Derek Haas: “Seven Things Novelists Should Know About Screenwriting”

Screenwriter-novelist Derek Haas, who also hosts the excellent short story site Popcorn Fiction, lets novelists in on seven things they should know about screenwriting. Here’s one I thought was particularly interesting:

5. Dialogue is King. Some novelists write beautiful poetic prose that paints pictures on the page. They find just the right word to describe a thorn bush, or they spend twenty pages on the thought process of how a spy enters a room. They write pages, sometimes chapters, with very little dialogue. And when they do write dialogue, it only serves to stimulate more inner thoughts from the character or leads to more flowery prose. You can’t get away with that in a screenplay. Yes, you have to describe the settings and the characters and properly pace the action, but more than anything, you better write cracking dialogue. Most scripts are eighty-percent dialogue… often, the studio readers will skip all of the action-descriptions and just read the dialogue when they judge whether or not the screenplay is good. And the dialogue has to do the job that the freedom of writing thoughts and making active commentary in the novel’s prose usually serves. You better have those characters sounding distinct and complex.

That 80% figure seems a bit high. And obviously dependent upon the genre and specific type of story you’re writing (e.g., action movies can have a lot more scene description). But writing good dialogue is a critical skill-set for a screenwriter.

The comment about novelists writing lengthy prose to describe an event reminds me of an anecdote I heard along the way. Back in the day, screenwriters worked bankers hours at the studios and were expected to turn in a set amount of pages at the end of the week which were then reviewed, then given back to the writer for revisions on Monday morning.

It seems a novelist was hired to write a screenplay. His first big scene was a horse race. And he really got into describing it — the flaring nostrils of the horses, the thwack of the riders whips across sweating flanks, mud from the track churned up and spat into the air, a sea of cheering observers with frantic please for their horse to win — on and on he went for several pages.

Feeling quite proud of his work, he dutifully handed in his pages on Friday. On Monday morning, instead of a nice note about his strong visual writing, he looked at his pages where everything he’d written about the horse race had been crossed out. Over it were scrawled these words:

“Stock footage.”

Welcome to Hollywood.

For more of Derek’s article, go here.

HT to @webacion for the link.