Words Into Pictures

Hello everybody! Had fun teaching to a full room at Warner Bros today! Our topic was Words Into Pictures: Writing Cinematically for the Silver Screen. It seems obvious that script writing should be colorful, sensory and cinematic but many writers, fearing that they don’t have license to write anything more elaborate than a blueprint, err on the side of writing dull, dry pages.

We talked today about the Three S’s: sight, sound, smell. So that if we have a scene set in a forest, we engage the reader’s senses wholly by using evocative words to describe the sharp smell of pine needles on the forest floor, or the way the sun looks peeking through the branches, or the muffled footsteps of a shadowy deer.

We also talked about establishing an intention, on page one, for how you want the reader to FEEL when reading the script and in particular, when reading each scene. Know your genre and set your agenda very early. If this is a thriller, we want to set up dread on evey page. So that forest might not be so sun-dappled, right? And perhaps the pine needles are rotting and black. And wind blows the branches.

So we manipulate the world we describe in action lines, slug lines and in dialogue to literally hypnotize the reader into feeling the way we intend them to. If Muzak is playing in a deserted convenience store late at night, if it’s totally generic elevator music, that’s creepy. But if it’s “Dancing Queen” or “The Hustle,” that’s a little funny. You can indicate music if there’s a source for it in the scene. A radio, boom box, CD player or radio. Otherwise, indicating music is NOT done.

We use modifiers and adjectives in the same way a painter uses paint in a pointillist painting. Little dots flecked with color take on a complete picture when you stand back.

Don’t worry about these details so much in your first draft – this is polish work. But do bear in mind, even in the early drafts, that your job is to seduce the reader into feeling the way you want them to feel about the story.

So set your intention on page one by knowing your genre and paying homage to it on every page. Bear in the mind the Three S’s (sight, sound, smell) and dig deep into your vocabulary for descriptors that turn the red apple into a blood red apple into a scarlet apple into a blushing apple into a crimson apple and back again.

That is all. Now get back to work.