Writing For The Eyes

22nd March 2019

This blog has to do with writing a screenplay, because I am currently writing one. But, first off, I have to mention the fact that when I went looking for examples of recent Oscar winners in this category, to a man they were, well, men. In fact, statistics reveal a mere 11% of screenplays that make it to movie are written by women. Seems odd, considering women make up 51% of the population.  We're not talking first responder firemen here. It appears that when it comes to the version of reality projected on the big screen, especially how women themselves are portrayed, then it is, to use a new but apt adjective, "blokey."

I have written screenplays before, but this time, as I try to piece together a screenplay adaptation of my new book, it lays heavy on me that this art is quite, quite different from other forms of writing. I have been in the practice of writing the screenplay version of my books, but I have tended just to transpose the action right off the book page onto the script of the film. I suspect now that that just won't do.
Female writer Darci Picoult said that when she writes for stage, she writes with her ears and when she writes for screen she is writing with her eyes. The craft of the novelist is wordy by nature, and I'm beginning to think that film is much more closely related to the visual arts. Film is a visual medium. Which is why you have to let the visuals speak.
As an example of film not doing this, there's a scene in the Bridges of Madison County, where Meryl Streep is in the bath, noticing that the shower head is still dripping from when the man she illicitly fancies recently took a shower.

It's a poignant moment, but just in case you didn't get it the writer brings in a voice-over telling you that this is what she is noticing. It is for this reason that voice-overs barely ever work in film. If the image doesn't clue you in, you actually undo the emotional impact by explaining it. The worst kind of movie dialogue is where the writer is explaining plot or motive to the audience through the mouths of her characters.

That well-used  dictum about how writers should show and not tell goes a thousand-fold for screen writing. The way I am trying to combat my "word" impulse for this screenplay is to think of the action in terms of music. Music probably does best what poet ee cummings said good art should do: almost entirely misses the intellect. Good poetry does this too.  Not that the audience should be dumb...well, perhaps that is what they should be. Struck dumb.  Speechless.