Earlier this week, we covered how the late, great Sir Sean Connery passed on several prominent projects because he didn't "get" them. Like, he didn't understand The Lord of the Rings. Nor did he get The Matrix. Granted, those are expansive works with huge amounts of worldbuilding, but we're guessing the scripts were, um, pretty solid, considering the films that we eventually enjoyed.
But you'll probably get that note yourself someday. "I didn't get it." "What was that about?" "Why did the character do that?" And, oof, it hurts. Something that seems so obvious to you is not translating somehow. So you might go back in, add a little line of explicit description. Or give the character something to say that just spells out what you meant. And you reread it, and it suddenly sucks. Things are clearer, but the storytelling feels flatter.
Novelist James Dunlop tackles this in a new video on his YouTube channel. He's a Toronto-based advertising copywriter who writes the Andrew MacKay thriller series, which includes Half Made Up and Plausible in Parts. He's talking about fiction writing, but so many rules from that form overlap with screenwriting, so we're stealing a few. Check it out here.
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Helping Your Audience Can Backfire
We've hinted at this already. When someone's confused, of course you want to explain. But if you do this in your work, you're risking overexplaining. It feels like good service, but Dunlop says the damage is subtle. You stop allowing your reader to figure things out for themselves, making them passive.
"Are there things we do to help our readers that are actually making their experience worse? … I mean worse in the sense that readers stop participating. They understand more but somehow experience less."
Dunlop can pinpoint his own habit of doing this to nearly 30 years of writing ad copy, where you assume nobody's listening.
"In advertising, you assume your audience is barely paying attention. They're scrolling, making coffee, or replying to emails. Your job is to make sure they don't miss the point, because if they do, you've probably lost them."
Plenty of screenwriters write this way for a similar reason. We assume someone is reading fast, reading distracted, reading tired. So we put in a line about an important prop or location, then spend a few sentences describing it. Or an action description becomes overwrought because you really want the reader to "see" what you mean. But if we do this, we forget that in this field, we have to rely on our reader's imagination, and our goal is to tell the story fast and simply.
Characters' Dialogue Shouldn't Be On-the-Nose
We've talked about on-the-nose dialogue a lot because it's so easy to do, but it impacts your work deeply. It can make performances feel wooden, and scenes feel boring. Again, it's a way that you steal an audience experience away from them by handing a ton of character or story information over on a platter, rather than asking them to be engaged listeners.
On-the-nose dialogue refers to lines where characters say exactly what they think, feel, or intend without any subtext.
Dunlop says, "A character says something, and we worry the reader might not quite understand it, so we explain it. Then another character confirms what they meant just in case. Before long, the scene begins sounding less like a conversation and more like a witness statement."
That second, confirming line almost always exists for the audience, not the characters.
These are the kinds of lines you sometimes need to hear aloud, which is why table reads and rehearsals are so important to a project. Look for lines that repeat information unnecessarily, as well as lines that feel exposition-heavy.
Credit: Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash
Don't Over-Write Emotion
In a fiction book, writers can harp on emotional beats and let characters stew over their feelings for whole chapters at a time. In film, we are trying to show more than we tell, and unless we have a voiceover, we don't have access to a character's interior life.
We are also supposed to trust an actor to bring that emotion to the character. So what you definitely don't want to do is direct from the page. Don't put in too many parentheticals, don't use action lines that name feelings, and don't have your characters announce how they feel unless the specific situation calls for it.
"The irony is that readers often feel more when they're allowed to recognize an emotion than when we repeatedly announce it," Dunlop says.
By the time your scene reaches the screen, an actor's face, the cinematography, and the music may all be carrying that same emotion. Everyone finds it together, if the scene is just written well and everyone understands the assignment.
If you've crafted a strong character that an actor can inhabit, the actor will know how a certain moment should make them feel. You don't have to spell it out for them on the page.
Be Confident as a Writer
You don't want to go the opposite way, either, and take out a bunch of details that will hurt the reader's experience. You're not trying to be vague. If you get a note that something's confusing, maybe get creative with how something is described or the way a character reacts to something.
Dunlop acknowledges that sometimes you do have to remind your audience of certain details. Sometimes you do have to connect dots, like the detective at the end of a mystery movie, for everything to make sense to everyone.
For the rest, you just need to trust that if you take a project to production, all those details will fall into place.
"That's why I no longer think overexplaining is an editing problem," he says. "It's a confidence problem. Every writer knows the little voice that asks, 'What if this isn't enough?' The trick isn't silencing it. It's learning not to let it rewrite your manuscript."
Hopefully you get to a place where you can cut, rather than add.
"One of the pleasures of becoming a more experienced writer, I find, is discovering that many of my best edits involve removing things rather than adding them. You delete the explanation, trust the scene to carry its own weight, and allow readers the satisfaction of reaching the conclusion themselves."
