Re: How can screenwriters control pace? Any thoughts on unintentional slowness?
Craig once yelled at me for making this argument on DD, but I stand by it:
I think some of these so-called rules originated as a way to talk about this stuff with less-experienced writers, as a way to teach it.
Teaching almost always involves simplification and abstraction. Stuff like "the story needs to start quickly" and "you don't need to set everything up" are hard to teach. "Give me an inciting incident by page 15 at the latest" is easy to teach.
This happens in every other field. If I'm teaching physics - momentum and force and gravity - I abstract out air resistance and friction and so on until the students have the concept.
The problem is, in physics, at some point you run an actual experiment and say, "Wait, this feather is actually falling slower than the lead ball, even the the law of gravity says it shouldn't. WTF?" And you start working the messiness of the real world back in. And you can't argue with it. The Space-X guys couldn't say "you just don't understand what I'm trying to do!" when the Falcon-1 blew up after launch. It was abundantly clear that they did something wrong.
In screenwriting, less-experienced writers can, and do, argue with it. "I need that set-up," or, worse, "That's just the way I see it." So the abstract and complex - and, for good writers, largely intuitive (albeit with an intuition born of a ton of hard work) - understanding of pacing gets abstracted down.
And the truth is that most young writers do start things too slow, and too slow in a way that would be helped by hacking a bunch of stuff out. So the over-abstracted lesson gets reinforced.
That being said, I do think that kind of thing is a valuable teaching tool - and the real problem is when writers who are still learning don't realize that it's just a teaching tool. Teachers can do better, too, by emphasizing practical examples. e.g., if I show you a bunch of films, normally the inciting incident will fall around or shortly after minute ten. But if I include Alien in the list, you'll notice that there's one film where the II is literally the very first thing that happens onscreen.
But just because something is a valuable teaching tool doesn't mean that it's something that is relevant to people doing professional-quality work.
Originally posted by Cyfress
View Post
I think some of these so-called rules originated as a way to talk about this stuff with less-experienced writers, as a way to teach it.
Teaching almost always involves simplification and abstraction. Stuff like "the story needs to start quickly" and "you don't need to set everything up" are hard to teach. "Give me an inciting incident by page 15 at the latest" is easy to teach.
This happens in every other field. If I'm teaching physics - momentum and force and gravity - I abstract out air resistance and friction and so on until the students have the concept.
The problem is, in physics, at some point you run an actual experiment and say, "Wait, this feather is actually falling slower than the lead ball, even the the law of gravity says it shouldn't. WTF?" And you start working the messiness of the real world back in. And you can't argue with it. The Space-X guys couldn't say "you just don't understand what I'm trying to do!" when the Falcon-1 blew up after launch. It was abundantly clear that they did something wrong.
In screenwriting, less-experienced writers can, and do, argue with it. "I need that set-up," or, worse, "That's just the way I see it." So the abstract and complex - and, for good writers, largely intuitive (albeit with an intuition born of a ton of hard work) - understanding of pacing gets abstracted down.
And the truth is that most young writers do start things too slow, and too slow in a way that would be helped by hacking a bunch of stuff out. So the over-abstracted lesson gets reinforced.
That being said, I do think that kind of thing is a valuable teaching tool - and the real problem is when writers who are still learning don't realize that it's just a teaching tool. Teachers can do better, too, by emphasizing practical examples. e.g., if I show you a bunch of films, normally the inciting incident will fall around or shortly after minute ten. But if I include Alien in the list, you'll notice that there's one film where the II is literally the very first thing that happens onscreen.
But just because something is a valuable teaching tool doesn't mean that it's something that is relevant to people doing professional-quality work.
Comment