scripts

The long and the short of it

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A friend is talking about giving up on a script because it’s telling a true story and there is just too much detail to get into it. Easy, I said.

It’s always easy when it’s someone else’s script.

But still, a story isn’t a document and if you want to convey truth, it’s better to make the audience feel than to brief them on every detail. I have believed this all my life: journalism is about the facts, drama is about the truth. The first half of that belief has taken a bit of denting lately, but I’m as sure about the latter as I am that I can’t stand those dramatic reenactment scenes that pad out some of the poorer documentaries.

I need more from dramatised true stories. I don’t mean I need added sensation and, this is a separate issue, I do mean that it’s amazing how bad the acting is in those documentary scenes. I’ve got to let that go.

Anyway.

The problem with a script that’s too long is that you cut it down. Sorted. Rather than just deleting every second page or something, just find the key part of the tale. Find the one part of the story that captures what you want, that conveys and communicates and connects with whatever jt is that made you so keen to tell this tale. That makes you want to tell this tale and not that one, that made you keen to spend at least hundreds of hours working on it.

It’s up to you to find that one line and I can’t help you because it’s your story, your connection. And besides, my current script is running too short.

In my case, I have this piece that I just look forward to writing each morning, to spend an hour in this world that is forming around me. It’s what I’ll be going to the moment you and I are done. Only, this script should come out to be an hour long and instead I’m eating up story like it’s chocolate. At the moment, I’m on 23 pages and I think it’s going to wrap up in about another 10.

Plus unfortunately the 10 includes two to three pages of necessary stuff that I require, that is fun, but the only place it can go is after the best point to end the script. I don’t know what to do about that, except that I do.

The friend with the script that’s too long and me with the one that’s too short, we still both have things we have to drop.

I won’t underestimate the difficulty my friend is having. I will underestimate the difficult I’m having. But still, even if neither of us is having it easy, even if actually neither of us has a producer waiting for this yet, even if both of us are writing for ourselves at the moment, this is all a nice problem to have.

As with any script, what I’m going back to writing in a moment and the other side of a mug of tea, may never get made. But I’m enjoying being in this world instead of our real one, and I can actually see how a previous script that was commissioned has taught me something I need for this one.

We get better by doing. I can’t see an alternative to that and I can see that it’s something I should apply to everything.

Right now, wrong then

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I should have seen this one coming. Usually if someone changes my mind about something, they do it quickly and I can never see things the way I did a moment before. This time, this week, that did happen, but it was less a new idea, more a confirmation of what I now realise I’d been working towards.

Previously… I used to believe that a story idea belonged in the form you first thought of it. If you thought of a radio play idea, then trying to do it as a novel was contorting it. It was contrived, it was wrong. The idea, the story, and the form are all part of the same thing, I believed, and if you change any part, you are going against the grain of the whole. If you want a TV idea, go think of one, don’t distort a stage story.

The person who changed my mind this week didn’t listen to all of that and then conclude that I was talking bollocks. But she did disagree and she did point out why.

And I was left with nothing else to say but the truth: “Then I’m wrong, aren’t I?”

I don’t want to let go of the opinion entirely, except I do. Maybe I just want to hang on to how I think the medium is important.

This woman’s entirely persuasive examples were centred on dramatisations of books and how interesting it is to see the process of bringing something to a different form, of how it naturally brings out other aspects, how it gives other opportunities. The example I gave back to her was the same. Slow Horses is better on television than it is in the original books. Screenwriters Will Smith, Morwenna Banks and co haven’t lost any of the strengths of the novels, haven’t changed anything, but have made it richer somehow.

But then five years ago I had a chance to do a short stage version of a radio play that I’d been struggling with. Struggling so much that actually I only finished it last month. Central to the many problems was a certain point where I needed one character to encourage another, but they physically and literally cannot meet. I think my ultimate solution in the radio script is a bit of a fudge, but for stage, I just had one of them walk by the other and whisper.

Didn’t matter that it was physically impossible in terms of the plot. It was right. The stage format allowed me to let that happen and it was right.

Similarly, I have a new stage play that comes from a TV idea and theatre lets me do things television never could. That story must start simultaneously in two time periods and for TV, I’ve made one winter and one summer to give it a visual start to the difference, before you then separately piece together just how many years apart they are.

For theatre, I put my characters on a train and had a train guard announcing to one “arriving London, 1987”, and to the other “next stop, Hull, 2019.”

“Seems a long journey,” says one of my characters.

“Try doing it standing up,” says the guard.

A small warm exchange and a simple, direct telling the audience what’s going on, but also done in a way that gives you a flavour of what’s coming next. Using an aspect of theatre that is pure stagecraft, that would be out of place on radio, out of joint on television. Using the form the story is being told in.

Sometimes you can still be contorting and contriving as you move between forms. But now I think the medium is only part of the message.

Voice control

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I was told this week that a character I’d written was clearly my creation, my type of character, and yet simultaneously also straight out of an Alan Plater drama. It was meant as a compliment and I took it as high praise.

Partly, actually, because one of my favourite things about Plater’s writing was when he dramatised Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War books. Watch the series, read the books, it’s clearly Manning throughout and yet the TV series is also simultaneously in Plater’s own voice too. I cannot fathom how he did that.

But I can fathom voice. I used to be proud of being able to adapt to any house style, any requirement, and now, not so much. I’m not proud of it and I don’t think I can do it anymore. Not when I now so cherish how a friend once recognised I was the writer of a particular piece, even when the job had required me to not sign or byline it. That reminded me of the radio broadcaster Fi Glover: the first minute I heard her on air, I knew who it was because I’d read her book.

She writes the way she speaks, which is fantastic and damn hard and may not be the only way to write but I have such a fondness for it that I think maybe it should be. Perhaps just on weekdays.

There’s also that I know, from direct experience, that you can encourage a writer to find their own voice but until the day they do, they’re as likely to have no clue what you even mean. Maybe we all start off trying to write like our favourite writers and maybe there just comes a day when you say sod that and write like yourself, but there comes that day, and there comes your voice.

Only…

I think the start of writing is finding this voice, but I worry that the end of writing is holding on to it too tightly.

This week I came across a few pages of The Golden Age, an unfinished theatre play script about 1960s British television. It may be that only those few pages were ever written, because I can’t find any trace of a full play being performed. I shouldn’t tell you who wrote it, but if you read it, you’d recognise the voice immediately. Just as you’d know it was a theatre script, even though at no point does it say that, or anything like it.

Suddenly, I’m wondering if I’m wrong and it was an unfinished TV script. I don’t think so. Plus, incidentally, the 1960s weren’t the golden age of television, we’re living in the golden age now. But I reckon that the play was started somewhere in the early 2000s, so the writer wasn’t to know.

It’s fine. Good gags, a wry and very clear opinion, but it’s the same opinion as in this writer’s other work. And though the specific words of the jokes are different, they’re really the same. The same kind of setup and the same kind of payoff, the same type of character making the same type of point.

Look, it was never finished so maybe this writer thought the same as I do.

But it’s like when you watch an Aaron Sorkin drama. There’s never the slightest pixel of a doubt who wrote it, and there are a thousand points to love and relish, but he has a very precise voice, he has a particular shtick.

And while his writing is so good that I have watched and many times rewatched his Sports Night comedy despite caring even less about sport than I know about it, it’s also so good that it stays with you. And consequently, I couldn’t watch his The Newsroom series, even though I really tried.

The trouble for me is that while the lead character in that, Will McAvoy, is apparently very good, I could never quite see him through the crowd of previous Sorkin characters standing in his way. This line sounds like Jed Bartlett from The West Wing, that one is clearly Danny Tripp from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and this is unquestionably Will McAvoy quoting Casey McCall from Sports Night.

In Sorkin’s case, he does also repeat stories between shows, which doesn’t help. A couple of characters in different series discover their father has been having an affair for decades, for instance, and a window gets startlingly smashed by someone in roughly identical situations in Sports Night, The West Wing and Studio 60.

There’s also the, to me, totally riveting issue of a man pursuing a woman. In Sports Night, you’re rooting for the two to get together. In Studio 60, the same story is creepy as hell.

So there is a difference in Sorkin’s characters, but again, you always know it’s him.

I think that’s great. I think a clear and strong voice is exciting and is so different to all the could-be-by-anyone dramas.

Only, his voice gets in his way for me, at least with The Newsroom. And on a rather smaller scale, I worry that having long found my own voice, it’s become too locked in for my own good.

Reading the boards

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I may have made a mistake. I’ve been reading scripts my entire adult life and since bothering to count from Christmas 2017, it’s been 2,289 of them. It’s not as if I’ve ever been unaware or unappreciative of how much producers, directors and cast do, yet very often if I’ve read the script, I don’t bother watching.

But then this week I watched the first episode of Guilt by Neil Forsyth. (It’s on the BBC iPlayer.)

I’d read the scripts as taut and frighteningly tense, and the transmitted version was exactly that – but it was also a lot funnier. It was played funny at points and played very well, barely any of which I got from the scripts. Same words, same meanings, just funnier when handled by a talented cast instead of me.

Similarly, while I was thinking about this, Britbox added Steven Moffat’s Coupling. I watched it and then the American remake too. If I had read the script, I wonder whether I would’ve got how funny it is. The US cast didn’t seem to.

While I’m on this line, I’m minded how in the early 2000s I read Ronald D Moore’s script for the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and shrugged. But I defy anyone to watch that mini-series and not be utterly arrested by it all.

I’m not saying that any one can make a bad script good. I’m saying that there are an enormous number of people who can read scripts better than I can, and a lot of them are currently treading the boards.

I’d best get back to practicing.

Write what you – no.

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This is doing the rounds again and maybe I’m not helping by grumbling about it. But this week I’ve been overhearing the phrase that writers should write what they know and I would like to offer that I know something about this.

I know it’s bollocks.

“Write what you know” is usually either said by people who aren’t writers, or by writers who are talking to people who aren’t and who they just want to get rid of. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, but I do know people who will ask what my current project is and then interrupt part way through the second syllable of the answer. I do tend to then wrap it up with “and, you know” while they say something about how I never tell them what I’m doing.

That’s just irritating me, that doesn’t matter. This “write what you know” idea does matter because it is damaging. There are writers who will believe it and you and I can only hope they recover.

I sound harsh, but then I intend to. If you know a time when you’ve heard it said with the best of intentions, I think it’s like it was interrupted part way through the second syllable. There is a crucial, crucial part that follows and which I’m going to have to make up since it’s never actually been said in the history of writing.

It should go thisaway:

“Write what you know, not as in writing about how it was raining when you put the bins out this morning, but rather how old that made you feel, how the knowledge that you’ve put them out a thousand times and if you’re lucky may get to do it a thousand times more, about how the repetition of a simple chore seems to you to be a metaphor for the pointlessness of life itself, for your failure to achieve anything, and how it feels like a klaxon or a Cloister Bell sounding out how little time you’ve got left before you die.”

Granted, that’s a bit specific.

It also told you more about me than I wanted to –– and that is the point of writing. Diving deeper, revealing more, reaching out. Connecting. Not describing how I forgot the council isn’t collecting garden waste this week and had to go out in the rain again to drag that bin back.

I’ve been working on a play that’s about two friends of mine. Clearly, then, I know them, I am writing what I know. Except I’m not, I’m not at all because in writing it I have learned more about them both and I’ve churned over what I thought I knew, what I’ve discovered, what I feel about them. If they were still alive, I would’ve been round their house a hundred times asking questions.

Then just technically, it’s a difficult play to write and it mustn’t ever seem like it is to the audience. When I started it, I did not know whether I was actually capable of writing what I needed, both because of these startlingly difficult technical issues, and because it’s about friends. Three or four times, I woke up in the morning not only thinking about it, but shaking. Sweating.

You don’t need to know that, the audience for the play mustn’t ever know it, but it is the best thing I’ve ever written and that is specifically because it stretched me far, far and three times far away from anything I knew how to do. Seriously, the very structure of this thing is alien to how I would say I tend to write, but it’s the correct way to tell this story. I now know that it’s the only way to tell it, too.

Sorry I can’t tell you what it is yet. You will be the first.

But for now, I have to write what you don’t know.

Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser in Mad About You: Togetherness by Steve Paymer

The actors did not make it up

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There’s a pizza restaurant in London, I forget the name but it’s right in the Leicester Square theatre area. Its walls are covered with quotes, not one of which is from theatre, every one of which is from films –– and every one of which is wrong.

That’s because each famous line from a movie is attributed on these wall plaques to the actor who said it. Who said it. Didn’t write it, didn’t think it up, just said it. I have pointed out to the restaurant that I’ve said all of these quotes too, they should give me plaque.

They’re going to get back to me.

I’d understand it if they credited the line to the character and the movie, but they don’t do either. It is solely the quote and then the actor’s name.

And I think it’s tied to how you’ve seen a bizarrely frantic need for people to believe actors make up everything themselves. That can be clear in how often people or the media ask, I don’t know, Peter Mayhew just how much he’s really like Chewbacca. Or it can be more specific: actors are regularly asked if they came up with this or that superb line.

No, they didn’t.

Drama is collaboration and an excellent actor can certainly, in the moment, in the character, come up with a great line. They can’t come up with two, they can’t come up with entire scenes and dramas, and they can well come up with a line that’s brilliant in this scene but entirely screws up the ending of the movie.

I don’t actually say that to criticise, either. I know of actors who are practically proud that they only read their lines in a script and to hell with what every other character has to say, and I know of actors who are extremely successful while being like that. They’re just crap, though, what can you do?

A tremendous actor will work that script, will understand everything in it and – this is quite hard to say as a writer, but it’s true – by the end, they will indeed know their character better than you do. I still don’t trust anyone who claims “my character wouldn’t say that”, and I still do suspect they really mean “I can’t pronounce that word”. Which has happened to me.

But if you and I both accept the practicality that drama is collaboration and that everyone is working to the same goal, let me zero in on why this is really all bothering me today.

It’s partly because it bothers me all the time. The desire on the part of audiences for the actor to have made up their lines, the need for them to have done it. Two or three times now, I’ve been told of a stage show where the cast go madly off script and ad lib like crazy. Each time the person who told me this said that it made their night, that it made the show come alive so very much more than if it had been written.

And then six months later, I catch the same show further on in its tour and every single ad lib is precisely the same.

Because they were written.

Of course they were.

Which means I could be wrong here, but I just saw something I think was ad libbed – and I liked it.

I’m rewatching Mad About You, the quite bizarrely underrated 1990s sitcom by Paul Reiser and Danny Jacobson. In “Togetherness”, an episode by Steve Paymer, there’s an end titles sequence that appears to be ad libbed. It’s nothing to do with the episode, it is a callback to an equally unrelated pre-titles gag, but the studio audience roars extra hard and co-star Helen Hunt appears to break character over it.

Let me just say here that this is Helen Hunt. She’s an Oscar-winning actor, she’s a director, a producer, and a writer. If she wants to make you think she’s genuinely laughing about something, she can do it.

So I could be wrong here. Or, to use a famous line written for the show, this may not be the most right I’ve ever been.

Plus, I’ve skipped over telling you what the gag was because a) it doesn’t matter and 2) I didn’t understand it. Truly, there’s this moment, everyone loves it, I haven’t the faintest idea what it means or why it’s funny. You just know that it was something topical and perhaps that’s why I think it was ad libbed.

I’ve now looked it up and yes, it was a reference to a separate role Hunt had just played in the month that episode was recorded.

So, okay, it was a topical reference that the studio audience would get and I, thirty years later, could not. And which actually the TV viewing audience some weeks or months after the recording might not have been able to get either. That’s definitely why it was in the end titles and not a gag in the actual episode, that’s possibly why I think it was ad libbed.

But what surprises me is that I enjoyed it. I don’t understand it, and yet I enjoyed it.

Not to reveal that I have been thinking about this for four days now, but I’ve been thinking about it for four days now. The best I’ve got, the furthest I’ve got, is that I enjoyed the momentary sense of looking behind the curtain, of seeing more than the show’s writers and cast and crew presented to us.

I think when we like a show, we form a relationship with it. It’s a peculiar one since the show has never heard of us, but it’s also a quite intimate one and seeing something behind the curtain, seeing something from the wings, it’s like we’re being allowed in more than other people. It’s like our special relationship with the show is somehow affirmed.

I don’t get how we can respond like this, how we can take a real or imagined ad lib, see that it’s revealing a show is constructed, contrived, and then ignore the constructors and the contrivers and think the actors make it up. I don’t get how we can correctly know characters and yet so many people take that to mean they know the actors.

But, okay, maybe I do now understand the appeal of ad libs.

Stupid count redux

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I’ve read 2,000 scripts. Well, yeah, no, I’ve read an awful lot more than that but in my current reading of at least one script per day, I’ve just read my 2,000th and this was both later than expected and then sooner than calculated.

Not sure there’s much you can say to this other than big deal. I’m curious why I clearly have to tell you this trivial thing, but if I can salvage something useful, let me also tell you this. Of the 2,000, some 361 were on the excellent TV Writing site, which is simply a favourite corner of the whole internet for me. And 117 were from the script library at the BBC Writersroom, although note that their collection includes some post-production scripts that are cut-down documents, made less to read and more for some admin purposes.

The rest, by the way, were predominantly plucked from countless other sites and links, were sent to me directly, or were in the couple of hundred script books I own. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to recommend a couple of books to you.

Five Screenplays by William Goldman and Four Screenplays by William Goldman.

I’m a little torn over Goldman. I was a fan until his profoundly, aggravatingly awful non-fiction book Hype & Glory. (Goldman is famous for huge, huge surprises in his novels, really eye-popping revelations that make you want to go back to read the book again. Something like 90 pages into this tripe, he tries to pull off the same thing by suddenly announcing that his wife has left him. Rather than surprise, rather than eye-popping, it’s a moment that leaves you eye-rolling and realising that’s why this is all so bad.)

Then he regularly described critics as failures, which is harsh but I’ve been a critic, I could see his point, and allegedly called one woman critic a whore, which just pissed me off against him forever. Or nearly forever, I think it was a few years after this that I read his two books of screenplays and enjoyed them as much as I have again in the last couple of weeks.

Except, as well as superb screenplays, each book has thousands of words of background detail about the writing and production of these films. Fascinating, illuminating, compelling, it is like having a friend sitting there telling you these things. These essays of his were so good that a few more years on, I was actually eager to read his non-fiction book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

Unfortunately, I already had.

The majority of that book is a reprint of the essays from the screenplay books. I know few people read script books, but you could be pretty certain that everyone who did would read this. I remember flicking through and through and through thinking I bought the hardback of this.

Anyway.

Five Screenplays has All the President’s Men, Magic, Harper, Maverick and The Great Waldo Pepper. Four Screenplays has Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride and Misery.

They are two tremendous collections and on the page, Goldman’s scripts fly. Some day I must actually see Waldo Pepper; I’ve read it a couple of times and yet never got around to watching.

Howay. That’s nine of the 2,000 scripts I’ve read in this run and if I don’t shut up now, I’ll be telling you about 1,991 more. Well, yeah, no, there have been some incredible stinkers that make you feel a) great that you can probably write better than that and 2) regret the time you spent turning those pages.

Although then there are others that are so good that 3) I want to give up writing.

Also, though, a fascinating number where either the script was a huge slog to read yet the show was great, or the script was incredible and the film was boring. I keep thinking about that.

It might be that a script is just the first, if biggest, if most crucial, part of a production. Might be.

More cents than money

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Yesterday my YouTube series 58keys qualified to earn money. You need over 1,000 subscribers and overall people must have watched more than 4,000 hours of your videos in the last 365 days. It’s been quite tense this week as I’d near the magic total one day, then the next it would drop back because another 24-hour period had ticked by.

But now it’s over the 4,000, the bells have rung, the lights have flashed and I am in the start of a long process that will see me registered to rake in cash. As best I can calculate it, I can look forward to 55% of $3 for every thousand views I get in the future.

My most popular 58keys video has had something like 8,000 views. In nine months.

Tellin’ you, raking it in.

Just to be clear, I don’t understand at all what really constitutes a view in terms of whether YouTube will hand over money. I think you skip as many YouTube ads as I do, but I’ve no idea when that still counts and when it doesn’t.

Doesn’t matter, not really. It’s not like I’m expecting to run a media empire.

The difference it will actually make, I believe anyway, is that YouTube will promote the series more. That’s always an aim, to reach a bigger audience, and I’m doing it through writing. I present the videos, yes, but I script almost all of them. So since the end of January 2020, I have written about 70 short scripts and they’ve all been produced and they’ve all been watched by someone. Strangers have watched.

Actually, I can tell you this even as it entirely confuses me. It’s true that my most successful video has had 8,000 views, and it’s also true that most range from 200 to about 1,500. But still, YouTube tells me that in the last 365 days my videos have been watched by 49,669 people.

I have to assume 45,000 took one look and switched off, but let’s not go there.

Fifty thousand viewers, however briefly, is simultaneously big to me and I realise also small too. But I’ve profoundly slowly come to realise that what satisfies me is thinking of something and making it happen. Seventy episodes, an unbroken weekly run with some extra specials, fifty thousand viewers.

And my writing is better because of them.

That’s the thing, that’s the difference. Writing does not have to be read or seen, but when it is, I think writers write better. Certainly I do. It’s partly from direct things like comments from viewers, which have seen me doing more visual gags than I realised I was capable of.

But chiefly it’s just the focus. Each week, one video, thought of, written, made, and then seen.

So as small time a YouTuber as I now am, please raise a mug of tea with me to mark the occasion.

Possibly as well to commiserate that yesterday was also the first year anniversary of my finishing the hardest drama script I’ve ever done and it is not one pixel closer to production. And to mark that thanks to BT, I am without internet and I’ll be writing on a website today using the same tin can and piece of string tethering connection I’m using to talk to you.

Stupid count

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For six weeks now, I’ve been counting the days until today when I could say to you that I’ve read 2,000 scripts –– and I’ve blown it. I’m not sure why I was proud enough of this trivial fact that I wanted to boast at you about, but seemingly I did and seemingly I was going to preen for some reason. Instead, on slightly closer examination, I have to tell you that I’ve miscounted and today’s script was only the 1,899th.

Yes, I have just filed my tax return. No, I’m not now terrified at all.

Look, I’ve read a lot more than 2,000 scripts in my life. I love reading them, I always have, it’s just that on December 23, 2017, I read a piece by Lorenzo Colonna on Hayley McKenzie’s Script Angel site which suggested reading a script every day. I can see me now, at this keyboard, thinking yep, good idea, I’ll do that. Since then I’ve read at least one script every single day and after the first year of it I wrote about the ten lessons I felt I’d learned from what I believed was 620 but who knows now, could’ve been 12.

I keep a list of what I’ve read and after the first while, also a link to where I read it if it’s online. It’s from examining that list that I discovered the miscount, but I was examining the list in order to hopefully be useful and I can still do a bit of that. I can recommend scripts and moreover, I can recommend sources for scripts. Let me do two sources and two specific scripts from those sources.

So while I see no reason you should ever trust me again about numbers, I believe that of my 1,899 in-a-row script reading, 318 were from my favourite site, TVwriting. I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t many, many more because that is my go-to site when I just want something good to read.

Another 105 were from the BBC Writersroom script library. I can’t say I’ve cleaned the BBC out since if I disliked a script to a show’s first episode, I skipped the rest. But still, I open that library page and it’s sometimes hard to find something I haven’t read. Certainly I’ve vacuumed up the entire radio drama, radio comedy and television comedy scripts.

I will press on, though, even beyond 2,000 when I finally get there in at most another 100 days. And let me offer this as another lesson from reading scripts: I may have read some stinkers, but there amazing pieces of writing just waiting for us all online.

The internet’s faults are legion, but there are gems, too. Including these two. It is completely unfair to pick out two scripts but no one said writing has to be fair, or at least nobody any good.

If you fancy reading a film screenplay, relish Man Up by Tess Morris, which I read on the BBC Writersroom on both January 5, 2018 and August 28, 2019.

Or if, like me, you’re more of a television drama nut, go for the pilot episode of Veronica Mars, by Rob Thomas, which I read on TVwriting on May 31, 2018.

I suppose you can call this educational reading and when I started this lark there was certainly an aim of improving my own scriptwriting. No question, it worked. But also no question, I read scripts for immense pleasure and if you don’t already do that too, I hope you will.

Just don’t bother counting them, it’s too difficult.

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.