4 Screenwriting Tips that Annoy Me

Great screenwriting advice is not hard to find. There is mountains of it in books, on the internet and at lectures and seminars. And once you've sent a script out for criticism or coverage, you're likely to receive a lot of that advice spit back at you.

This is both good and bad.

On one hand, when you see the ideas of Syd Field, Robert McKee or Lew Hunter put to use in feedback of your script, there's a good bet that the reader has a solid foundation from which to dispense her criticism. On the other hand, some readers have a propensity to give notes with the tomes of screenplay theory used as a mental crutch. When this happens, what often emerges is some screenwriting tenant held too rigidly, causing a critic to gloss over why you may have intentionally broken some steadfast "rule".

Now, it is always advisable to at least consider every note that comes your way. Especially when more than one reader has raised the same issue. If that happens you can bet that you have a legitimate problem to address. But I've found some screenwriting rules to be unusually frequent as throw-away critiques. Rules that set off a reader's "spidey sense" as more of a robotic response than an intuitive story problem.

Here I will describe some of these rules and tell you how they can be misused.

Kill your babies.

When the momentum of a screenplay bogs down, a critic will often suggest to "kill your babies". This is a stirring way of saying you need to find the scenes that are most dear to you -- wether an action sequence or a snippet of dialogue -- and analyze their impact in moving the story forward. If they do not, then they are likely cases of writer indulgence and they should be deleted from the script.

Bogged-down momentum is a serious problem for a screenplay and if one of your "babies" is causing issues, then the scene must be altered to make it work. But throwing it out completely is a bizarre move because, if you've written something you "love dearly", you have written it for a reason. And it's probably the same reason you were compelled to write the script in the first place.

So you should not kill your babies. Instead, find them homes within your story. If you love them, most likely so will the reader. To find the connectivity, read the indulgent scene several times while also thinking of your story as a whole. Sometimes a potential relationship between it and the story will emerge pretty quickly. If it doesn't, try the opposite approach. Read your screenplay from the beginning while simultaneously churning the indulgent scene over in your mind. It may be a case of moving the scene up or back and changing the dialogue a little to make it contribute to the overall story.

If you employ these tactics only to read through your entire script without finding your scene a home, then it may be time to submit to this rule. But if you delete a dearly loved scene without some attempt to save it, you're probably doing your screenplay more harm than good.

Make characters likable.

This seems like a sensible suggestion, right? After all, who wants to watch a movie full of jerks, lowlifes and rat bastards? Well, the problem with this note is that character likability is too subjective to merely amp up.

Like people in real life, no character is universally loved nor hated. We bring our own specifications, both intrinsically and self-consciously, to relationships. That's why people fit in some social circles and not others. The same is true in terms of how we view characters and, for that matter, movies as a whole.

Almost every movie has at least one character who audiences generally "like". The sympathetic character. The one who allows us to relate to a film on personal terms. But what about movies in which the main character is truly despicable? A movie like "A Clockwork Orange". In this we have Alex de Large, a hedonistic teenager with a passion for ultaviolence and a bit of the old in-out. He is charming and witty, but no less a disgusting reprobate. I like taking the two-hour journey into his life. His world is fascinating. But I don't like him.

Some film theories go on that even the most vile characters must have redeeming qualities or the character is a throw away. A lifeless paper cutout. Given as an example is Hannibal Lecter. He is a blood-thirsty psycopath yet, like Alex, he has a certain charm and refinement that lifts him above mere monsterhood. His willingness to help Jodie Foster's character track down "Buffalo Bill" is also cited as a redeeming quality. But just because Hannibal listens to Chopin and knows that fava beans and a nice chianti go well with a census taker's liver, doesn't make him refined. It makes him even more twisted. And helping Clarice catch an at-large serial killer is done for entirely selfish reasons. Hannibal relishes "the challenge" of it. He also wants to get out of his dark and dank confines. He is not redeemable in any shape or form.

So what would Stanley Kubrick or Ted Tally have done with the note to make their respective characters more likable? In the case of "Silence of the Lambs", Tally could shrug it off as already having likable characters in his script. There's enough likability to go around. But what about "A Clockwork Orange" where the onus for sympathy is squarely upon Alex? I have met a fair share of movie-goers who find Alex and the movie itself so repugnant as to be unwatchable. But this is on them. Subjectivity is fully at play.

What, then, would Kubrick have done to make Alex more likable? Nothing. And that's as it should be. When you receive the same note. Address it, but don't submit to the idea that a character must be likable because, ultimately, you are playing to somebody else's sensibility. Your efforts will not create a more "likable" character so much as a watered-down scoundrel.

Page numbers.

A feature-length spec script is supposed to be no less than 90 pages and no more than 120. Or so people say. Generally, this page range is a good length to shoot for as many screen stories are conducive to a 90-minute to two-hour telling. Also, production companies and studios mandate this range as "ideal" for specs and, consequently, it is the first thing a company reader will look for as a positive or negative.

So if you have only one or two scripts under your belt and you are driven to sell them, hitting the mark on page numbers is pretty critical. But if you already have a few samples to show off and your latest script idea is a 150-page masterpiece, then why let some silly (and downright arbitrary) rule stand in your way? Do your best to prune that epic, but if some trimming here and there still leaves you at 145 pages, so be it. Ask Quentin Tarantino or P.T. Anderson what they think about sticking to under 120 pages.

This rule is most annoying when your script just barely misses the mark. Let's say you punch out a first draft that is 124 pages. You send it out for feedback and a note comes back that it is "too long". If the critic includes with his decree specific scenes he feels are either unnecessary or over-written, then great. That's a helpful note. But if all that is said is, "it's too long", then very likely that reaction was merely triggered by seeing the page count surpass 120. Few critics will admit this, but if you receive this kind of note, be sure to ask the reader to detail where the story drags. Her response will either make the note useful or apparent to ignore.

If you do wish to knock down your page count for the sake of hitting the correct range, the best way, of course, is to find a scene or two to delete. If you can't find any, then look for ways to shorten scenes. Chop out some dialogue here and there.

But the only way to drop pages without losing any of your story is to attack the hanging chads. These are the extra word or two that carry over to the next line of a text block. Shorten the sentences, whether it is dialogue, action or description, within the block so that the extra line disappears. Each script page has 52 lines. If you can find two or three lines to eliminate on each page of a 120-page screenplay, then you are taking out 200 to 300 lines, which translates to four to six pages you can shed without changing your story in the slightest.

Make characters voices "distinctive".

This one really baffles me. A note comes back that all the characters "talk the same" which, apparently, has confused the reader. To fix this you are expected to add little quirks here and there to differentiate each characters' dialogue. Add some slang, an accent or two, play with the cadence.

Don't do this. It's a waste of precious writerly brainpower.

Your focus should be on what a character says, not how she says it. Any differences in the way characters speak need to come organically. If several of your characters sound the same, that's okay. That's the way it was meant to be. It's more realistic, too, because people tend to run in circles with other people who speak the way they do. By forcing speech differences, you risk adding unintentional humor or offensive stereotyping or distraction from your main purpose which is to tell a story.

Most of my characters speak the way I do, which is with a neutral American accent. But if I have written something that is location specific, whether Southern, New Yorker or Scottish, I have no problem adding a little flavor to some of the dialogue. Or if age or gender plays a factor. A 70 year-old woman talks much differently than a 15 year-old boy. But I do not dwell on it. I simply ask myself, would this character say this line? If the answer is "no", then I turn it over a little until it is believable.

Ultimately actors are the ones who make your characters "sound different" on the screen. And any reader who complains about confusion over voice distinction simply isn't doing their job.

Of course, if every single character you write sounds like a 25 year-old would-be screenwriter from Sherman Oaks, then you might have a problem.