Encuesta a Docentes de Piano

Revising should be the fun part of writing a screenplay. You’ve got a shape, a draft. Your story is down on paper. Now you can play with the language, move words about, and move them again (which is, after all, the fundamental definition of a writer…). You get to experi-ence the elation of cutting out the unnecessary and refining the parts that work so that they work even better. If you’re lucky you might get to kill a character. Nothing feels better. You might discover your first scene is actually on page twenty.

If you don’t relish revising, then you aren’t a writer.

Enjoy it.

And while you’re revising, while you’re reading your draft as if you didn’t write it, bear in mind the following questions and challenges.

LOOKING AGAIN FOR LOGIC

At the outset I suggested that a useful idea when approaching compo-sition is the notion of logic: does every moment, every gesture, every action, every image, fit consistently with what comes before?

This idea of logical consistency must now be brought to bear as you read and revise. It is the cornerstone of what I mean when I suggest that you need to learn to read your work as if you hadn’t written it. It’s what I mean when I say you must be brutally objective in your revisions.

It may seem obvious, but it bears repeating. Here, then, are the three aspects of screenwriting that are accessible to challenge on the grounds of logic.

Character Logic

Challenge every line of dialogue, every minor gesture, every interac-tion for logical consistency with the character you have imagined and the character you have drawn on the page. Would they say what they say, do what they do? Is what they do consistent with their overarch-ing want? Is every action motivated and linked to an immediate need?

The most egregious error of character logic appears when you allow the manipulation of the plot to corrupt the characters. Where you have a character do something fundamentally out of character in order to allow for a plot twist.

Plot Logic

Do the events of your story follow one from the other? Is the cause and effect of your plot reasonable and probable? When an event sur-prises, when it deviates from the expected—violating the logic estab-lished—does it do so satisfyingly, in a manner that transforms my expectation and generates a new insight into the story?

At base, the question we ask of a plot is this: given the rules of the fictional universe, is it probable? Do even the reversals and surprises, once achieved, seem possible, acceptable, linked to what came before?

Visual Logic

Does your action description paint a coherent and navigable image for the reader? Have you thought through what you wish to feature, to jump off the page, to be revealed? And has your prose been com-posed and designed to accomplish the movement from one image to another? Description in a screenplay is not simply scene setting. It isn’t general. You need to think what must be described because it is obvious, what can be foregrounded by word or sentence placement.

QUESTIONS Active and Accurate Verb?

Eliminating the use of a single word will instantly improve your screenplay by a factor of ten. That word? Is.

In day-to-day colloquial speech, we indicate an event that is hap-pening as we speak and is likely to continue haphap-pening into the near future by using a combination of “to-be” and the -ing form of the verb.

For instance, “Gladys is standing near the exit.” “Mark is waiting.”

“Felix is cleaning up.”

Grammatically, there is nothing wrong with this construction. In fact, as the intent is to describe an ongoing action, an action that pre-sumably began before the utterance, continues through the utterance, and likely will continue after the utterance, this is the correct tense. It even has a name. Present Progressive. Or Present Continuous.

But in a screenplay, which must be insistently present tense, where the presumption is that the actors do and continue to do what they are shown doing—this formulation feels passive, stilted.

Such constructions describe the action rather than presenting it.

They tell what is happening rather than showing it happen. Or to use my preferred vocabulary: they describe what is happening rather than enacting it.

It is not, technically, the passive voice (in that it doesn’t promote the object of a sentence to the subject position: The ball is thrown by Jack.

Passive. Jack throws the ball. Active.). But it feels passive.

In a screenplay, where we are trying to craft prose that exists in the present tense, where we are not describing a past action, but attempt-ing to mimic the immediacy of film, the Present Progressive draws attention to duration rather than focusing on the immediate action.

I guarantee that if you go through any random five pages of any screenplay you have written and circle every use of “is,” you will find fifteen or more Present Progressive constructions. It is so deeply imbedded in the idiom of English that we reach for it without thought. It presents itself as the natural construction for describing present action.

I contend that it’s too easy. And the very commonness of its cur-rency leads the writer to lazy choices. Find those constructions. And now ask yourself if you’ve truly chosen the verb that follows the “is.”

Ask yourself if there is a more vivid, character-revealing active