stories, expressionism as a style breaks the rules of the physical world and creates images that the audience understands on an intuitive level. As a style, it aims to capture a subjective, as opposed to an objective, depiction of events.
In the 1992 version of Dracula, as a nod to Nosferatu, Dracula’s shadow is discordant, out of sync with his actual actions. For instance, while conversing with a character, Dracula’s shadow appears to be strangling him. Although a physical impossibility, emotionally, the audience comprehends it: the shadow reveals Dracula’s true nature.
Expressionism as a style will not be appropriate for every script or genre. However, you can borrow some of these techniques and apply them to your writing. An expressionistic writing style allows you to skip some details and focus on key images instead. This is one of the few times I will champion imprecision over brevity and specificity.
Think about how you can use shadows, silhouettes, and as Sleepy Hollow does here, ellipses. Notice the montage-like style here where gaps in detail create mystery and force the reader to fill in the blanks:
THUNDEROUS HOOFBEATS are HEARD behind.
The ugly man glances back again. His lantern swings wild… SHATTERS against a tree. The jammed-up pole SLAMS the ugly man off his horse…
He hits the ground. He runs, trips, falls, and scrambles up.
DEEP IN THE FOREST, we glimpse the source of the HOOFBEATS: a HUGE FORM on a HUGE BLACK HORSE, already gone.
The ugly man pushes through thorny bushes. Jagged branches slit his hands and cheeks.
There’s a quote that was attributed to King Vidor by camera operator Peter Hopkinson: “In Hollywood, the cameraman lights the star, in Europe he lights the set.” It might be more clever than true, but use the idea as inspiration to bring your environment to life.
In the German expressionistic film M, we know that the police are in pursuit of the child killer. Without the responsibility of a tediously realistic depiction of the police procedure, the film instead tells the story with intriguing visuals that include a disorienting close-up, a silhouette, and a magnified fingerprint:
CLOSE - HAND WITH MAGNIFYING GLASS
Moving across a dossier.
CHIEF OF POLICE (O.S.)
But we must try everything…
IN ANOTHER ROOM…
… of the police laboratory, a fingerprint is projected onto a large screen.
Silhouetted against it, a police research assistant, using a magnifying glass, compares the projection with the dossier.
Tell your story with expressive touches that do not add clutter to the language. When you are microfocusing on scenes sentence by sentence, make subtle refinements to create satisfying moments of mystery, suspense, or intrigue for the audience.
Stick with open mode long enough to decide if the best way to improve a scene will come from a completely new angle. Sometimes you must completely let go of what’s there, even if you lack a clear-cut solution. If you feel something is off, trust yourself and your process. Have faith that from out of the blue, an improvement will present itself.
After you have implemented the overhaul, switch to closed mode so you can you tweak and polish the scene as discussed in these next steps.
Small-Picture Approach
The Final Polish
Most of your script’s final polish will correspond with closed mode. You are making last-minute tweaks with finesse. One of your main goals is to ensure you’ve removed all impediments to clarity for the reader.
A fat-free script tells your story better. You want to strip the script down until it becomes a distilled version of itself. Get into the habit of poring over every word of your script. The attention to detail, which starts as by-rote proofreading, eventually yields surprising results.
You begin by asking yourself at each moment, “Would I miss this?” or “Is there a way to make my intent more clear and succinct?” This attention to craft leads your subconscious to asking the more germane question “How can I make this better?”
Less Is More
Break the habit of thinking more is more.
Let’s say I was chipping away at piece of marble and I showed you its amorphous shape that vaguely appeared to be on its way to being a sculpture of a human. In fact, let’s say you don’t even get to see it. Would you believe me if I told you that it was a masterpiece that clearly surpasses the magnificence of Michelangelo’s David?
No? Why not?
Somewhere “inside” that chunk of marble is the exact same shape of David that Michelangelo sculpted. I could keep cutting away so that all that remains is David. But why bother to do that when what I have now is David plus more? It’s clearly better.
Absurd as this thinking is, screenwriters make this parallel argument in defense of their script.
A major part of clarity, cohesion, and elegance in your storytelling is brevity.
One of the first things you will do to tighten your script in your final polish is to pore over all of your action description. This is as close to classical proofreading as you will get. You can even make a game of it.
Take orphans, for example. An orphan is an old typesetting term for the word or two that fall on a line all by themselves. You must kill your orphans.
If you have a block of action description that takes up three full lines and a few character spaces of a fourth one, challenge yourself to find a quick fix that, with equal clarity, shortens the paragraph to only three lines. Eliminating an average of three orphans per page will make your script at least a few pages shorter.
Look for subtle places where you can lose words, or, better yet, lines.
Consider this short excerpt from an imaginary script:
The red-faced Coach screams at his team.
COACH
(angry)
Drop and give me fifty, you maggots!
Do we really need the parenthetical here? Why add extra words and an entire line to the script?
You can attack dialogue with the same fervor. Although a mechanical pursuit of brevity with dialogue initially seems like a creative violation, you might discover that cutting an article or adding a contraction makes dialogue sound more natural or in the voice of a character while simultaneously shortening the script.
Eventually, you will find that one of the most exciting things during the polishing stage is when cutting a word or a few characters yields the elimination of an entire line.
Check out the breakout box Delete Your Way to a Better Script to see how you can substantially improve your script by making simple, noncreative cuts.
Delete Your Way to a Better Script
Armed with a red pen or the delete key, you can use brevity to systematically improve your script in hours or even minutes.
Here’s what often happens to a typical amateur’s 116-page script, a so-called final draft.
First, mechanical proofreading alone (cutting orphans, tightening verbiage, rethinking long passages)—even if it rids us of only four or five lines per page—eliminates seven to eight pages without losing any intention or clarity. Same content, less space, higher story density. The same good stuff gets delivered more quickly and efficiently. It’s already a better script and a more marketable length (the shorter the script, the lower the budget).
Move from language usage to story development by eliminating exposition and cutting or tightening redundant or otherwise superfluous material, which will often yield another reduction of six or seven pages. As your rewriting craft improves, you will get into scenes later and out of them earlier, sometimes with clever transitions or elli
pses that intentionally skip over a section to make an association or create mystery. Let’s say you surprise yourself here and lose five more pages.
Now we have a 96-page draft, but our creative efforts increased the efficiency of our storytelling, so we lost almost 20 percent of the page count, and most likely, improved the quality immensely.
For most genres, 96 pages might be considered a bit short for a feature (comedy, horror, and ultralow budget being typical exceptions), so now we have room for more story: ten or twelve pages for another sequence or two and their new climactic twists. Your script’s overall story density can skyrocket.
The relationship between story and the sorts of improvements discussed here isn’t strictly linear. Do all of this along with whatever magic you can bring to the rewrite, and you can end up with a script that is twice as good as it was.
Voice Drafts
Not all of your rewriting of dialogue will come during the final polish. However, a voice draft—in which you address the individual nuances, rhythms, and manners of how each character speaks—is best addressed near the end of the process.
Ideally, every character would sound so distinctive that if you were to extract any individual line, even out of context, the speaker would be immediately identifiable. Do they have an accent? Do they use big words? Are they educated or blue-collar? Are they talky or curt?
I suggest breaking down your overall voice draft into several shorter, individual passes that focus on only one character at a time. This process allows you to concentrate on and “stay in” an individual character’s voice.
If you are not sure where to start, find a word that describes a character’s worldview and a single adjective or quirk of how he speaks. A neurotic person might talk in circles with a lot of repetitive hemming and hawing. Compare that to a laconic person who gives one-word answers if any at all.
