Reader Question: How to write action with a marooned character?
A reader question from Robert:
Hi Scott
I have a question that’s a bit about the writing and a bit about the layout that you might find interesting to cover on the blog — which, BTW, even after all this time is still the best resource out there by a country mile.
I’m writing a screenplay about a guy that gets marooned somewhere and as a consequence spends a lot of screen-time time on his own. My problems are two-fold:
1) Plenty of action
2) Very little dialogue
As I’m writing, I’m constantly going back to the action to flesh it out with more detail so a reader doesn’t get confused or have any doubts about what’s going on, but this means my screenplay is running short on pages (around 70–80) but looks like a damned novel when you flip through it.
Any suggestions about overcoming that ‘looks like a novel’ issue?
BTW I don’t want (or need) to invent a ‘Wilson’ to give him some ‘thing’ to talk to, and I don’t want him to start rambling incoherently in like a ‘Ben Gunn’ character, so, any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
Robert
This is a big challenge. Wilson from the movie Cast Away proves the point as I’m almost certain the volleyball character’s presence in the story derived from the need to provide ‘someone’ for Chuck with whom to interact, an object to justify his dialogue.
If you are committed not to do something similar, my next question would be this: Does the character have a cellphone? Depending upon the circumstances of him being marooned, that may be a moot point as he might not have any reception. However most cellphones have voice memo record functions. Might he use that to record his thoughts? A diary, if you will.
Compare to Life of Pi where the Protagonist [Pi] uses a paper and pencil to scratch out his inner thoughts which we hear as voiceover narration. It seems entirely plausible that a character in dire straits, facing the possibility of death, would turn reflective and want to leave some legacy of their last days on Earth.
Riffing off Pi, and again depending upon the circumstances of where the Protagonist is marooned, could an animal show up and take an interest. This could become someone with whom the Protagonist could talk.
So that’s one issue: How to provide an outlet for the character to convey his inner thoughts through dialogue, verbal or voiceover narration. Of course an additional benefit of that is to help break up page after page of nothing but scene description.
Per that point, I would encourage you to read scripts like Buried and 127 Hours. First off, it’s instructive re your concern about page count. Buried clocks in 90 pages. 127 Hours is 84 pages. Given the unique nature of your central story conceit — a character marooned by himself — readers will understand the limitations arising from the concept itself (i.e., you simply can’t sustain a story for 2 hours like that… unless you’re Robert Zemeckis, have Tom Hanks as your star, and give him a volleyball to talk with, then you can justify a 143 minute film.
My general advice about writing scene description in a script wherein the main character is marooned alone is to do two things:
* Use 1–2 line paragraphs. That’s the common approach nowadays anyhow, each line representing a camera shot, and making it much easier for the reader to read. But with your script, you’d really want to embrace this stylistic choice.
* Think white space. This largely comes down to editing, going through each line, each paragraph, each page, and trim, trim, trim. The goal is to create as little black on the page in terms of scene description and as much white space.
To achieve this, consider giving your Narrative Voice a poetic mentality. With a poem, so much of it is about minimum words, maximum impact. So if you adopt a haiku style approach like the first 3o pages or so of Wall-E, which is almost all scene description, you can make it a better read.
How about you, GITS readers. What suggestions do you have for Robert?
While we’re here and since I haven’t done this for awhile, if you have a question about screenwriting, big or small, head to comments and post it there. I’ll be happy to provide my two cents.
Comment Archive