layout

Scene and not seen

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This was hard for me. I ran a workshop about scriptwriting last weekend and I was required to teach a group of teenage writers how to format scripts. I did try telling them to just get it right, but for some reason they wanted more detail.

Look, you know and I know that scripts are laid out in certain formats and they are different to prose fiction, you would never accidentally write in these layouts. What you would do is read scripts. Read enough scripts, you get it. Film scripts are pretty rigidly formatted, television comes in a couple of different forms, radio is bit more relaxed and theatre is a Wild West.

But read scripts, you get it.

I don’t expect any writer to happen to know the millimetre dimensions of every indent, but I will not accept a writer who thinks it doesn’t matter. Who thinks script formats are solely done because there’s some secret club that has agreed it all.

Instead, scripts are laid out in their various ways for very specific reasons, all of which are long-won over decades of you writing and other people making the show out of that script. Some poor sod will count your INT for interior scenes and your EXT for exterior, for instance, as they try to balance the budget between days of location filming versus building studio sets.

There are reasons, they’re practical, none of this is hard. So what I told the group was that if you send me a script and it isn’t laid out correctly, really you are telling me to stop reading. Rather than showing me you’re a free spirit who won’t be confined by arbitrary layouts, you’re shouting that you don’t read scripts.

There’s no reason you should read scripts, unless you want to write them. If you do and yet still can’t be arsed to read any, I struggle to see why I should read yours. You could be a natural, brilliant talent, but you’re not. Get it right, I said to this group, because it’s not as if it’s hard, and read scripts because you’re a scriptwriter, you’re surely interested in your own field.

However.

I also explicitly told them that I know instantly when you’ve got a format wrong. I know from the first glance, before I’ve read a word, I know it’s wrong. I said it was that obvious.

It turns out that I lied.

I still believe what I said and I obviously didn’t set out to lie to them, but something happened shortly before the workshop and something happened shortly afterwards. What makes it worse is that it was the same something.

It was that I read the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship” by Hank Steinberg and Steven Kane, distantly based on the book by William Brinkley. I enjoyed it very much, I bought the episode off iTunes to watch, and then I bought the next episode, then I bought the season. By the time of the workshop, I think I’d seen six episodes and the day after, I re-read the script.

So there I am, barrelling along, enjoying it again, seeing the differences between the draft and the final production, having a fine time.

Until I noticed that it has no scenes.

There isn’t a single scene heading and I hadn’t noticed. I’d got so caught up in the reading that despite all the rest of the format being full-on script, I completely failed to notice that there wasn’t one single INT or EXT in 54 pages. When I did notice, around 30 pages into the re-read, I went back to the start and checked it out in case I were mad or the copy of the script I got was peculiarly incomplete.

It wasn’t. Rather than say what you’d expect, such as:

EXT. FLIGHT DECK – DAY

the script instead says:

CUT TO
XO MIKE SLATTERY (40’s) walking on the FLIGHT DECK, crossing with NAVY SEALS DANNY GREEN and FRANKIE BENZ (both 20’s). He shakes Danny’s hand.

I do feel for the poor sod working out the budget, but then the great majority of the script is set on a ship which appears to clearly be a real one shot on location. So I suppose that one big EXT is somewhat implied.

There’s no lesson here, certainly not for you because you didn’t sit down to get lectured at, but also not for me. I was wrong about seeing deviations from the format instantly. I lied to those teenage writers. But I’ll lie in the same way again, I’ll always write INT and EXT. But I was wrong.

It’s just that instead of instantaneously recognising something was off, it took me one and a half reads of the entire script to notice. Instead of seeing it on page one, then, it effectively took me 84 pages.

I’m suddenly reminded of when novelist Paul Auster stopped writing chapters. I can’t remember which novel it was now – I want to say Oracle Night – but the entire book is a single chapter, just as this script is a single scene. With the novel, it was oddly compelling. I don’t understand how, except that late at night, figuring I’ll just read to the end of this chapter, I was a bit tense.

“The Last Ship” script is an exciting, absorbing read. My concern for the poor budgeting sod is too great for me to ever try abandoning scenes, but it is true that ditching them makes this feel like a faster read, that it pulls you through instead of pausing to plant an INT or EXT flag.

58 Keys

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Just to say, it kills me beginning a blog title or actually any sentence with a number. It’s as knife-scraping as beginning one with a lowercase letter. Consequently, having written very many articles and news stories about the likes of the iPhone, I’m used to contorting headlines to fit in one word, any word, before the offending digit or lowercase. In this one situation, though, putting anything before “58 Keys” would change it.

“The 58 Keys” would make you think of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, for instance. “The Mystery of the 58 Keys” is Agatha Christie if you’re normal, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators if you’re less so.

Mind you, just saying 58 Keys is at risk of putting you in mind of either Edgar Allen Poe or, in a slightly different chain of thought, Florida.

Somehow I think it’s fitting, however, that you are very unlikely to read that title and know what this is about yet it is impossible that you haven’t been affected by it. Now it sounds like a disease.

It’s just this. I offer that every artistic, sporting, engineering, scientific, medical, architectural, sculptural, scriptural, design or really any human endeavour, any human thought of the last thirty years has gone via a keyboard. That’s obviously true for writers but a sculptural artist, say, he or she may work with stone and chisels but at some point they email a gallery describing it.

Amateur photographers not intending to ever sell their work and, let’s go to an extreme here, too illiterate to write a caption, they still use a keyboard. Whether it’s holding down the Option key as they choose a function in Photoshop or it’s logging in to Flickr as CrazyNutBoy99, they use a keyboard.

We never think about this, most especially not if we’re touch typists, because we’re thinking about the work we do. The keyboard and our fingers on it are the bridge from our thoughts to the physical reality of what we’re creating. And I’m just fascinated by that. I’m fascinated by how pressing these keys means I get to talk to you. By how using exactly the same keys I will unthinkingly, unconsciously switch from writing words to issuing commands: I press Command-S to save my work do much that the S key is worn down.

If you’re reading this on a phone or a tablet then you’ve got an onscreen keyboard that pops up when you need it and hides away again when you don’t. If you’re on a laptop then these days the keys are probably what’s called a Chiclet style unless it’s a Butterfly mechanism or in Microsoft’s case a curious cloth-like one.

The type of key varies from silent and virtual to the mechanical Cherry keyboard that clacks away terribly satisfyingly to the ears of those of us trained on manual typewriters. The number of keys varies a lot too. It’s not that I usually go around counting them, honest, it’s more that for decades the standard layout for a computer keyboard has been what’s called the PC AT one with 102 keys. When you see the QWERTY layout with a numeric keypad to the right and arrow keys between the two, it’s probably 102 keys.

That is a standard, whether you’re using QWERTY or something like France’s AZERTY. That is also a standard whether you’re in the UK or the US, though for unfathomable historical reasons, our two nations have different keyboards. In the UK, the Return key is a tall one that takes up the space of two keys vertically. In America, it’s a wide one that takes up two key spaces horizontally. Nutters.

Even so, it’s the same number of keys and you have never looked at me so strangely before. Let me hurry to explain why I’ve called this 58 Keys and not 102.

It’s the Mac.

The original Apple Macintosh is the reason we have iPhones and iPads, it’s the reason we have Windows. And, yes, that original Mac had 58 keys on it.

There should’ve been 62. People at Apple fought over four more keys and they lost. Steve Jobs rejected four keys. He rejected the arrow keys. You can think that’s taking micro-management too far, but there was a reason.

He refused to allow the original Mac keyboard to have these arrow or cursor keys because if it had them, people would use them. Since it didn’t, there was no other way to move your cursor around the screen than to use the mouse. This was the first time any public computer had included a mouse and, as strange as it seems today, it was bloody hard to grasp what in the world this thing was for.

Taking away four keys meant you had to use the mouse and it’s part of why we did so it’s part of why we got to move away from those green or yellow phosphorus text displays into full-screen, full-colour, overlapping windows.

Even if you have never used a Mac, even if you’re a die-hard PC fan and even if you’ve only ever had your phone as a computer, the decision to give the Mac just 58 keys shaped everything we do today.

There’s no reason to say this to you now, no particular anniversary, no keyboard launch and definitely no way to explain why I currently have about nine keyboards in my house. But you will spend time at some keyboard today, whether that’s onscreen or physical, and you will every day. We could get really deep into how mechanical keys work, we could dive into how onscreen keyboards invisibly expand the letter you’re most likely to type next. But let’s just take a moment to notice how this small thing has world-changing impact.