Less Is Better

Would you buy a stock (I know, it's an untimely example) which would gain in value by a quick thirty percent overnight. I'm sure you would. So would we. Do you want to enjoy the same dynamic with your script? You would. OK, then,WRITE IT TIGHT OR TRIM IT DOWN.

Less is almost always better in screenplays. Writing the "chateaubriand" of a scene is the name of the game, then cut away to the next fillet. Fat is a no no, a bit of gristle should be carefully doled out.

Ask any stand up comic how one minute extra can ruin a routine. Even people who write for the New York Times or the Washington Post are given a limit.. The limit is their friend!

Screenwriters in the know realize this and usually employ this philosophy and profit from it. But there are a boatload of scripts out there that are suffering from too much weight. Their stories are encumbered by so much rhetoric that it's hard to find the spine. If you can't find the spine, you can't find the story and that's bad news.

Screenplays are not real life, they only seem to be. Extended salutations and good-byes, descriptions of irrelevant detail, orders of breakfast, lunch and dinner, funny jokes some writers think might be funnier in triplicate, are all "death on the Nile."

We feel strongly about this.

In fact, when we push brevity and pace to writers it's not just for the script at hand it's for all material present and future. Nothing makes us happier than receiving that occasional call from a writer, a previous offender, who tells us that s/he just had the pleasure of going through the script, cutting long intros and outros ("get into a scene as late as possible and get out as soon as you can"), found three or four redundancies to eliminate, found a way to explain that long piece of exposition in half a page as opposed to three, or trimmed that narrative down a bit and then had the pleasure of printing out the new draft, discovering that it's now at its fighting weight and reads great. REMEMBER, IT'S NOT HOW LONG YOUR SCRIPT IS. IT'S HOW LONG IT SHOULD BE.