This is a post on why mechanics matter.
On message boards like this one and the zoetrope forum, you can find two schools of thought on the mechanics of screenwriting. One says "You must have everything perfect, or your script will wind up in the trash." The other says "If you write a kick-a$$ story, a few misplaced wrylies won't kill your chances."
I was of the latter school, until I posted my first screenplay over at zoe. Now, I took my direction on formatting and mechanics straight from J. Michael Straczynski's "The Complete Book of Scriptwriting." That book is getting a little long in the tooth these days apparently, but it does recommend the use of (beat) and (parenthetical) as needed to tell the story. My screenplay has lots of them, and even includes the dreaded "we see," as Straczynski's examples frequently do.
Now I have three reviews in, and all of the reviewers have gone into detail about how my use of parenthetical elements has to be eliminated. The consensus appears to be that writers MUST not do ANYTHING that could be perceived as directing on the page, including telling the reader what he's supposed to be seeing.
Apparently this is the direction the zeitgeist is going. More tellingly, my screenplay is really about characters, ideas, and the protagonist's growth over time...yet only one of my reviewers even touched on the matter of my characters, and none of them mentioned any of the storytelling aspects of the script. They didn't see those things, because they were focused on what they saw as mechanical problems.
The lesson, boys and girls, is that if you don't get the mechanics right, the reader will never see your awesome story. Assuming the story's there, your task as a rewriter is to remove all the obstacles that prevent the reader from seeing it...including those heinous parentheticals.
So out they come.
On message boards like this one and the zoetrope forum, you can find two schools of thought on the mechanics of screenwriting. One says "You must have everything perfect, or your script will wind up in the trash." The other says "If you write a kick-a$$ story, a few misplaced wrylies won't kill your chances."
I was of the latter school, until I posted my first screenplay over at zoe. Now, I took my direction on formatting and mechanics straight from J. Michael Straczynski's "The Complete Book of Scriptwriting." That book is getting a little long in the tooth these days apparently, but it does recommend the use of (beat) and (parenthetical) as needed to tell the story. My screenplay has lots of them, and even includes the dreaded "we see," as Straczynski's examples frequently do.
Now I have three reviews in, and all of the reviewers have gone into detail about how my use of parenthetical elements has to be eliminated. The consensus appears to be that writers MUST not do ANYTHING that could be perceived as directing on the page, including telling the reader what he's supposed to be seeing.
Apparently this is the direction the zeitgeist is going. More tellingly, my screenplay is really about characters, ideas, and the protagonist's growth over time...yet only one of my reviewers even touched on the matter of my characters, and none of them mentioned any of the storytelling aspects of the script. They didn't see those things, because they were focused on what they saw as mechanical problems.
The lesson, boys and girls, is that if you don't get the mechanics right, the reader will never see your awesome story. Assuming the story's there, your task as a rewriter is to remove all the obstacles that prevent the reader from seeing it...including those heinous parentheticals.
So out they come.
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