25 Expanding to the Finished Product
You can now expand your strong, well-tested outline into its final form, be it a short story, novel, stage play, documentary proposal, or fiction screenplay. For plot-driven works, you have done much of the tough brainwork during the ideation stage, but those that are character-driven, and those with multiple characters and subplots, will often wander widely from your initial expectations. Strong characters in literary fiction are, for instance, notorious for elbowing their author aside and taking over the story. Not surprisingly, novelists will sometimes admit that they write in order to discover what they are really writing about. So expect your outline to lead onward to a long, evolutionary process. Expect new ideas to surface, ones that challenge your preconceptions and surpass the original concept.
Work from your own resources as long as possible, and look for guidance only when you meet intractable problems. Write to a daily schedule, even though you sometimes don’t feel like it. Work done regularly usually accomplishes more of value than sporadic marathons. Don’t be afraid to tackle especially appealing scenes out of order. Everyone works differently, and inspiration is most lasting when you work in your own way and embrace what most sustains you in the process.
Envision what you want to accomplish by way of particular prizes or festivals, and make a project schedule to get yourself there (Figure 25–1). The conventional path—writing when you feel like it, and seeing whether you finish anything—is the passive dilettante approach. Be bold and schedule the bridge you must build to realize your intended creation. Apart from motivating you, it will allow you to learn how long the various stages take—which is invaluable self-knowledge in professional situations.
The guidelines that follow include tips for several narrative forms, and a short bibliography to help you find more specialized help. If this seems sketchy, it is because anything more comprehensive would be suffocating. Online there is a wealth of help and discussion by and for writers. Simply enter your query in a search engine and brace yourself for the torrent.
Figure 25–1 Sample agenda for a short film project.
Writing for the Screen
This is cinema, so plan to really use your medium. Imagine you are writing primarily for the silent screen, and you won’t go far wrong. Also, stick to what is affordable to produce: set your work in the present day, have accessible locations, and have a small cast. It won’t cramp you in any way artistically.
Aesthetics: Tell your story visually and not verbally. Cinema is a visual, juxtapositional, even melodramatic medium. Write behavior, images, actions, and reactions. Write dialogue when nothing else is possible.
Keep point of view in mind so you give us the subjectivity of the characters and their storyteller.
Stretch your audience’s imagination by under-informing rather than over-informing.
Use the audience’s knowledge and expectations of genre.
Visualization: Choose subjects, characters, and settings for their visual and behavioral strengths.
Work to create a special, strong, and different mood for each scene.
Alert us to subtext through visual juxtaposition, symbolic imagery, and metaphors, but only ones that are organic to your story and its world.
Dialogue and sound: Reproduce natural conversation by using its essence, never its prolixity.
Make each character speak with his or her own voice, not yours (research character types with a recorder and transcribe what they say).
Use the emotional associations and narrative possibilities of sound. It’s a powerful component in creating mood (research your locations).
Economy: Plan to use local, present-day settings and situations whenever possible.
Keep the cast small.
Avoid special effects.
Avoid period costuming, sets, or props.
Collaboration: Cinema depends on director, actors, and technicians. Trust their expertise and don’t smother the reader with your idea of their contributions.
Before releasing anything as finished, solicit plenty of other people’s reactions.
Standard Screenplay Format
The industry screenplay standard (Figure 25–2) is the ultimate in convenience and no professional will look at anything else. In standard layout, a page yields roughly a minute of screen time. A screenplay is unbound, and secured by a single brad through its top left-hand corner. This lets an interested party copy it easily for distribution to other readers. See bibliography for copyright and other protection.
Font: Courier, 12 point, 10 pitch type, nonproportional spacing. No variations.
Margins: Left, 1.5 inches. Right, 1.0 inch. Top, 0.5 inches to page number, 1.0 inch to the body. Bottom, 0.5 to 1.5 inches, depending on position of page break.
Pagination and running head: Number the pages and include a running head to identify screenwriter and film title.
Spacing: Single.
Title page: Title and author centered and one-third down page, then flush right at the bottom of page put the author’s name, social security number, and contact information.
Page breaks: Never break scene heading from scene, or character’s name from their line.
Scene headings (also called slug lines): Each scene begins with a flush-left, capitalized scene heading that lists: Interior or exterior (abbreviated as INT. or EXT.)
Location description
Time of day (DAY, NIGHT, SUNSET, DAWN, etc.)
Body Copy. Scene or action description, mood setting, stage directions in single spacing. Runs the width of the page but double-spaced away from scene headings and dialogue. Sometimes called stage directions, body copy should: Evoke situation and characters in minimal but colorful language.
Stipulate nothing irrelevant or impractical.
Set a scene impressionistically, never comprehensively. (Example: “Unmade single bed, ashtray full, underwear overflowing from drawers, crucifix hanging crookedly.”)
Set the scene mood boldly, briefly, and evocatively. (“Raw dawn over wet, lackluster streets” is enough to fire the reader’s imagination and inspire the cinematographer.)
Give action descriptions that leave room for interpretation. (“York looks around nervously,” not “York puts his right-hand index finger to the center of his lower lip and inches forward to see around the gloomy, gray-painted stairway.”)
Capitalize character names in body copy only when they first appear in a scene. Repeat them thereafter in lower-case.
Dialogue sections are: In single spacing.
Headed by character’s name in capitals and tabbed across to around 4.0 inches.
Block-indented and set between reduced margins (left 3.0 inches, right 2.5 inches).
Preceded and followed by a space.
Specially marked when dialogue must be split across a page break. Put (MORE) just before page break, and (CONT’D) after character’s name on following page.
Accompanied only when strictly necessary by stage directions inside brackets.
Dialogue is most effective when it is: Brief and compressed.
Distinguished by the individual flavor and rhythm of the particular speaker.
A verbal action—that is, acting on someone or eliciting something.
Accompanied by a strong subtext. The most interesting characters in films, like those in life, seldom say directly what they really feel or want, but express it indirectly in subtextual ways.
Focused on what the audience cannot see. (It would be ludicrous and redundant for a character to remark, “That’s a smartly cut brown tweed coat you’re wearing.”)
Figure 25–2 Example of standard screenplay format.
Camera and Editing Directions
These are a distraction and an infallible sign of amateurism. Never use them.
Only use transitions like “Cut to,” “Dissolve to,” when they are indispensable to understanding. Place them capitalized between scenes, consistently flush left or flush right.
Sou
nd and Music Directions
Specify sounds only to advance the mood or narrative.
Never specify music or even its placement unless it has special meaning to the plot.
The screenplay format is a trap for the unwary. Its theatrical layout suggests that movies are fueled by dialogue, but the opposite is true: memorable films are usually more visual and behavioral than verbal. To see how minimal a screenplay should be, examine one for a film you admire. Be careful, however, that you are reading the original screenplay, and not an after-the-fact transcription of the finished film.
You can write screenplays by setting up your word processor’s tabbing. To write more easily in correct format, invest in one of the screenwriting software programs, such as Movie Magic or Final Draft. They automatically format screenplays, TV episodes, stage plays, and even novels. Expect a variety of excellent features including a spell checker, thesaurus, and an index-card and outlining feature that lowers the labor of wholesale rewriting. Check out the latest versions and offers at www.screenplay.com/, www.writersstore.com/, and www.finaldraft.com. Educational software companies like Academic Superstore (www.academicsuperstore.com/) offer substantial discounts for bona fide educators and students. The Screenwriters Guild of America (www.screenwritersguild.org) and the Writers Guild of America (www.wga.org) both review writing software. The WGA site also offers model contract forms and a wealth of other information.
There is a dizzying profusion of texts about screenwriting. Beware high-priced workshops whose esoteric methods and formulae promise sure success in Hollywood. There’s a preview of one in Spike Jonze’s comedy Adaptation (2002). Written by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, it tells a self-reflexive story about a screenwriter called Charlie Kaufman who is struggling to adapt a real book called Orchid Thief (about an orchid thief …). Amid this self-referential hall of mirrors the screenwriter debates screenwriting’s conundrums with his screenwriting twin brother. Expect entertainment and not a little cynical instruction.
To learn more practical stuff about screenwriting from a film director’s perspective, see the screenwriting chapters of Michael Rabiger and Mick Hurbis-Cherrier’s text, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics (Focal Press, 2013). Seeing how a director assesses and interprets a screenplay will complement the work you are doing here.
Documentary Film Proposal
A documentary proposal describes a hypothetical movie based on research and informed expectation. While a fiction film interprets an exhaustively developed script, a documentary is a more circular and speculative entity whose story does not settle before you have researched, conceptualizing, directed, and edited it. To explain how you arrive at the final version would take excessive circumstantial discussion here, but a booklist to help you follows.
Documentaries usually start from a proposal. They are a pain to do, but indispensable for communicating your purposes and for raising financial or other support. Writing and rewriting one is the very best way to refine your ideas about your intended film’s style, content, dramatic structure, and thematic meaning.
There is no separate professional designation of writer in documentary as there is in fiction film, nor is there a meaningful way to write about a documentary without insider knowledge of production details. To propose a documentary convincingly and raise money, you should either observe professionals at work or use a how-to documentary production book to amass some documentary experience. My widely used Directing the Documentary (6th ed., Focal Press, 2015) will take you onward from the work you have done here. Making documentary is wonderful experience for fiction writers or directors.
Plays
The power of theatre lies in the palpable presence and interaction of the characters. Because actors are three-dimensional people, not shadows on a screen, a good live performance is one being created as you watch. Plays are driven by strong characters who draw us deep into human predicaments, and the theatre is thus a laboratory for human relationship. It might be the rivalrous friendship of the nuclear physicists in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, the agony of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at being inadequate to protest his father’s murder, or Linda Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman protecting her tired husband from his sons as he approaches suicide. Nothing about the human heart is beyond the theatre.
Plays can use abstract, minimalist settings to suggest time and place, and are not forced by the realism of photography as cinema is to contend with constantly encroaching realism. Though modern theatre is astonishingly agile, you must still sometimes get an actor bodily from one part of the stage to another if you specify a cut from Sydney to Soho.
Many cities nowadays have a theatre company that will “workshop” new plays—that is, actors will read them through on the stage, and audience and players will afterward critique your work and suggest solutions to its problem areas. However primitive this may be as a performance, it exposes a play to an audience and helps it evolve. Such events also publicize new work. Screenplays can go through a similar process with very good results.
Figure 25–3 Example of typical playwriting format.
Standard Playwriting Format
Stage actors have to rehearse while carrying the text in one hand, so play format crams a lot of text on the page (Figure 25–3). Ideas of what is standard vary, but here are some pointers:
Font: 12 point Times or other plain, easy-to-read type.
Binding and pagination: Play copies take a beating in use so print yours on strong paper and bind securely in a “term paper” cover with inbuilt brads. Number pages sequentially.
Title page with play title, author’s name, and author’s contact information.
Preliminary pages with: A list of characters and thumbnail portrait of each
A synopsis of the play
The assignment of male/female roles, and which parts can be doubled (played by the same actor)
Any special set or technical requirements
Dialogue pages with: Names of characters capitalized and centered above their lines
Dialogue aligned to the left margin, 1.5 line-spaced, and running across the entire page
Stage directions between parentheses on a separate line, single-spaced, and indented as little as one tab, or as much as halfway across the page.
Scenes, each numbered and titled, with their termination marked “Scene Ends.”
Play ending is marked “The End.”
Novel or Short Story Format
How to submit a fiction manuscript varies slightly among publishing houses, so follow their instructions to the letter. The preferred layout allows a busy editor to estimate the finished work’s page count and production costs. By using your word processor’s style feature while you write, you can globally reset margins, indentation, font, or headings later for submission to different publishers. Here are brief guidelines:
Font: Depends on publisher but Courier, 12 point proportional spacing is usual. Do not justify your text—align to the left margin and leave ragged on the right.
Title page: Title and author centered and one-third down page, author’s name beneath, centered, and contact information flush right at the bottom of page.
Margins: Right and left, 1.5 inches. Top and bottom, 1.0 inches.
Pagination and running head: Number the pages and include a running head with title and author’s name. Print on one side of the paper only and use heavy (20 lb) paper stock.
Spacing: Double spacing between lines and no extra space between paragraphs.
Paragraph indent: 1 inch.
Chapter numbers and titles: Centered, with “Chapter One” one line above chapter title. Leave two double line-spaces before first paragraph. New chapters start on a new page.
Extra space in the text: If you insert extra space, mark it with the pound sign (# # #) so the typesetter can see the space is not accidental.
Style: For guidance over punctuation, use of spaces, indentation, and suchlike use a style manual such as Joseph Gibaldi’s MLA Hand
book for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed., (Modern Language Association of America, 2009). The awful precision it calls for enables typesetters to reproduce your work with the fewest errors.
A detailed breakdown of the conventions for formatting a self-published novel format can be found at http://completelynovel.com/self-publishing/writers-toolbox-typesetting-and-format.
Submission
When you prepare to submit anything to a journal, publisher, or producer, make absolutely sure you are making your submission in the preferred format. Use your word processor’s spelling and grammar checks, and get literate friends to closely proofread your manuscript, since nothing consigns it to oblivion faster than typos, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors.
Consistent craft and style command immediate respect. Not only do they remove all barriers from reading, they imply you are a mature craftsperson with the highest standards, and are worth taking seriously.
Good luck and good writing!
Going Further
An excellent resource for the aspiring media writer is The Writers Room at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website, www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom. It contains hints, tips, and interviews with writers of different genres. Go to their Scriptsmart section for formatting models (feature screenplay, the TV script, the BBC house style for radio scripts, as well as formats for the UK stage, the US stage, and even for comic books).
At the Writers Guild of Great Britain (https://writersguild.org.uk/writing-for-film/) or at the Writers Guild of America (WGA, www.wga.org/) you’ll find goldmines of information such as interviews, news of the profession, and cautionary hints about over-exposed topics. Also try Zoetrope: All-Story at www.all-story.com/, a “quarterly literary publication founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997 to explore the intersection of story and art, fiction and film.”
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