Those of you who have read my post on planning will know that I don’t really do it when it comes to writing. I only need the vaguest notion of plot to start a novel, and as long as I know what the end of a short story will be, I can write it. But when it comes to writing scripts, you will find me sitting down, breaking the plot into individual scenes, and describing what happens in each of those scenes.
So, why does someone who hates planning, and finds it a borderline painful experience, do all this preparation when it comes to scripts?
Waffle, with a side order of waffle
With a novel, you can waffle. Think about the number of fantasy books that run to 700 pages, but only feature 350 pages of story. The great thing about prose is that you have room to manoeuvre, room to go into detail. Scripts don’t have this luxury. They have to be tighter than Russell Brand’s trousers.
With novels or short stories, I find it very easy to just write out a first draft and worry about the editing later on. It’s a skill I had to learn, after getting into such an editing frame of mind that no project could ever get more than a paragraph in before I declared “It’s rubbish!” and deleted the whole thing.
Precision
With scripts, if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get there. Scriptwriters have an immense challenge in that they have to tell a story almost entirely through dialogue. They don’t have the option of suddenly flying into the character’s heads and spending several minutes listening to the character’s internal voice as they explain everything they are thinking to themselves. They have to get all the information they think you need to know across to you in as little time possible.
Think of this classic example, which I personally think is a masterclass in good writing:
CHARACTER 1
I love you.
CHARACTER 2
I know.
In a novel, you’d have the luxury of being able to draw out Character 2’s internal thoughts as they ask the question ‘Do I still love Character 1?’, thinking about perhaps the other person in their life, or the side of Character 1 that they have now seen, and questioning whether that changes their feelings for them. In a script, ‘I know’ is about all you can afford to have, and says it all perfectly. We all know the required response to ‘I love you’, assuming it’s coming from your loved ones, not your boss, a judge, or a stranger on the bus who smells like beer. Which means we all know what’s wrong when Character 2 doesn’t issue that required response.
Keep it moving
With scripts, you have to talk your way through a scene. Not in the same way those teenagers at the back of the cinema do, but as in dialogue has to get you from the beginning of the scene to the end. You’ve had conversations, right? Ever phoned someone with a purpose, hung up after half an hour and then realised you didn’t ask/tell them whatever it was. “Yeah, I do love London, especially going on the Eye, you just get such a great view. Anyway, which emergency service was it you wanted?”
It’s so easy when writing purely dialogue to get massively side-tracked, and given that so much of the story has to come through what the characters say, you have to make sure that the plot doesn’t get diluted underneath superfluous dialogue. By having a plan that says ‘Scene 8. Tim and Sara realise they have to get rid of the gorilla’, you have a clear point to aim for. Writing blind can be useful when writing novels or short stories, as you can stumble across alternative/sub plots or new characters. With scripts, you just haven’t got time.
Is it getting funny around here?
The other reason is that the scripts I write (and am writing at the moment) and comedies, or some bizarre blend of comedy and something else. On top of the usual scriptwriting challenges, comedy throws up another one.
When I first tried writing a sitcom, and for several attempts after that, I made the mistake I expect all newbies make. I tried to make it funny. That may sound counter-intuitive, but I forgot about the story and just focussed on putting as many jokes in as possible. To that end, I ended up with scenes in which nothing happened, apart from an endless stream of jokes that digressed and struck out on tangents like one of those flies that gets in your house and is really confused by the whole ordeal.
Each scene in a sitcom has to do two things; it has to move the plot forward, and it has to make the audience laugh. Without knowing where the plot has to be moved from and to, it is incredibly hard to put the jokes in without losing the narrative structure and flow. Hence the planning.
Comic complications
There is another reason planning helps. Sometimes I find if I am struggling to think of jokes for a scene, I will go back to the plan, look at what needs to happen in the scene, and then devise what I call a Comic Complication. There’s probably a proper and better name for it, but I don’t know it. Basically, this is something that provides you with ‘fuel’ for your comedy, if you like. It is especially useful in scenes in which you need to get across really important information, and so it is hard for your characters to joke around, and impossible to include a typical ‘sketch’ scene.
For example, a scene in which Sara goes into the coffee shop where he works in order to tell Tim that she loves him could be complicated by the fact that an impatient queue begins to form behind her, and she ends up having to order something whilst giving her big speech in order to shut the other customers up and avoid being thrown out by the management. Her speech takes a lot longer than she thought, and the customers won’t give her a second’s room, so she keeps having to add cakes to her order. By the end of the scene, she can no longer see Tim behind the tray on which her coffee cup and a huge pile of cakes and muffins lies.
It’s hard to decide how to complicate a scene if you don’t know what actually happens in it, which is why planning is so important.
A help, not a hindrance
The reason I plan scripts but not novels and short stories is that with the former it actually helps the writing process,whereas with the latter I begin to wonder why I am writing plans about something when I could be writing the actual thing itself. Because scripts have to be so sharp, so precise, I find a framework is essential. This is especially essential for comedy, where jokes and story have to intertwine perfectly without one compromising the other.
So, are you a ‘one-plan’ policy kind of writer, or does it depend on medium?
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I’ve written both – and the point you made here is so true.
I think why I went back to novels is that it seems to suit me better. I’m a go with the flow kind of guy and I like that about novels. In fact my latest book I accidentally wrote a whole new chapter without realizing it till it was done. I only do a small out line – how many chapters and what I want in those chapters, but the descriptions are brief, enough to help me find my way. I’ve found that helps at least keep you on track.
With scripts – you got to find plot points, you got to have certain things happen at certain times – if you are writing scripts look into Syd Fields book Screenplay. It might be a bit dated, but the rules still apply.
I don’t know who said it but when you make a movie it goes like this – First act you get your character up a tree, second act you set that tree on fire, and third act you somehow get him out of that tree. Not exact words, but you get the drift.
Good luck.
Yeah it wasn’t really until I worked out that I needed to plan things before scripts began to click with me. I’m still pretty new to them, so I’m sure I’ve still gone tonnes to learn, but mapping them out before I started writing them changed the whole process for me and suddenly made scripts possible. With novels it really depends on what I’m doing. Really as long as I know the overall plot, I can get going, so often I’ll write that out as a paragraph or two and see where I end up.
I’ll have to check that book out. That’s a great example of film narrative, I think! Thanks
Robert Towne (Chinatown) and Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) are two great screenwriters to read. They know their stuff.
Robert Towne (Chinatown) and Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) are two great screenwriters to read. They know their stuff.
Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the fellas behind ‘Peep Show’, use a variation on the rule atothewr mentioned – they stick their characters in a tree, then just persist in throwing rocks at them.
Anyway, I’ve yet to write anything substantial that would need to be broken down into scenes (My last couple of scripted projects were tiny sketch-length plays, actual sketches, a monologue, and a fifteen minute one act play), but I still loosely plan some of them. In the case of the latter two, I plotted conversation/plot points, then wrote freely off this loose structure, connecting the dots when it seemed right to.
Ahh Peep Show. A brilliant exercise in how to make something as awkward as possible. There are probably people who’ve bitten their fingernails off whilst watching that show, some of the still they get caught up in.
Sounds like conversation/plot points is all you need. I think with sketches in particular, all you really need to do is develop two or more funny characters, get a premise, and drop them in to see what happens. I expect, rather like how I write short stories, that having the final punchline already in mind probably helps give you something to work towards, but as you say, none of the stuff you have written so far really needed much planning. It’s really a case of what works best, I guess.
I am a terrible script writer but I understand the point you are making. I am not a natural planner. I never plan a short piece. I have only recently (this year) started planning and outlining novels. I usually write novels in three acts. I figure out how many chapters I need per act and then I only write a couple sentence bullet points up to a paragraph per chapter. Those points serve as reminders of the plot when I actually write the chapter. I often find things change as I write them anyway so I do question whether there is a point to planning in the first place..
Your last sentence encompasses the whole reason that I don’t plan. I know it’ll change, and as strange as it may seem, I would actually prefer to get (and often have got) 30,000 words into a novel and then realised that the plot would be much better if THIS happened instead of THAT, and had to go back and start all over again.
The three act structure sounds like a great idea though. Very theatre-esque. I’m not sure when I write a chapter I necessarily know what’s going to happen. I just see what comes out and then see how it fits into the story. I’m the same as you though, for some reason I find myself drifting towards planning, but I still can’t stomach sitting down to break a novel into chapters, then scenes, then paragraphs, like some people seem to do.
I’d love to read your comedy/sitcom script(s). Is it possible?
It certainly is, or will be in a couple of weeks! I’m just doing some final tweaks to the script I’m working on and then it’ll be ready for people to look at, so is it OK if I send it over in a couple or weeks or so?
Absolutely!! I can’t wait! Do you have my email address?