I was having a rough go of it with the Last Great Screenplay Contest entries this week.
There was one point where I read 23 “no’s” in a row.
One of the biggest mistakes continues to be starting with the wrong scene. I say “wrong scene” because you can write a scene that’s technically well written and shows that you’re a good writer, but if it’s a boring scene, it was the wrong scene to start with.
An example of this would be a scene that sets up a location. So if you’re writing about a small town in the middle of nowhere (think “It”) and you want your first scene to describe this town, you might describe the general setting (it’s hidden inside a vast forest), the main strip (all the cute buildings along the street), the people (what people in this town generally look like and how they act). As well as any other interesting details.
Here’s the problem with that, though. That’s a MOVIE first scene. It’s not a SCRIPT first scene. The scene I just described would be perfect for an opening credits scene in a film, the kind of scene you see at the beginning of a lot of movies.
But you don’t want to do that in a script. Because readers lose interest quickly. A bunch of description – unless we’re talking about an INCREDIBLY UNIQUE world – is only going to lure the reader into a bored state.
Look at Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket. You could’ve written ten pages of description on that city alone it was so unique. But, instead, the writer starts with a scene where something is happening. Our hero’s best friend is leaving her forever.
So I want to remind everyone that your best bet for capturing the reader’s attention is to write a SITUATION. What is a situation again? I’ll tell you in a second. But it just so happens that after those 23 “no’s” in a row, just as I was about to give up for the day, a script came around and pulled me in. Here is the first scene from that script…
**THIS** is a situation.
We have a deliveryman who’s hiding inside his truck. We have a cop outside that truck who wants to break in for some reason. That’s a situation, folks. It’s a situation because the character has been presented with a problem that they must deal with. It’s an interesting situation because the stakes seem to be high. Our deliveryman’s life may be in danger.
Also, this scene has some interesting questions attached to it. Why is a presumably American Amazon truck in Mexico? Why is this cop so lackadaisical at first? Why is a cop threatening this person? What does the cop want? When he gets into the truck, we expect an immediate attack but instead the cop starts looking through the packages. This tells me the writer is going to constantly surprise me. Cause I thought for sure he was breaking in there to immediately kill the driver.
There are a lot of reasons why this opening scene caught my interest. But the main reason was that the writer set up a situation.
Does that mean this is the only way to pull a reader in? Of course not. Some readers are more patient than others. They’re more willing to sit through non-active description. And if you have an amazingly original voice, you can probably rope readers in just on that alone.
But my question to you would be, why risk it? Why not pull ALL your readers in as opposed to just the patient ones?
And remember, a situation doesn’t always have to be this pulse-pounding explosion of a scene. All you have to do is create a situation that has some sort of problem for somebody, and pull us in by making us wonder how they’re going to deal with that problem.
The very first script in the contest that got a “Yes” from me had a little girl walking along a field, and she stumbles upon a naked bloodied pregnant woman who has been hanged from a tree and is desperately trying to get down. It’s a problem. It’s a situation that the girl now must deal with.
The thing that frustrates me so much is the ego in a lot of writers in that they believe they’re above that. They believe they’re above a splashy situation. They’re such good writers that they’re going to describe their world and their characters and any other exposition they need to get to and you, the reader, are going to take it because you owe them that. You owe them, the writer, that attention because they worked hard on this script and they deserve it.
I got news for you. That’s not how the real world works. It’s definitely not how Hollywood works. People don’t owe you anything. It’s the other way around. You owe them entertainment or they’re moving on.
By the way, I am not saying you have to write some whiz-bang real-time thriller where something’s happening every second to keep the reader invested. You can write a slow story and as long as you understand how to create a series of situations that are interesting, we’ll be right there with you. Even in the first scene.
A Quiet Place starts out very slow. It’s a family going to get things from a store. The big OMG moment doesn’t come until five minutes into the movie. But the writers knew how to create a suspenseful mysterious situation, they knew how to hint at danger even if we didn’t yet understand what that danger was, and hence, we were pulled in.
Look at the beginning of Parasite. I mean how much more artsy can you get than a subtitled Korean movie. And yet that script starts out with a problem the characters have to solve (the wifi they were stealing doesn’t work anymore so they can’t get internet and they need it to do their job). That then segues into another problem, which is that the family needs to hurry up and fold a bunch of pizza boxes.
The scene isn’t going to win any opening scene awards but something is HAPPENING. There are issues that need to be resolved which put your characters into action. And characters in action will lead to more interesting situations than characters who don’t have to act.
The reason screenwriters continue to struggle with this is that sometimes you go to movies and the first scene ISN’T a situation. The scene might even be agonizingly slow. And you get to say, “See Carson! You’re wrong!” But, remember, not all movies start as a spec script. A lot of them don’t need to go through the process of grabbing a reader. So they don’t have to worry about that part of the story.
There’s a reason that one of the most famous spec scripts of all time, Scream, starts with one of the greatest scenes of all time. The writer, Kevin Williamson, knew he had to do that because he’d spent years upon years sending scripts out to people, getting no traction, and through that process, learning how important it was to grab a reader right away.
I think it was William Goldman who said the thing that kept him up at night most was, “Are they bored?” He said in every scene, at every juncture in his scripts, he is thinking, “Are they bored?” It’s a good mindset to have as a writer. Cause we can trick ourselves into thinking that anything we write is necessary. But if you take that second to put yourself in the reader’s head and ask if there’s a possibility they’d be bored by this scene, and the answer is yes, you should go back and rewrite the scene to make it better. That’s true for every scene. But there’s nowhere it’s more true than the first scene. I know that because it was proven to me 23 times in a row.
