Yesterday, I proclaimed that I expected Bite After Bite to rule the weekend and win the Blood & Ink First Scene Showdown. And now I’m going to explain why. The Bite After Bite pages were the only pages out of the 62 submissions where I felt that the writer had captured the exact promise of their pitch. These pages are giving me the movie that I imagined.
If you missed yesterday, I’m doing a deep dive into the first scenes of the Blood & Ink Contest. Yesterday was winner, Karoshi: The Drive. Today, we’re getting our zombie on with Bite After Bite.
Let’s take a look.
You’ll notice that this page starts quite differently from yesterday’s first page. We don’t start in the middle of an action that’s already taking place. This scene is more of a slow build.
I point this out so that writers understand that there’s no universal “correct” way to start a script. You can start fast. You can start slow. Up to you. I will say that the slower you start, the better the writer you have to be. Because it takes a more skilled writer to keep the reader invested while things are moving along slowly.
I consider the opening page a great example of my newsletter article about pages 0 and -1. Bite After Bite is a first scene that is helped tremendously by what the logline promises. Here’s that initial logline: “From Bite to Bite, we follow the zombie infection as it spreads – each victim’s story unfolding from the moment they’re bitten to when they pass it on.”
That logline helps the reader power through a page where seemingly nothing is happening. And some of you might be saying, “Carson, do you really need extra fuel to get the reader through the very first page?” I’ll answer that question this way. Have you ever stopped reading on the first page? My guess is that you have. Well, Hollywood people have less patience than you. So, there’s your answer.
It turns out we didn’t have to wait that long for something to happen. This is, essentially, the inciting incident of the screenplay. Elliot has been bitten. Presumably, he’s now infected. This is going to propel the narrative for the rest of the screenplay.
So, even though the script starts “slow,” we’re still introducing a major plot point just two pages into the script.
Something I also noticed here was that Andrew is using even shorter paragraphs than Mike was yesterday. Most of the paragraphs are one line. And, if they’re two, they’re finishing very quickly on the second line. This moves the eyes down the page even faster than yesterday.
I strongly recommend doing this if there’s a lot of description in your story. Description can feel like a chore once those paragraphs get up to 4 lines or more. However, if you have a ton of dialogue, which is the fastest part of the script to read, then it’s okay to have longer paragraphs, as the reader is okay with reading them every once in a while.
To be honest, this page is a teensy bit clunky. The interaction between the family feels off. Amber seems to be working against her husband rather than with him.
I also think more clarity surrounding the bite could’ve been conveyed. I always go back to this directive: “If this conversation were happening in real life, how would it go down?” That’s not to say you have to use that conversation in your script. But it should be the foundation of the conversation you use because it is the most truthful. And, in writing, we writers can sometimes lose the thread and focus more on what we want to put in the script rather than what would actually happen.
Here, I feel like there’d be more discussion regarding what happened. “Wait, did you see anything?” “No, I was swimming and then I felt it and I shrugged it off.” The kid would probably ask, “Was it a shark?” “No.” The wife might say, “Hold on, take me through what happened.” I then think there would be a longer conversation about whether to go to the hospital or not. Instead, we’re taking pictures of the thing and moving on.
This is a good example of the difference between being a wordsmith and being a good storyteller. The most important thing you must do as a writer is get the reader to turn the page. To do this, you must be a good storyteller. There are lots of ways to be a good storyteller and the use of suspense is one of the big ones. If you can learn how to build suspense, you can consistently hook a reader. And if you can do that, you don’t need to be a wordsmith.
Even though there’s not a lot going on this page, there’s one line in particular that stands out. “My leg is on fire.” It establishes a ticking time bomb that we know, because of page -1, is going to kill him. And it’s going to be responsible for killing millions of others as well.
That one sentence compels us to keep reading. Because even though we know that he turns into a zombie, we can still hope we’re wrong. We can still hope (even if it’s impossible) that he figures it out before it’s too late. We’re also wondering if he’s going to turn and infect his family or if he’s going to be separated from them before things get bad. So there are still questions to be had.
We now have escalation. We talked about this yesterday. You want your scenes to evolve. You don’t want them to stagnate. One page ago, his leg was burning. Now he’s vomiting. Things are escalating which means we have to act fast.
Just two pages ago, we were watching a family enjoy their day at the beach. Now, things have gotten very bad very quickly. Real danger is rushing in. At this point, I would say it’s impossible to stop reading until the scene is over. Which is where you want to be with that first scene. You want to make it so that they HAVE TO finish the scene. Not even WANT TO. They HAVE TO.
The scene continues to evolve with a new character – the lifeguard. Things are getting bigger. Which is what you want. You want to BUILD with a scene. You don’t want it to stay the same. Writing a screenplay is about building pressure then releasing it. You can build within a scene. You can build within a sequence of scenes. You don’t want to go too long in your screenplay where you’re not building towards something.
I noticed some readers complain that we don’t care about this family because we don’t know anything about them.
That’s a choice we all have to make as writers. Do you want to go the traditional route, where you use your first 15 pages to introduce your hero (or heroes) in their everyday environment so that we get to know them and sympathize with them, and only THEN hit them with the inciting incident?
Or do you jump into the story right away and teach the reader about your characters while all the action is happening? With Bite After Bite, we’re going to be following 8 different stories which is why I’m guessing we don’t have time to set this family up. By the time this sequence is over, we’ll be moving on to another character. So, in this case, Andrew has no other choice but to do it this way.
And even if he didn’t, I still think jumping into things is a perfectly viable option. I will say, however, that you should look for quick ways to set up characters to create the “mini” effect of a larger character setup.
For example, maybe when Elliot is about to swim out, he sees a little girl who’s by herself in water that’s almost up to her chest. She’s perilously close to losing her footing and being swept out. He moves her out of the water, spots a family down the way, and says, “Hey! Is this your daughter!?” And they look over. The mother realizes, ‘Oh,’ and comes and grabs the girl. In other words, it’s a quick way to make us like Elliot a bit more. So you should be doing that in these scenarios to help make up for the fact that you weren’t able to set the characters up traditionally.
And by the way, I should point out, the writers who get paid the big bucks are the ones who can do what other writers can do in 1/4 the time, or 1/8 the time. They can make you like a character in one page as opposed to eight pages. So, you should definitely know how to set up a family like this quickly if you want to work in this industry.
I will say that there could be more specificity in this scene. I don’t know much about this beach other than it’s your garden variety generic beach. As someone who used to ride his bike down the beach from Santa Monica to Torrance, I can tell you that each beach has its own personality.
Santa Monica is all tourists. Venice is the pothead beach. Dockweiler has the planes taking off from LAX. Manhattan Beach was the glitzy beach. Hermosa Beach was beach volleyball central. Redondo has the giant pier that’s still stuck in the year 1993. Each beach had its own demographic.
It adds something extra when you bring those details into your story. Not just for the beach. But for the characters. For the community. For the types of people who are around. That’s how you make things feel real on the page.
The good news is, this is not something you have to worry about in the first draft. So I’m fine giving Andrew some leeway here. For your first draft, it’s okay to be a bit generic cause you got to get the pages down. That’s what’s most important. But once you get to draft two, you have to start populating these scenes with more detail.
I’m not entirely on board with “I’m going to do bad things.” That sounds like something Bruce Banner would say. I think it’s a lot scarier for everyone if he doesn’t know what’s coming.
Then again, these are STORY CHOICES. When I give notes, I’m usually using dramaturgy to inform the writer about what he should or shouldn’t do in his story. But sometimes, I’ll give an opinion.
When it comes to opinion notes, that’s up to the writer. I can convey my concern but if he doesn’t like my suggestion, he’s the writer. He’s the one who, ultimately, has to face the fire. Which is why, as a writer, you should go with choices that you believe in.
George Lucas famously got flak for “The Force” and Obi-Wan becoming a ghost in Star Wars. His director friends (DePalma especially) told him it was a dumb idea. But Lucas believed in the choice, kept it, and created one of the most iconic mythologies ever. So I won’t get mad at Andrew if he believes in this choice.
Yesterday I said to think of your first scene as a pilot episode. At the end of every pilot episode, you want to include a cliffhanger so that the reader wants to see episode 2. Likewise, at the end of your opening scene, create a cliffhanger that makes the reader want to read scene number 2.
The reason you want to do it this way is because of the way a reader thinks. A reader will start reading that first page. If there’s enough there that they like, they’ll mentally say, “I’ll read the rest of the scene.” But, if they don’t like that scene, they’ll stop reading. Which is why you use this little cliffhanger trick to FORCE them to read the second scene. Once someone starts reading a scene, they’ll usually finish it. So keep giving them reasons to start the next scene.
