Written Interview: Javier Grillo Marxuach (Lost, The Middleman)

Today’s interview is with writer Javier Grillo Marxuach whose credits include the TV series “Lost” and “Middleman.” The interview comes from a fine writing blog called Tiny Protagonist. An excerpt:

Your style of writing is definitely action-oriented, you use a lot of colloquial language in your scene description, and you’re very familiar with your reader in the way you tell the story. How did you develop that style?

Well, I’m very familiar with the reader, but it also depends on what script I’m writing. I don’t do that all the time. That was a very deliberate style choice that I made, pretty much starting with The Middleman script, because I wanted to establish that script as having a very unique and individual voice. That script was sort of where I found my voice, but the thing about that style is it can be very deceptive, because people think that you don’t have to work at it. Probably the two people from whom I learned the most about the physical craft of screenwriting, like what your prose should look like and all that, are probably Damon Lindeloff from LOST, and then after him, Glenn Gordon Caron on Medium.

Damon writes very conversational, very profane — he uses a lot of four-letter words in his prose — and you feel like you’re sitting there with a really good friend who’s telling you the coolest story he’s ever heard. That’s how he writes. Glenn, because he’s both a TV writer — he created Moonlighting and all that — and a director, wanted us to write those scripts… we didn’t use slug lines. He felt very strongly that the script was told from the point of view of the Patricia Arquette character. We had to describe everything she saw.

So for me, it’s sort of taking Damon’s Shane Black-like sensibility and melding it with that you-are-there kind of feel that Glenn brings to his scripts, and a lot of my later developments as a screenwriter came from working with those two people, and seeing how they wrote. And again, that goes to show — I’d only been working TV for thirteen years when I got on LOST and I knew quite a bit about it, but the ability to recognize somebody who’s really good at doing x,y, and z, and what can I learn about it, and how can I connect it to my style, was a big lesson I took from that. And that really melded well with some of the things I was trying to do with The Middleman script, which was eight years before I got on LOST. So there’s that.

Also, the thing about, the way that I’ve written some of those scripts, like the Middleman script or Couriers, which is a feature I wrote a couple years ago, it’s a very specific style of writing too. For example, I believe that every word on a script has to propel you, has to propel the visual narrative, so for example, I never use the passive voice in a script, because that’s extra words. Every word has to move forward, and passive, like “Javi is standing on the floor,” you can change, “is standing,” to “Javi stands there.” Every time I use a word, it’s an active verb, because, and this is really abstract, but every frame of a film propels into the next frame, and to create action I feel that words have to be the same in the script. I feel like that really affects the reader’s experience of the prose.

The other thing I do, people always say, “Bob begins to drink.” But I say, you don’t begin to do anything, you’re either drinking or you’re not, and if you’re not doing it, you’re doing something else. So what’s the verb that best conveys the actual action you’re doing? In addition to the script being very conversational and having this colloquial theme and colloquial voice and all that, there’s also the need to be very considerate of the reader’s experience of it, and not making them read more than they have to.

The other thing is, through the years, I’ve learned that most readers are going to skip the prose and go straight to the dialogue. So I also look very closely at how to create prose that looks graphically interesting on the page, so that you’re actually guiding the reader’s eye through the prose and into the dialogue.

A few lessons here. First note how professional writers spend time thinking about their writing voice, the way they bring style to genre. Also isn’t it interesting how they are cognizant of the writing styles of other writers? Both of those are good tips to take to heart.

For more of the interview, go here.