The Case for Screenplays: What Modern Writers can Gain From Reading Scripts

Charlotte Mallegol // Guest Writer

TW: Mention of drug/drug-use

Lifts his eyes. From the mouths of babes: 

LITTLE 

Do you sell drugs? 

Juan’s face? Crushed. 

He nods yes. 

LITTLE 

And my momma, she do drugs, right? 

Again, something falling in Juan, hangs his head even lower. A nod yes. 

Above is an excerpt from Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s breathtaking 2016 screenplay Moonlight. In this scene, the main character Little is asking Juan, the man who has become a father figure to him, about his involvement with drugs. This is the back end of an exceedingly emotional and vulnerable sequence of three characters talking at a dining room table, discussing harsh realities of living in urban Miami at the height of the crack epidemic. Because of the dialogue-driven nature of screenplays, not much can be described in the way of physical action or setting. Sparse descriptions are given here and there, but they exist mostly to provide guidance to the actors and filmmakers later on in the production process, not to give anyone reading the script a vivid image of what is going on. However, so much is conveyed in this short exchange between Little and Juan that the reader immediately understands the emotional stakes in only thirty-eight words.

Conventional rules of prose are thrown out the window–the first sentence omits a pronoun, the second is a sentence fragment, and the tense switches multiple times in just this one passage. Yet within these few lines, innocence is established and destroyed with little frills involved. We understand Little’s pure, untainted view of the world when his speech is described as being “from the mouths of babes” and we understand Juan’s reluctant acceptance of being the one to shatter that worldview with his reaction to the question–simply, “crushed.” So much is said in that singular word that no further description of his emotions are necessary.

Most traditional prose writers never engage with screenplays. I find among writers that screenplays are often thought of as being completely other than common forms of writing; writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry alike all seem to believe that screenplays exist in another realm entirely and serve no purpose in the literary world. This assertion has always confused me, as stage plays are so often referenced and read by authors, yet the same rules do not apply to screenplays. Both stage plays and screenplays are what can be described as intermediary art forms, meaning that the purpose of their existence is to facilitate the translation of a story from one medium to another. In the above cases, from the page to the screen and the stage respectively. Despite both serving the same purpose, stage plays are revered by the literary community and treated as complete and well-rounded stories while screenplays are ignored altogether.

I believe two factors can account for this. For starters, stage plays are much, much older than screenplays, meaning they have had centuries more time to cement themselves in the cultural canon and gain respect among artists, scholars, and the general public. On top of this, I also feel that the extremely commercialized trajectory of the film industry has hurt cinema’s reputation as an art form worth consuming and thinking critically of. Sure, the occasional arthouse indie film will see widespread release and be viewed and adored by mainstream society, but these films are fewer and farther between, and often get lost among the sea of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters that get churned out near daily. As a result, modern cinema tends to be viewed less as an art form and more as a form of entertainment, something that appeals to the masses and therefore is not worthy of examination by writers from a craft standpoint.

Despite this assumption, I feel that screenplays contain swaths of untapped material for prose writers to help them better their craft. For instance, since screenplays are usually mostly dialogue, prose writers can learn a lot about how to write effective, natural conversations that flow by reading screenplays. I would recommend this practice as a remedy for any author who struggles with dialogue in their writing, as it has helped me learn how to write purposeful dialogue that moves the story along. On top of this, because the ultimate goal of a screenplay is to tell a primarily visual story that is meant to be consumed in one sitting, the writing style is extremely condensed and streamlined. Screenwriters are subsequently forced to get creative with the way they convey information. For example, take the following scene from Aaron Sorkin’s 2001 screenplay, The Social Network:

MARK looks back at EDUARDO and smiles…EDUARDO gives him a pat on the back and we 

CUT TO: 

115.INT. FIRST DEPOSITION ROOM – DAY

GRETCHEN 

$18,000.

This scene starts in the past, as Mark and Eduardo, the founders of Facebook, are celebrating hiring new interns. It ends with a cut to the present day courtroom where Eduardo is suing Mark for cutting him out of the company. A transition like this in a standard piece of fiction writing would be much harder to pull off and would also feel less natural to the reader. However, because of the film structure, the screenplay gives us this quick, hard cut back to the present, back to reality. Mark and Eduardo used to be close friends that trusted each other, but that trust has evaporated. Sorkin throws the reader mercilessly between these two timelines, juxtaposing their emotional closeness with a scene of physical intimacy, only to thrust us back into the present conversation surrounding who stole who’s money. While this type of writing may prove difficult to utilize in prose work, reading narratives that are structured this way can help writers think outside the box and get inventive with how they tell their stories.

Reading screenplays forced me out of my comfort zone. It opened me up to a whole new world of possibilities in terms of how characters can interact and how plots can progress past what is traditional in prose writing. In short, screenplays teach you how to cut to the chase, a task I know we prose writers often struggle with. I encourage anyone who writes to pick up a script and read you never know where the next source of inspiration will come from.

Sources cited: 

Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins, Performances by Actors’ Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert, Plan B Entertainment, 2016.The Social Network. Directed by David Fincher, Performances by Actors’ Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Denise Grayson, Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures, 2010.