MemeMachineGo!

The bulk of my past few screenwriting classes has consisted of in-class critiques of scenes from the students’ screenplays. My turn was last night. I’m no stranger to being critiqued, but it was a new medium and a new environment and I was a little nervous.

Screenwriters are at least as concerned with economy as short story writers. Everything on the page has to be there for a reason, preferably four or five reasons simultaneously. Generally, scenes are only a page or two in length. Dialogue is just a few exchanges, and each utterance is short: in screenplay format, dialogue is centered with two and a half-inch margins, leaving only three and a half inches, thirty-five characters, for the text. And normally, one uses only one or two lines at a time. More than four is considered a speech.

I sweated bullets to cram my scene into 4 pages — it’s the most pivotal scene of Act I, when my hero and heroine meet, obviously a big deal in a romantic comedy, so I didn’t feel bad about it being a long scene. I squeezed every line until it screamed.

The first thing someone had to say: “It’s too wordy.”

And he was right.

I’m learning a lot about writing and storytelling — I’d recommend studying screenwriting to any writer in any medium. (I’m also experiencing ever diminishing sympathy for complaints that movies over-emphasize explosions, car chases, and gasp, other things that are visually interesting and in motion, but that is a topic for another time, perhaps.)

Oh, and by and large my scene was well-received. People laughed at the right parts. In discussion afterwards, I got a lot of good feedback and have realized one character needed to be much more sympthetic, and the relationships and thus the plot had to change fairly drastically from what I’d envisioned, or Act II won’t sustain itself. All to the better — it’ll be more complex and more interesting this way.

And hard to pull off.