Stop using parentheticals!
What she said:
When a script starts tipping the scale and exceeding the two-hour standard, the page-gobblers can invariably be traced to one or more of the following:
- Extraneous conversations
- Explicit character descriptions
- Detailed scene descriptions
- Excessive camera and lighting directions
- Parentheticals ad nauseum
It’s the last of these, I’ve found, that writers are the most reluctant to let go of. The argument that an actor wouldn’t otherwise know how a line should be spoken negates the reality that the context of a scene itself provides the framework relative to the emotions, dialogue and action contained within it. If the subtext is consistent with the context, we already know the character’s intentions and, accordingly, how his or her words support them.
Parentheticals basically suck. You waste an entire line on one, two or three words — and most often to do nothing more than create redundancy:
SARAH
(angrily)
I hate you!
BEN
(sadly)
That breaks my heart.
The only legitimate times to use a parenthetical are (A) if the tone of what is being said is counter to the text of the dialogue or (B) to describe some action the character is doing over the dialogue. However, both of those can be handled in scene description. So instead of:
SARAH
(picks up pistol)
I hate you!
You can do this:
Picking up the pistol, Sarah turns toward Ben —
SARAH
I hate you!
Or instead of:
SARAH
(tenderly, not really
meaning it)
I hate you.
You can do:
Sarah peers at Ben. Then tenderly, not really meaning it —
SARAH
I hate you.
To me, parentheticals are like adverbs: There’s almost no good reason to use them.
For more, go read “The Curse of the Quirky Parentheticals” by Christina Hamlett. H/T to Mystery Man for the link.