Re: Description
Sounds like you took the brevity thing a bit too seriously and your agent and that producer had to remind you that there's a sweet spot wherein we're describing compelling events with good but less than verbose language.
It will indeed be diffeent for each of us and it will depend to some extent on the genre one is working in. It's nigh onto impossible to discuss this strictly in qualitative terms because the desired end defies meaningul description using terms like "brevity" and "economy" and "verbosity" and "short" and "brief" and "white space" and "dark space" and the myriad other terms we use when we discuss this sort of thing.
About all that can be said is that generally, brief paragraphs of no more than four or five lines at most (40 to 50 words) is a target to shoot for in most instances, the fact that we'll all have the odd six to eight-liner notwithstanding.
It's sort of like boxing it in, we know that a script filled with 12 line paragraphs probably isn't going to cut it as well as we know that a script in which descriptions are all one line paragraphs probably isn't going to either. So the "right amount" falls in between those extremes somewhere and we each have to find the sweet spot for ourselves.
I do occasionally consult my writing software to check on average descriptive paragraph length. If it's running around 2 sentences and 15 or 16 words or thereabouts, I'm happy; if it's six sentences and around 50-60 words I'm not so happy and will go look to see what's pushing the average up into that range.
But I seem to be long past writing long paragraphs. As I've said here before, when a paragraph begins to approach eight lines it starts to feel draggy and heavy and my tendency is to stop right there and re-think what I'm doing with that paragraph and figure out a way to condense what needs to be said in it, better word choices, better phrasing, better composition, more precision.
I will sometimes write long paragraphs when first drafting, but they always get redeveloped and tightened up as I get into a second and third draft.
And of course none of this addresses the idea of the actual content we are writing.
But in any case, practice makes perfect!
Originally posted by gravitas
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It will indeed be diffeent for each of us and it will depend to some extent on the genre one is working in. It's nigh onto impossible to discuss this strictly in qualitative terms because the desired end defies meaningul description using terms like "brevity" and "economy" and "verbosity" and "short" and "brief" and "white space" and "dark space" and the myriad other terms we use when we discuss this sort of thing.
About all that can be said is that generally, brief paragraphs of no more than four or five lines at most (40 to 50 words) is a target to shoot for in most instances, the fact that we'll all have the odd six to eight-liner notwithstanding.
It's sort of like boxing it in, we know that a script filled with 12 line paragraphs probably isn't going to cut it as well as we know that a script in which descriptions are all one line paragraphs probably isn't going to either. So the "right amount" falls in between those extremes somewhere and we each have to find the sweet spot for ourselves.
I do occasionally consult my writing software to check on average descriptive paragraph length. If it's running around 2 sentences and 15 or 16 words or thereabouts, I'm happy; if it's six sentences and around 50-60 words I'm not so happy and will go look to see what's pushing the average up into that range.
But I seem to be long past writing long paragraphs. As I've said here before, when a paragraph begins to approach eight lines it starts to feel draggy and heavy and my tendency is to stop right there and re-think what I'm doing with that paragraph and figure out a way to condense what needs to be said in it, better word choices, better phrasing, better composition, more precision.
I will sometimes write long paragraphs when first drafting, but they always get redeveloped and tightened up as I get into a second and third draft.
And of course none of this addresses the idea of the actual content we are writing.
But in any case, practice makes perfect!
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