Writing tips & tricks

SCREENWRITING ISNT WRITING...

...not anymore than acting is writing, or editing is writing, or sound design is writing, or casting is writing - all of which, in a certain sense, ARE writing. The point is you must never make any of these FEEL or SOUND like writing. If I see the writing instead of the characters, and the acting instead of the story, there's something wrong.

Here's a good place to start to make things right:

1. Use adverbs on pain of death. If you're not prepared to die for one, ignore it.

2 Never start your story with a description of the weather.

3. Keep exclamation marks ­under control. See if you can get them down to three per screenplay (or less).

4. Never use the word "suddenly" in the BIG PRINT.

5. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Idnit the trooth?!

6. Avoid ALL generic descriptions of characters, like "FRED - a tall, fair-haired man with an athletic body". Use no more than four or five words to SHOW the essence of the individual character - the defining quality or attitude that makes him or her utterly different from any other character. In BODY HEAT, Lawrence Kasdan introduces the Mickey Rourke character as follows: "TEDDY LAURENSON (25) - rock'n'roll arsonist."

7. Don't go into great detail describing rooms and places and things, other than to show what makes this particular room or place or thing different, or as a way of illuminating a character that occupies or possesses that room or place or thing.

8. SHOW don't describe, and always combine SHOWING with ACTION. e.g.: "MARK kicks a few empty beer bottles out of his way as he crosses the room and plops down on the threadbare, over-stuffed sofa".

9. Leave out EVERYTHING that the reader would skip if he/she was speed reading the script or manuscript. "And" and "But", and "Well" and "So" are the easiest words to live without when it comes to writing dialogue.

10. And finally - the most important rule of all: if it sounds like writing, rewrite it.