I want to keep giving you inspiration and advice for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. So here are ten things I commonly see when I’m reading a good script.
1) An unobtrusive writing style – Too many screenwriters want you to know that they’re a WRITER. They want to describe everything beautifully. They want every scene to be dense and self-important, all the things that prove how serious and strong of a writer one is. I can tell you from experience that these tend to be the hardest reads. They take a lot longer. They’re not fun to read. Good writers understand the burden of the reader and try and make the script as easy to read as possible. Sparse prose. Never adding more than is necessary. Keeping the story moving. These are the fun scripts to read. Now there will always be a difference between a script like Buried and a script like Gladiator. Gladiator obviously requires more description. Still, you always want to keep the reader in mind. When was the last time you finished reading an entire script? I’m guessing except for a couple of dozen of you, it’s been a while. Why didn’t you finish it? Because at a certain point it became more ‘work’ to get through the script than ‘fun.’ Don’t make the same mistake on your script.
2) A first scene that creates a sense of mystery – If you took everything I’ve ever written on this site about the importance of your first scene, it would probably be as long as Lord of the Rings. And yet, day in and day out, I continue to read screenplays with bad first scenes. So the message isn’t getting through. What I’ve noticed is that I often get pulled into scripts where the first scene creates a sense of mystery. There’s some question that’s been posed and I need to keep reading to find out the answer. For example, one of my favorite recent scripts is The Traveler. In that script, we start off with a man driving, and then slowly, bit by bit, his car begins to disappear, until it’s gone and he’s floating through the air all by himself, still in the driving position, then he tumbles to the ground and rolls to a stop. When I read a scene like that, I want to know what’s going on. And that gets me to keep reading.
3) Conflict in dialogue – One of the quickest ways for me to dismiss a script is when I read really on-the-nose dry dialogue. Dialogue that doesn’t have any sense of spark. The characters are speaking more to establish themselves or push the plot along than they are actually having a conversation. One of the easiest ways to up your dialogue game is to inject conflict into every dialogue scene. It doesn’t have to be over-the-top conflict. But something that forces the characters to work something out. There’s an imbalance in the moment and the only way that it’s going to re-balance is if the characters hash it out. In The Menu, one of my favorite scripts from last year, we start with two people on a mysterious date (yup, we get another first scene with a sense of mystery!). He’s freaking out because, wherever it is they’re going, it’s important to him. His date, meanwhile, is trying to relax him. And the more she tries to relax him, the more revved up he gets. Note how this isn’t some huge dramatic argument. That’s not what we’re looking for in every dialogue scene. But there’s an imbalance here that the characters are working out. There’s conflict to play with.
4) An organic conflict within your hero – Characters are always more interesting when they’re fighting an inner battle. If everything is neat and clean inside your hero, why would we be interested in them? The great thing about inner conflict is it can literally be about anything. But a trick to find it is to ask yourself, “What is the first thing my character wakes up in the morning anxious about?” That should lead you to your inner conflict. We can go as far back as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. The second we meet him, he’s graduated college and HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE WANTS TO DO WITH HIS LIFE. That’s the conflict that eats at him every day. More recently, we have Arthur from Joker. He’s trying to figure out how to connect with the world yet he has no idea how. Every day he wakes up trying to figure out that equation. Obviously, the conflicts will be lighter in lighter genres, like comedies. But a quick way to make characters stand out is to give them an interesting inner conflict.
5) A good scene writer – Recently I read a script where the first 30 pages consisted of scenes that were barely a page long. The script moved quickly but the pacing was odd. We were always moving on before anything got going. Conversely, I read another script where all of the scenes were 8-10 pages. Shockingly, they were just as incomplete, as the characters were always prattling on without a point. I know I’m reading a good writer when one of the first few scenes in the script is its own complete compelling thing. It’s got a point (characters with a goal). It has a beginning – a setup to the scene that lets us know what it’s about. It has a middle – conflict between characters and obstacles that come up. And it has an end – the scene’s own little climax. These writers understand that scenes are like mini-movies which need to entertain the readers in and unto themselves. If every scene is an entertaining little movie then it’s impossible for the reader to get bored.
6) A sense of purpose – Good writers know that every scene is a piece of the puzzle and, therefore, must be pushing towards the puzzle’s completion. There is a noticeable focus to each scene that indicates the writer knows exactly where he or she is taking you. On the flip side, you have writers who think scripts are places to figure their story out. They might get an idea on page 20 and let that dictate where the story goes next. When you write this way, 99 times out of 100, your script will lack focus. It will read like you’re not sure what story you’re telling but, hopefully, along the way, you’ll figure it out. When you hear that a script displays confidence, it is always in reference to writers who have a deft command of their story and it’s clear, every step of the way, they know where they’re taking you. By the way, it’s perfectly okay to seek out tangents in early drafts. But not at all okay to do it in your final draft.
7) A steady stream of unexpected choices – This is something I harp on all the time on the site. But it truly is one of the easiest ways for me to tell if a script is going to be good or not. If a plot development or scene or character in the story comes up and the writer chooses to write something that 95 out of 100 writers would’ve written, I know I’m in for a long read. Good writers get into the heads of the reader, ask what they expect to happen at this moment, and then make sure not to write that. Honestly, this starts at the concept stage. If you give me an idea that I’ve seen hundreds of times before, I can promise the script will be bad within 99.9% certainty. One of the biggest level-ups for a screenwriter – and it’s something most of them don’t figure out until between their 7th and 10th script – is when they start actively seeking out unexpected choices in their screenplays. I mean, did anyone see the hidden room in Parasite coming? Did anyone see that crazy climax in the backyard coming? This is the creative bar you need to hold yourself to. Cause like I tell everyone, if you’re just going to give us what everyone else does, why do we need you? We can just go to everyone else.
8) Understanding the power of time – One of the biggest decisions you will make in a script is deciding how long the story’s timeline will be. The reason this decision is so important is because time has the biggest effect on your structure. Once you know how long your story is, you can begin to figure out how everything is going to play out. Generally speaking, the shorter the time frame, the easier it is to structure. Not long ago, I reviewed a script called 9 Days. The concept was as close as you’re going to get to experimental without being experimental. It was about a guy in some nether-not-quite-heaven reality who decides which people get to live a life down on earth. That concept could’ve been dealt with in a very messy way. Believe me, I’ve seen it before. However, the simple decision of giving our hero a 9 day deadline gave the story a firm structure. Another example is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. That movie followed a dozen different characters and was about the chaos of junior high and high school in a small Midwestern town. It would’ve been so easy to get lost in that world. Yet Linklater had everything take place in one day. A messy story all of a sudden became very focused.
9) A love of the second act – The second act is where most beginner and intermediate scripts go to die. It’s the biggest most expansive space in the script (50-60 pages!) and if you don’t understand how it works or have a plan to tackle it, your script will fall into this abyss as well. One of the things you learn the longer you travel this screenwriting journey, is that the second act IS YOUR MOVIE. It’s not some thing to muddle your way through until you get to the climax. It’s the place where your characters will be challenged by the things they fear the most, which will include the external journey, the other characters they interact with, and, like we discussed before, themselves. In other words, this is where your characters are going to figure themselves out. Once you embrace your second act as an opportunity to explore that, you will begin to love it.
10) A killer ending – I read a lot of scripts where you can see the writer getting tired the deeper into the script we go and so the ending feels more like something they were just happy to get to than the single biggest most memorable sequence in the film, which is what an ending should be. Remember, the ending IS WHAT WE THE READER LEAVE WITH. If you write a great ending, a reader will have this compulsion to go out and tell someone about it. They can’t keep it in because it’s the last strong memory they’ve been given. As crazy as it sounds, lots of writers take their ending for granted. They think as long as the good guy saves his girlfriend from the bad guy that we’re going to give them a big fat gold sticker. It doesn’t work like that. Outside of your opening scene, your climax should be the scene you put the most time into. And that’s not just writing. You should be thinking through 10, 20, 30 different potential climaxes to make sure you’re giving us the best one.
P.S. If you’re still deciding what script to write for The Last Screenwriting Contest, consider a logline consultation ($25). Not only will I analyze your concept’s strengths and weaknesses and write a new version of the logline for you, but I also give a 1-10 rating on the concept. As I’ve noted here before, I don’t encourage anyone to write a script for a logline that gets under a 7 out of 10. So it’s an indirect way to find out if your concept would fare well in the contest. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if interested.
