“Producers and readers want a lot of white space on the page.” Do you hear that a lot? I do and always hope it’s not true. After all, don’t we write on a white page to tell and sell an emotional, visual story?
It makes me wonder, as a former English teacher, if attention spans and/or lower reading standards are to blame. My last best 8th grade reader finished his year before high school reading 5th grade level. There’s a lot of that in our future. (I actually quit teaching middle/high school levels because I didn’t feel qualified to teach elementary standards. But I digress.)
Maybe readers use that white space “break” to glance at their smart phone, text or social media. Well, if they do that while reading your work, fugget about it.
So don’t give them a reason to look away. Keep them engaged with less white space.
Novelists are emotional and visual writers. Readers READ their characters’ thoughts, emotions, actions. Screenwriters SHOW all that.
But screenwriters, as you know, must be precise in descriptive word choice, to the point, so readers can visualize, feel and experience the characters’ emotions and actions not just in their minds, but on screen as well. Readers must experience the actions, thrills and emotions with characters in a car. How? Readers must sit next to those characters in the car.
So how should screenwriters do that?
If you take some time and read screenplays of movies you were completely captivated and engaged in, you’ll get a really great idea how to write your narrative. Your action must have descriptive action words. Your emotions must have descriptive emotional words. Short phrases/sentences must fit action and the pace of that action. Here’s an example:
“ Her eyes widen. She jerks from behind. Blood drips from her mouth. She shakes, cries, slumps to the floor. She sees her ankle bracelet on a foot she recognizes. Her lips quiver.” (Then perhaps your character whispers the name of her attacker). And the tone is set.
In one of my current screenplays, I have an ongoing metaphorical action of cars nearly missing other cars or pedestrians. I merely use short phrases like:
“A car skids around the corner. Jimmy shoves Sara off the street. She falls. Jimmy’s body drops atop her. He’s bloody. He’s dead. Tires screech away.”
The whole point is to keep your reader engaged and use the white space to tell the story in narrative not dialogue. Dialogue only supports what you show. And, in screenwriting, you do that with precise word choices that fit the current action or emotion in usually 3-4 lines.
So don’t be afraid to write on that white. That’s what it’s there for.
