I think the hook that draws most of us to screenwriting is dialog. When we envision penning the perfect movie, It’s all about those great snappy lines. I doubt too many of us set out to do this because we thought we had a whole new way to explain “she angrily wipes her nose,” a laundry list of synonyms for “snort laughs,” or the most awesome wording to detail the bedside table.

We tend to want to barrel through these parts to get to the chatting. I’ve heard a former script reader describe this phenomenon by saying that page one of many bad screenplays looked like a big “T,” with one or two lines of description spanning the width of the page at the top (just because they have to be there), and then the rest is dialog, streaming down the center. Unfortunately, according to him and various other big boys and girls in the business, this won’t do. They say that “the description is where the story is told,” thus we’re gonna have to eat our vegetables and get that description popping.

I got off to a very rocky start with this particular skill. I was initially misled into the “only what you can see and hear” camp. This led to a few years (!) of clunky, awkward, boring, lifeless, and morbidly confusing prose like “he furrows his brow, purses his lips, and cocks his head,” rather than “he doesn’t know what to make of the question.” To make matters worse, I was taught that every set’s and every person’s appearance must be recounted in excruciating detail, a la “MAX, 34, caucasian, muscular build, with a stubbly square jaw and graying temples under his dark brown hair,  wearing an off-the-rack gray suit, a fake Rolex, and alligator shoes, arrives.” By the way, Max is just the guy who parks the car, then we never see him again.

Finally, after sending a TV pilot draft to the fantastic consultant Rebecca Stay, she asked a massively overdue question; (paraphrasing) “Why do you write your description that way? Why is it important what the valet’s wearing? This isn’t The Devil Wears Prada.” It was just the dose of tough love I needed to seek further guidance on this. Thanks to the ScreenwritingU ProSeries (which I can’t recommend highly enough), my eyes were finally opened to the true nature and purpose of screenplay description. I finally stopped treating it like an academic exercise with “right” (what we see and hear) and “wrong” (anything in the character’s head that can’t be readily perceived) answers, and started approaching it as more of an indispensable vehicle to clearly and concisely say what needs to be said, with a little style thrown in. This set me on a whole new journey of honing and shaping my descriptive passages to imprint them with as much of my distinctive voice as the dialog, which brings us to my present dilemma…

When does conveying the mood and feel of the story become too much, and overreach into the area of “directing from the script?” While the days of dull and robotic over-description are behind me, I have been accused by some esteemed peers of including too many characters’ subtle gestures that are better worked out on set, such as “she rolls her eyes,” “they exchange glances as he exits,” and “He fumes at that last comment “. These are seen as not only wasting page space and reading time, possibly evoking a certain distaste in the industry reader, but also having a stifling effect on the actors should it ever reach the production phase. However, my counter to this would be that these are not meant as set-in-stone directions, but merely essential little symbolic cues as to the overall feeling of the scene, and certainly open to modification or omission while shooting.

The value of feedback (from the right sources) can’t be overstated, and these “directing” notes have given me a new pitfall to guard against. Maybe the inclusion of these details is spoon-feeding the reader and bogging down the readability. My plan is to go through my description and measure it against these questions: 1) Is this absolutely necessary to convey the color of the piece? 2) Without it, is my intended meaning lost or muddled? 3) Should I leave more room for the reader’s subjective interpretation here? Hopefully these, and additional notes from colleagues, will suffice to filter out the nonessentials.

What do you think? How do you handle screenplay description? Let me know below!