Studies in good scene description

Over the past year and a half, we’ve discussed scene description several times:

Scene description as poetry

Screenwriting and the present tense

American Beauty and The Sixth Sense: Good ‘poetic’ writing

Capitalization in scene description

Butch Cassidy: One way to write an action scene

Screenwriters confront a challenge with scene description. On the one hand, movies are primarily a visual medium and it is scene description that conveys a script’s visuals and action. On the other hand, script readers will, if pressed, scan scene description and focus on dialogue. Why? Dialogue has narrower margins and, thus, can be read faster — a big deal if you’re a reader under a deadline to turn in coverage and/or you’ve got several scripts in your to-read stack. And you can pretty much track what’s going on just by reading dialogue.

So a conundrum: Scene description is critical in conveying a movie’s visuals and action, yet a script reader will often carry a conscious (or unconscious) prejudice against paying close attention to it.

Which results in a few principles re writing scene description:

* No more than 5 lines per paragraph of scene description [better yet, 3 lines]
* Think of scene description more like poetry than prose
* You do not need to use complete sentences in scene description
* Use visual descriptors
* Use strong verbs
* Aim to create a visceral sense of place, mood, and feel

Here’s a mantra that pretty much sums it up: “Minimum words, maximum impact”.

In that spirit, check out this scene description:

Pete cruised in slow. He wore the sap. He held his automatic. He saw:

Dirt streets. Dirt yards. Dirt lots. Shack chateaus abundant.

Tar-paper pads with cinder-block siding. Beaucoup churches/one mosque.
ALLAH IS LORD! signs. Allah signs revised to JESUS!

Lots of street activity. Jigs cooking bar-b-que in fifty-gallon drums.

Shouts overlapped — more rebop/more jive. Pete yelled. Pete displayed
charisma. Pete restored calm.

Visual. Lean. Punchy. Conveys a sense of place, mood, feel. And easy to read.

Good scene description, right? Except it’s from a novel: “The Cold Six Thousand” by James Ellroy. 

In this most recent 14 Days of Screenplays challenge, I was struck by how good the scene description was, especially in the more contemporary scripts: The Crying Game, (500) Days of Summer, Wall-E, Aliens, Little Miss Sunshine. Since screenwriting boils down to scene-writing, and scenes are almost always dominated by scene description, I thought it would be interesting to keep an eye out for good examples of scene description over the next few weeks.

So as you read screenplays, novels, short stories, even poems, make a note of particularly good scene description. Once a week or so, I’ll start a thread inviting everyone to post those examples in comments — to help inspire us to write strong, compelling, and vivid scene description, the best way to keep a reader engaged in the visual aspect of the scripts we write.

Feel free to start in comments here with any of your favorite screenplay scene description.

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