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Minimalist Screenplay for Maximum Punch

Less is more: Learn some minimalist screenplay techniques that successful screenwriters apply to streamline dialogue and action in their script to make for an easier read.

Written by Charles Deemer
Edited by Stavros C. Stavrides

‘Less is More‘ is a surefire and lasting dichotomy in the screenwriting business.

Let’s look at how to put this philosophy into practice when revising the draft of a screenplay.

I’ll focus on two areas where my screenwriting students do most of their overwriting: The dialogue and the description (action).

Less Dialogue, Please

Often one glance will tell if a scene has a dialogue problem. This is when a series of long speeches are exchanged, each consistently taking up more than several lines in the block of dialogue text.

One character speaks for a dozen lines, the other answers for a dozen or so more, and so on. Large blocks of dialogue text fill the page.

However, there are exceptions. For example, the first 45 minutes of “Tar”(2022) is almost exclusively dialogue. If not for someone as capable and thus watchable as actor Cate Blanchett, perhaps the criticism over this wouldn’t be as evenly split. Still, a daring move.

I commonly see this problem in a student script. If the exchange is much too verbose, repetitive, and therefore boring, I copy the pages to do a classroom exercise.

I pass out the scene as originally written, select students to read the parts, and direct a staged reading. We discuss it.

The scene readings of large exchanges of dialogue are usually painfully slow. The class quickly picks up on this. They identify the common moments of repetition that happen in such scenes.

Then I take out my red pen and very dramatically start crossing out lines.

Over the years I’ve learned that most fat in a long speech comes in the middle. So in a 12-line speech, I might cross out lines 3 through 11, leaving the first line second, and the last – and that’s all. Maybe I add a phrase to make for a smooth transition.

I continue this through the entire scene, crossing out half to two-thirds of the dialogue. Then we replay the scene out loud.

The improvement is astounding! The pace immediately quickens. The exchanges are quick and snappy, not long and verbose. There is no repetition to cause boredom.

The class may think I’m a magician, able to fix a scene so dramatically by doing nothing more than hacking out excess lines of dialogue.

I’m not a magician. I just have experience. I’ve read thousands of pages of verbose, over-written dialogue. I can spot it half a room away.

The key test to any line of dialogue in a script is this:

What is lost if it is removed? If precious little is lost, then cut it.

Every line of dialogue needs to move the story forward in a fresh way or make a point about a character that we don’t already know.

Verbosity is your enemy. Less is more.

This is a support article for Cyber Film School’s
Multi-Touch Learning System 2022 Edition

Less Description Please

Here is the description of John Nash’s fantasy CIA connection in, ‘A Beautiful Mind’:

“Fine dark suit. Thin tie. WILLIAM PARCHER.”

This is as much the character description as we get on this guy!

Here is how we meet the title character in ‘Citizen Ruth’:

“She is around 30.”

That’s all we’re given.

Clarice Starling in ‘Silence of the Lambs’:

“Trim, very pretty, mid-20s.”

That’s it.

The antagonist, however, gets more detail because he or she is more unusual:

“A face so long out of the sun, it seems almost leached
– except for the glittering eyes, and the wet red mouth.”

Descriptions of place get no more detail than descriptions of character. From Sling Blade:

“It’s an all-American girls’ room. Everything is pink.
There are stuffed animals everywhere and posters of pop idols.”

From The Ice Storm:

“A large New England Colonial,
with a few modern additions and touches.”

From Good Will Hunting:

“The bar is dirty, more than a little run down.”

None of these comes close to the long, verbose descriptions of character and place that my students love to write about, especially those who come from a background in literary fiction.

None of this detail is appropriate in a screenplay. Why? For one hugely important reason:

The screenwriter is a collaborator.

The Screenwriter is not the costume designer, not the set designer. A screenwriter sticks to a “fine dark suit” and lets the costume designer pick the color.

She writes, “a thin tie” and lets the wardrobe people decide just how thin.

A screenwriter offers, “stuffed animals everywhere and posters of pop idols,” letting the set designers select which animals and which pop idols belong on the set.

Write so it doesn’t sound like you are telling the costume designer and the set designer how to do their jobs.

Your job is to give them the appropriate clues so they can do their job in a way consistent with the context of the story.

Write with an awareness that you are a collaborator. Understand this and you will solve your tendency to over-write descriptions.

Make sure to read our related articles for a deeper look into streamlining your draft:
Writing Is Rewriting
Vertical Screenwriting For An Easier Read

The Writing and the Story

As we tend to repeat in many screenwriting articles, the screenplay is a blueprint for a movie.

It should be written accordingly, lean and mean, in a style that lets the story flow quickly, vertically, down the page. Your job is not to let the writing get in the way of the story.

Think about that.

What an odd thing to tell a writer! Don’t let the writing get in the way of the story.

Many of us are taught early to think about “writing” the way a novelist thinks about it, where every essence of the story, and literary style, is everything.

The screenwriting style is far more subtle and more poetic because there are far fewer literary tools to use.

When beginning screenwriters over-write, they often let the writing get in the way of the story.

Excess verbiage becomes camouflage that hides the story’s movement, leading to misdirection from the spine of the story that needs to be abundantly clear quickly and throughout the script.

Don’t let this happen in your script. Make your writing serve your story because a producer isn’t going to buy your writing, he or she’s going to buy your story that reads like a film.

“When in doubt, leave it out!”

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Charles Deemer authored Write Your First Screenplay among other titles and taught screenwriting at Portland State University.

Speech As Character

A film character’s screen dialogue should be written as a language to be spoken and heard, but many beginner screenwriters mistakenly write dialogue to be ‘read. It’s in the character’s speech where a screenplay can show off some mastery.

By Charles Deemer
Edited by Stavros C. Stavrides

Updated October 25, 2022

For writers who aspire to stylistic brilliance of prose in models such as Henry James, William Faulkner, and James Agee, screenwriting can be a disappointing field.

That would be a bit like an Olympic runner joining the grade school track team. Strong writing skills in the traditional literary sense simply are not as important to a screenwriter as strong storytelling skills.

A minor exception, however, is the writing of screen dialogue. Writing dialogue is the primary area in which a screenwriter gets to show off a little mastery of language.

But dialogue for the screen is written in a special kind of language, and in my university classes, I am struck by how many students enter with no knowledge of this.

They are writing dialogue as a language to be read, when in fact dialogue must be written as a language to be spoken and heard. Those two universes are light-years apart.

People Speak in Fragments

Picture a scene in which one student roommate asks another if he would like to go out for a beer. A beginning screenwriter might write something like this:

The above is poorly written for several reasons.

At the level of rhetoric, this language is too formal. The language we speak every day is much less formal than written language. Real spoken language is filled with sentence fragments and word contractions, the sort of things that are frowned upon by English teachers expecting formal written prose.

Ironically, often the better the student in terms of English literary skills, the worst the dialogue they write. That’s because they’re trained so strongly in writing formal prose which is seldom appropriate for dialogue.

A more informal, spoken translation of the above might be:

But we can still improve this dialogue by making it more personal, making it more of a revelation of character by giving it some “attitude”.

Screenplay dialogue must serve at least one of two purposes: it must either: Move the plot forward, or it must reveal character.

Give Dialogue An Attitude

How do we personalize dialogue? By giving it an attitude, in the sense that dialogue becomes a verbal imprint of individual character. Hence:

See the difference?

The first rewrite improves the rhetoric by making it informal, spoken speech, but the dialogue is still primarily informational.

In this second rewrite, we’ve infused the dialogue with attitude and wrapped the information in the point of view of the character. We begin to learn something about who the characters are by the way they speak.

“Lines with an attitude” is a good way to describe dialogue that reveals character, and it’s a major key in writing unforgettable spoken language.

Subtext In a Character’s Speech

In his book “Stein on Writing”, Sol Stein asks four questions of dialogue, establishing the conditions it must meet:

• What is the purpose of the exchange – does it begin or heighten an existing conflict?
• Does it stimulate [our] curiosity?
• Does the exchange create tension?
• Does the dialogue build to a climax or a turn of events in the story or a change in the relationship of the speakers?

Stein also notes how interesting dialogue is often oblique. He gives many examples in his book. One is this (boring) exchange:

“How are you?”
“Fine”

A boringly ordinary exchange, right?

But when we change to:

“How are you?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.”

we create interest because the person does not answer the question, but establishes subtext – something more than meets the eye is going on here.

Ordinary speech is boring, and good dialogue is carefully crafted to give spoken exchanges tension and mystery, direction and conflict. What is not said directly but nonetheless communicated is “subtext,” meaning under the literal surface of speech.

A pejorative term for poor dialogue that has come into fashion is “on the nose” dialogue, which is the opposite of dialogue. Russin and Downs define it this way in their book “Screenplay: Writing the Picture”:

“When a character states exactly what he wants it’s called on-the-nose dialogue. The character is speaking the subtext; there is no hidden meaning behind the words, no secret want, because everything is spelled out. But most interesting people, and certainly most interesting characters, don’t do this.
~ “Robin Russi, William Missouri Downs

Example of Subtext

Below is a very simple scene from David Lynch’s movie “The Straight Story” written by John Roach & Mary Sweeney. It’s an excellent example of subtext:

Before Alvin begins his incredible journey riding a lawn mower across the country to visit his distant brother, his daughter Rose goes to the grocery store to buy him supplies.

Rose is fearful about her father’s trip. Notice how Rose’s feelings of grief and fear transfer to a simple grocery item, a braunschweiger sausage.

Yet this scene is not about the Braunschweiger, but about her anxiety over her father’s trip.

Rose takes items to the counter. Brenda is the checkout cashier.

The most ordinary everyday settings such as a checkout counter can serve as an arena for revealing emotional material.

And such a scene doesn’t take very much time at all when handled by a skilled screenwriter, so every line works. The focus is tight, and that idle chit-chat doesn’t dilute the scene’s energy.

In the hands of an amateur, this scene could be disastrous, full of small talk that goes nowhere.

Here the progression is logical, direct, concise and efficient, all moving toward the unspoken but evident “punch line,” in which the subtext is:

“I hate that my Dad is going on this trip!”

When you write dialogue with subtext, you are letting the audience discover meaning through the heart before they understand it through the head.

Expository (obvious and overly factual) dialogue aims at the head, at understanding.
Subtext, on the other hand, aims at the heart – at feelings.

It is more powerful writing to make your audience feel first and understand second.

Summary

Here are some things you can do to improve your skills at writing dialogue:

Read your script aloud! The written word is not the spoken word. Even better, get your script into the hands of the actors. By doing a “staged reading” of your script, your ear will tell you what your eye will miss when it comes to poor dialogue.

Listen to the speech of people around you. On the bus, in a restaurant, at a party. Listen especially for idiosyncratic rhetorical patterns that you can “borrow” and adapt to your work.
However, do not make the mistake of believing that “real speech” is the goal. Dialogue is always crafted – it is, in fact, more interesting than real speech (usually) but gives the illusion of being real speech.

Write with subtext. People normally don’t speak as directly as characters do in a soap opera. Let them speak obliquely, around their true emotions, so that the listeners/audience will discover meaning through feelings, through the heart.

When you write dialogue with subtext, you are letting the audience discover meaning through the heart before they understand it through the head.

Rewrite your dialogue and read your script aloud again.

Making Sense of Screenplay Format

Contributed By Charles Deemer, edited by Stavros C. Stavrides

If you are a student of screenwriting and not confused by screenplay format, then you haven’t been paying attention. Conflicting information is everywhere. This is unfortunate because, in fact, the preferred format for the contemporary spec screenplay is straightforward and easy to understand. But today’s format took years to get there.

The Origins of Confusion

Then why the confusion? For three major reasons: first, screenplay format has evolved in major ways over the years; second, established writers tend to use whatever older format with which they learned the craft; and finally, published screenplays are shooting scripts, not spec scripts, which contain significant format differences.

Someone should write a book on the evolution of screenplay format. It’s a fascinating subject. I remember looking into screenwriting in the 1960s and quickly abandoned it because the screenplay format was filled with technical jargon that I was too lazy to learn.

Terms like “TWO SHOT” and “DOLLY SHOT” and other camera direction in screenplay writing was everywhere. In those days, the screenwriter contributed to directing the film by including in the script precise directions for how the camera would shoot the scene.

However, directors went ahead and did what they wanted to do, regardless of “in script” direction, so format change was inevitable in order to make the screenplay a more clean and efficient “blueprint for a movie.”

Directors, not writers, were going to direct the film and the format was destined to change to reflect this reality. The scripted scenes were subsequently written and read in a master scene format with very few if any, camera or editing cues.

However, there are interesting hacks that experienced screenwriters use to “direct without directing” by using white space to break down the action into several beats, as if each action is one visual setup. More about this in our article Writing Screen Action – Part Two.

Taking Power from the Writer

Therefore, the evolution of format has been in the direction of removing directorial power from the screenwriter. This process was gradual. After specific camera directions dropped out of the accepted format, general directions replaced them.

Instead of technical terms like “DOLLY SHOT,” writers would describe the same thing in more general language: “the CAMERA MOVES along with them as they walk down the street.”

Later, in the eighties, new fashionable terms came into place that suggested how a scene would be shot. ANGLE ON became a popular slugline and sometimes the name of the character would become a slugline, suggesting the same thing.

This post is a support article for the “Screenwriting” chapter in Cyber Film School’s Multi-Touch Filmmaking Textbook

Today’s ‘Master Scene’ Script

This process continued to evolve until all references to the camera were removed from the spec script. Today’s spec script is written in “master scenes” using four elements.

1. THE SLUGLINE:

Almost all sluglines begin with INT. or EXT. for interior or exterior respectively. There are very few exceptions. One is SUPER, a slugline put before language superimposed on the screen, such as a place or date: SUPER: “Three years later”

Another is INTERCUT, used for a phone conversation after the location of each party is established with prior sluglines.

If you write all your scenes with sluglines beginning with INT. or EXT., you are on the right track. Location and time follow:

INT. JOE’S HOUSE – BEDROOM – NIGHT

Always use FULL sluglines and always use day or night unless a special time of day is dramatically essential, i.e. two lovers watching the sun rise: EXT. BEACH – SUNRISE.

2. THE ACTION ELEMENT:

Write, cleanly and crisply, what the audience sees on the screen. Do not write action in parentheses after a character name, i.e. GEORGE (lighting a cigarette), which has fallen out of fashion. Cap a character name in the introduction only.

Here, in the action element, is where most beginning writers over-write; I’ll have much more to say about writing action in a future column.

One more thing: write in small paragraphs, no more than four or five lines per paragraph, then double-spacing to the next paragraph. In fact, by isolating action and images in their own paragraphs, the writer suggests visual emphases in the story, the only remaining way a writer can contribute to direction.

3. CHARACTER NAME:

Always in caps, tabbed toward the center of the page. Be consistent. Don’t call a character JOE here and MR. JONES there.

4. DIALOGUE:

Tabbed between the left margin (where sluglines and action are) and the character name margin. Writing dialogue is an art in itself, and a future column will be focused on it.

Beginning writers also over-write dialogue, making scenes slow, chatty, and “play-like.” Remember, people don’t talk as formally as they write. Your dialogue should reflect the personality of each character.

SUMMARY

Here is the style as seen in the best contemporary spec screenplays today:

Crisp visual writing (what do we see on the screen, in general terms?) in simple sentences,
in short paragraphs, with no mention of the camera,
and without directing the actors or usurping the duties of the costume designer, set designer, cinematographer, etc.,
with dialogue scenes that are short and snappy.

Remember, a screenplay is not a literary document. It is a blueprint for a movie.

Make it lean and easy to read — in fact, easy to skim because all screenplays are skimmed or read over very quickly before they can reach the next plateau to be read more carefully.

In “VERTICAL WRITING FOR AN EASIER READ”, we explore formatting that allows for a more efficient read.

If a brilliant script isn’t an easy read, it will never make the first cut. The purpose of format today is to make reading easier than it ever was. If you write in master scenes, you will accomplish this.

Category: Writer Support Articles