I’m sitting at lunch with a friend, a dear old friend, old in years and long in friendship. I’m trying to bring him up to date on my life, my experiences, my accomplishments, dreams, and failures over the past many years.
Yes, it’s been years since I’ve seen him. And as I’m weaving my stories I suddenly become aware of the joy of flexibility and opportunity in oral storytelling. I’ve been struggling with one particular screenplay for nearly eight years, I’m telling him, and I explain my love/hate relationship with writing screenplays.
“I’m sitting there, staring at the scene, knowing precisely what both characters are feeling, thinking, fearing, wondering and hoping. And I feel trapped, blocked, locked into a form that won’t allow me to express myself, to express precisely what I know is going on inside. Minutes later I am reading the inner monologues of these characters that I wrote weeks ago and it’s all there in black and white, clear and precise.
"I feel relieved only in knowing that I know what’s going on. But then I go back to the screenplay and I can feel the doors slamming in my face. The phrase ‘show don’t tell’ echoes in my head. The four boxes in front of me that scream to be filled in, ‘location,' ‘character.' ‘behavior,’ ‘dialogue’ taunt me.”
And as I’m telling this story to my patient and wise friend I realize that everything I want to do (or say) in my screenplay has been so easily expressed in my verbal storytelling.
When we’re casually telling our stories we have such tremendous freedom, flexibility and opportunity. We can switch POV, switch time, place, location, tense … anything. We can take the listener inside the deepest part of our experience or whip them over the surface of the story giving a global view. And it’s all done with words, just words. And if we stumble, no problem. If we forget, no problem. We can go back, start again, erase a mistake, reframe, restructure and clarify.
Even in a novel we have great freedom of expression. We’re free to shift and move around in time and place at will. We can go quickly from the objective to the subjective, from the global to the deeply personal and revealing.
And then I realize that even in writing this blog I can shift from the purely objective: “I was sitting at lunch with a friend” to the immediacy and intimacy of the subjective: “I am sitting there looking into his eyes wondering why we lost touch." And in that shift I can immediately pull, you, the listener deep inside my personal experience where I am naïve and innocent. And just as quickly I can pull you out with a comment like: “But that was months ago and now those feelings have passed."
How do we achieve that intimacy and control in a screenplay? Of course when that screenplay becomes a film and there are talented actors embodying our characters we can obtain that level of intimacy. But that’s the film. I want to know how to obtain that in the screenplay itself. I know, many of us sneak in those little parentheticals and snippets of description that attempt to clarify what is really going on inside the characters. And these help, these nudge us in the right direction.
“Show, don’t tell." We write in pieces of behavior (always wondering if the actors will actually do them) such as “he pulls the edges of his collar up as if he wants to retract like a turtle” or “she runs her fingers through her hair, a habit annoying to others but which she finds comforting."
Maybe we should write novels first. A well-known agent in London advises his clients to write a novel first, both for professional and creative reasons. “First you’ll get to really explore your story and your characters. Second, it’s a double sell – sell the novel and then sell the screenplay based on the novel.”
Food for thought.
My friend and I finish our long lunch, vowing there will never be such a long absence again, vowing we will find a way to infuse our screenplays with more authenticity, more truth, more subtext. So far we have failed on both accounts.