Writing a slow script that’s actually good is hard. So thank God Scriptshadow is going to show you how to do it, once and for all!
A few weeks ago I reviewed a movie (or was it a script?) that moved at the pace of a continental drift. At the end of the review, I asked if anyone wanted me to write an article explaining how to write a slow-moving story without putting the audience into a coma.
Seven of you responded with some version of, “Yes. Please do that.”
Now, if we apply the universally accepted Equation of Exponentious™, which takes actual online engagement, multiplies it by real-world silent agreement, and divides the result by The Denominator of Audience Inertia (because people never quite say what they mean), we arrive at a very conservative estimate that 18,000 people wanted this article written.
Which means I had no choice.
So here we go.
To accurately diagnose the problem, we need several slow films as reference points. Let’s start with Sentimental Value, which follows a washed-up director attempting to cast his estranged, deeply resentful daughter as the lead in his latest project. Then there’s The Ballad of Wallis Island, about a wealthy man who owns a private island and hires his favorite pop-folk duo, now long since broken up, to perform a concert just for him. Bugonia centers on two unhinged cousins who kidnap the CEO of a local company because they believe she’s an alien. And finally, After the Hunt follows a university professor forced to carefully navigate her relationship with her star student after the student accuses one of the professor’s friends of rape.
I would call all of these films slow.
I think they all work, even if each of them has issues. Still, they are exponentially better than a movie like Train Dreams, which follows a couple where the husband builds train tracks over an endless series of decades.
Now, what I’m about to describe are the tools for getting a slow story right. But not every one of these tools is present in every film I mentioned. So if you’re looking for one of them in After the Hunt and it’s not there, that doesn’t mean the idea is wrong. It means these tools give you the best chance of writing a slow movie that stays engaging. You don’t need to use all of them. But you should use as many as you can.
The real danger with slow moving screenplays is that the margin for error is thinner. Readers are far more likely to give up. You are already asking them for more patience than they are used to giving. Because of that, choosing not to use one of these tools might mean removing the very thing that would have kept your script afloat during a long stretch of quiet.
TOOL 1 – AT LEAST ONE CAPTIVATING CHARACTER
With a slow screenplay, it’s imperative that you have at least one truly captivating character. Faster paced scripts can rely on constant plot turns to keep a reader engaged. A slow story can’t. So you have to make up for that somewhere else.
The upside is that if you absolutely nail the character, you don’t need any other tools. This is where my instruction basically ends. Readers will follow interesting characters anywhere. They’ll follow them straight into the middle of the most boring plots imaginable.
That’s why Joker, with its almost nonexistent narrative, became a breakout hit. Arthur was endlessly interesting. He desperately wanted to be liked. He had a bizarre condition that made him laugh uncontrollably. He was unpredictable. He was the world’s biggest underdog. He was a stand-up comedian. Characters like this become a plot unto themselves, to the point where the narrative almost doesn’t matter.
You see something similar in The Ballad of Wallis Island. Charles, the owner of the island, is a two time lottery winner who lost his wife, lives alone, and is unfailingly kind to everyone he meets. He has an offbeat, often awkward sense of humor, and we’re never quite sure what he’s going to say next. Readers are willing to sit through slow storylines when they get to spend time with characters like this, because hanging out with them feels no different than hanging out with a genuinely unique person in real life.
TOOL 2 – A GOAL
One of the riskiest things you can do as a writer is not tell the reader where your story is going. You send the script off on a road trip with no destination. While there are audiences willing to go on that type of aimless adventure, they are a tiny portion of the movie-watching populace. Generally speaking, readers want to know where they’re headed.
This is where you see some of the examples I used break down. Wallis Island has the clearest goal – play the concert – and, therefore, the most direction. Sentimental Value has a goal (director dad needs to get daughter to play the lead role in his film) but it’s one of the more casually explored goals you’ll see. And it’s eventually abandoned. After the cousins kidnap the CEO in Bugonia, it becomes less and less clear what the goal is (have her admit she’s an alien?). And then with After the Hunt, there is no goal. The movie is literally titled, “After The Hunt.” It’s about the fallout that happens after a sexual assault.
Therefore, if you didn’t like any of these movies, this may have been why. Because you may have been watching them and, somewhere along the way, thought, “What is this about again? What are they trying to do?” But I’ll tell you this. All of them have clearer goals than Train Dreams, which has no goal. And you can see that in its randomness. If anybody had tried to sell Train Dreams as a spec, they would’ve been laughed out of every office in Hollywood.
TOOL 3 – CARROT DANGLING
Because the plot is rarely propelling the story forward in a slow script, you need other tools to keep the reader turning the page. For that reason, the act of carrot-dangling is crucial in slower-moving screenplays. And it’s simple to use, too. You essentially say, “Hey, if you read another 5 pages (or 10 pages, or 20 pages), I’m going to let you have this carrot.” It’s a reward.
Carrot-dangling is a mix of smaller short-term carrot enticing and bigger long-term carrot enticing. One of the most common carrots you can dangle in a script is, “Will they get together?” That’s one of the primary carrots being used in Ballad of Wallis Island. We keep watching, in part, because we’re curious whether former band members Herb and Nell are going to get back together.
But this tool is versatile. You can dangle all sorts of carrots. In After The Hunt, when Maggie tells Alma that Hank raped her, it manifests as an “anticipation carrot” for Maggie’s talk with Hank. We want to hear Hank’s side of it. From the moment the cousins in Bugonia reveal that their plan is to kidnap the CEO, that’s a big fat juicy carrot that will effortlessly take us to the point where they try and do it.
TOOL 4 – SUSPENSE
This is arguably the most powerful tool you have available in your shed. Because suspense has an amazing ability to condense the reader’s perception of time. If we write a meeting scene in a boardroom and tell the reader there’s a bomb under the table and that it’s going to go off at some point, you can literally extend that scene out to 20 pages and it would feel like 3 pages to us. Because we’re anticipating the bomb going off.
Where so many slow scripts go wrong is they never look to add a bomb under the table. And yet they’re perfectly fine with writing that same 20 page boardroom scene. But that’s, ironically, where time distorts in the opposite direction. 20 pages now feels like 40 pages. You should be looking for elements to introduce into the script that signal something destabilizing is coming, and then force the reader to live inside that anticipation. That’s the power of suspense.
In Bugonia, we introduce this electrosis machine that Teddy has built for Michelle to get answers out of her. It sends excessive electricity into the body. The whole sequence leading up to the use of the machine is pure suspense. Once we see the machine, we know what she’s in for. And once he starts using it on her, the suspense continues because we know he has the “max power” option, which could potentially kill her.
TOOL 5 – SCENES WITH GOALS
In most slow-moving screenplays, the narrative is weak. Like Train Dreams. What is that narrative really about? Existing? That’s not a plot. Once you take the fun of a plot away from the reader, you have to make up for it in other places. You do that by making sure the reader’s moment-to-moment experience is engaging.
Therefore, create clear scene goals. Once a character is trying to achieve something, you can put another character in their way, and suddenly the scene has tension. We want to see whether the character overcomes the obstacle and gets what they want. And because someone is actively blocking them, we know they’ll have to rely on cleverness, intelligence, or persistence to succeed. That uncertainty is what keeps us reading.
These goals don’t all have to be gigantic. They can be as simple as a high school kid asking a girl to the school dance. As long as a character has a goal in the scene, you’re creating scenes with more purpose than 75% of the screenwriters out there. Even if you only used this one tool in your slow script, and you executed each scene well, it may be all you need. Because if we’re always entertained in the moment, we’re not as demanding in regards to the overall story.
TOOL 6 – UNRESOLVED
In slow movies, you want to build a series of unresolved elements that pull the audience forward.
Start with your hero’s flaw. If your protagonist is insanely stubborn and lives by the creed, “my way or the highway,” and that trait is actively ruining their life, we want to see how that gets resolved. Now compare that to a protagonist with no real flaws. Why would we keep watching them? They’ve already figured everything out.
Unresolved relationships work in the same way. Two sisters who can’t get along no matter how hard they try, like in the Netflix show Sirens, create an ongoing question that keeps us engaged. We keep watching to find out whether that relationship ever heals.
Unresolved actions matter too. If we know the hero’s dream is to move to Hawaii and he’s been saving toward it for years, we’ll stay with the story to see whether he follows through.
What all this comes down to is that you’re making a series of promises. You’re saying: this character is broken, and if you keep watching, I’ll show you whether he gets fixed or not. You’re saying: these characters are trying to build a time machine (in Safety Not Guaranteed) and if you stick around, I’ll show you whether they succeed or not.
Most writers don’t use enough of these tools. And when that happens, the reader drifts away. That’s why I strongly recommend erring on the side of using too many rather than too few. Rarely will a script feel too engaging. More often, it’s the opposite: too flat, too slow, too putdownable.
These tools aren’t just for slow scripts either. They can be applied to any screenplay. But in a slow-moving story, the stakes are higher. You’re asking your audience for patience, for attention, for a willingness to linger. Using these tools is how you repay that patience.
So think of them as a toolkit. Captivating characters, clear goals, dangling carrots, suspense, scene-level objectives, unresolved threads. Each one is a lever you can pull to keep your audience invested. Use as many as you can, mix them creatively, and be deliberate about where you deploy them.
A slow-moving screenplay shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. It should be a choice. You’re keeping things slow because you like the way a slower pace bakes in the reader’s head. But this choice requires some serious know-how. You can’t stumble into a slow-moving story as an amateur and expect it to work. You need to master these tools if you have a shot. But the good news is, when you *do* master those tools? Your storytelling is literally unstoppable.
