Re: Writing the Classic Movie Ending (How to Finish your Screenplay!)

Catja Pafort wrote:

Kat Richardson wrote:

Catja Pafort wrote:


I've reached the point in the revision process where I'm coming up
against the revision-resistant passage. I've whinged about it before -
15K of Rhailed talks to one person, two people, one person etc - all in
the same location, almost exclusively dialogue. Lots of stuff
happening, but no action, every part of it important but together it
was just way too much talking.

Umm... hello. I'm new here and you don't know me and I'm out of context
with this, so please take salt with this.

Salt? No thanks. And welcome to rasfc!

Thanks.


Assuming this isn't the big climax, if your passage is resisting revision
that you've identified as necessary it might be that you've brought too
many elements to a head at the same time and place and have a logjam of
information or plot points.

Who are you and when did you sneak into my house to read my manuscript?

Oh, I've been in the situation, myself, so it's all too familiar.


One skill I haven't got is to tell whether a section is over- or
underwritten. I can tell that it doesn't quite work, and that's as far
as it goes.

You'll get it. I'm sure people keep saying that, but you will. It's often
a matter of checking for redundancies. Did you already say that? How
recently? Is this new? Is it merely "business" and not action? Is it
self-indulgent, overly cute, self-conscious, etc? All those things can go,
immediately. Sometimes you DO have to get down to a word-by-word analysis
of a key paragraph and see if you could have dropped or simplified a
description or tightened up a speech so that someone doesn't have to say an
additional line elsewhere that opens up a whole conversation you don't
need. You have to wrench and tear sometimes. And that always hurts a bit.
'Cause you wouldn't have put it in if you didn't like it, right? Sometimes
you just have to cut, though, even if it means bleeding a bit to get
better.

But you already know that. This is just a slightly different application of
the knife. More surgery, less slashing.



You may need to make changes _earlier_ or
_later_ to pace those elements slightly differently, here, so they flow
through the bottleneck a little more smoothly.

That's a good point I will keep in mind. I feel another attack of the
flashbacks ;-)

Can you move an event or piece of information in the chronology? Then you
don't have to do a big flashback--possibly no flashback at all. Sometimes
a bit of information can come later or earlier than you originally thought,
which will allow you to build a scene without it, or another with it in a
different part of the chronology.


Reading through the old stuff again after doing the blank page rewrite
of the next scenelet, I am striken by the kitchen sink approach I took
previously - while the _event_ is a fairly straightforward (Rhailed
performs a spell to find other mages. One is unexpected, and strong; he
goes to find out who the guy is, and he turns out to be a fountain) the
passage has - as usual - tons and tons and TONS of internalisation, and
Rhailed's inner voice rambles about, well, almost every subplot I've
ever put into the Quadrology.

I've streamlined the scene - it now contains a reference to the
interaction that went on in the previous scene, and another reference to
the problem of the next one (which was necessary, it was a question of
'should he go home and sleep or should he try to contact <minor
character>' - being conscientious, he does the latter. Everything else
got cut - his family life, his social status, the history of the city
he's in, the tentative signs (or not) that an enemy is at work, an enemy
he'd left behind and will have to confront on his return...

Oh wow. That's going to be heavy-duty work, but it sounds like you've
trimmed a lot of weight off it.



If people are saying the same things, you can always "shorthand" that to
a mere mention and expand on it, later.

'Tell, don't show'? (sorry, long-standing discussion)

*laugh* Got me. (been there, had that conversation....)


Yeah, I've done
that. And encouraged by this discussion, I've gone back and done that
some more. There's a passage that I was quite proud of, where Rhailed,
under the guise of making sure his student knows exactly what she is
talkling about, gets her to walk him through a spell step by step, and
thus learns it from her without her realisation.

I've just taken another subplot out with only the briefest mentioning -
I'll give him an opportunity to learn the snippet he needs to learn to
wrap the whole thing up later.


You may be able to treat this like a screenplay and layer background
action or location context under your dialog to move the story forward
faster. Packing images, scents, and sound with your character
interactions can raise your information density and your tension.

You're talking to someone who has about five months of writing
reasonable description, and only under duress.

Ahhh... OK. Don't worry about it.




If you've established
emotional loads or contexts for locations, you may be able to shorten the
dialogs by implying a lot of information through those contexts and the
characters' comfort or lack of it in the location. You can re-exmine
things and explain them later when similar actions/interactions occur.
"This is just like the warehouse! God I hate that place!" Or
what-have-you.

Care to expand? How _do_ I establish 'emotional loads or contexts'? This
sounds like an interesting technique...

Usually a combination of character reaction and word-choice. Create a mood
of the place and give your characters an emotional reaction to it. Link it
to events, feelings, characters that the reader is familiar with from the
character's perspective. Don't just describe the physical place, but
choose words that indicate the mood. Let's say, your character walks into
the main hall of his father's house and though it is dark and cold, his
reaction is instant relief--he is home and safe, he thinks of the
remembered warmth of the solid, age-mellowed walls and doesn't mind the nip
of the air filled with dancing motes of dust, he smiles, his stride is
firm--we will be as shocked and horrified at anything bad that happens here
as your hero. Or if his reaction is shuddering revulsion, edging through
the doorway with all senses on alert even though the house is bright, warm
and shining with golden light, we know it's a bad place for him and that
bad things will be constantly on the verge of your hero's mind. Whatever
conversation happens, then, will have all that emotional freight riding on
it.

Err, well, that's the nutshell version. Don't forget that most people have
stronger memory associations with scent and taste than sight or sound, so
if you put those elements in, too, you'll make the reality of your setting
more full and solid for your readers. Remember good ol' Proust and his
cookies.




I hope I haven't put my foot deeply in my mouth, here. (mmm... sneaker
with
salt water! yummy!)

We'll be able to offer some interesting condiments but I don't think
that will be necessary - you provided plenty of food for thought.

Catja

Hope I haven't disappointed with further explanations.

--
Kat Richardson
Greywalker--coming from Roc in October, 2006
http://www.katrichardson.com/
.

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