It’s late, your optic nerves are shriveling, your laptop is so hot it’s burning your thighs. You need to get from here to there, fast. You’re in a weakened condition. You take a shortcut, you shoehorn a raw and bloody slab of backstory into a conversation where it doesn’t belong so you can move your plot forward.
All of a sudden your character flattens out like a wet cardboard box and sounds like the beautiful but thrice-divorced star neuropathologist at Mercy General, trying to fill in viewers who missed Friday. There is always a better way. You don’t have to resort to these screenplay-killing clunkers.
“Hello, my brother, who has been blind since birth.”
The king of the clunkers. Paul Chitlik, teacher and author of “Rewrite”, uses the Blind Brother example when he talks about writing exposition the wrong way. “You cringe when you read it. No one would ever say that. It’s dead on the page.” Use techniques, instead of shortcuts, to give important information to the audience. Conflict is a good technique for revealing backstory. Give two characters with opposing goals the chance to argue about the information you need to convey. If an explanation must be given and an argument isn’t feasible, keep your dialogue lifelike by staging it between a character who knows and one who doesn’t, but needs to.
“What do you mean?”
When inserted between two chunks of complicated explanation, this phrase is useless clutter and a red flag. If the explanation is so complex it needs an intermission, your plot relies on telling rather than showing. Find visual ways to reveal critical information so that when it comes down to your hero catching up his sidekick on an evil plan to use stem cell technology to clone criminal geniuses, he can do it without needing a bathroom break.
“It’s so crazy, it just might work.”
Consider this tottering chestnut for a moment. What do the words mean? Nothing. This is no more than a warning shot for the reader. INCOMING IMPLAUSIBLE CRAP! ATTEMPTS TO SUSPEND DISBELIEF WILL RESULT IN INJURY! This phrase in no way excuses a plot hole. It’s cheap. It’s boring. And no one’s falling for it.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
This is a pretentious way to indicate that there is a moment of pathos going on that the writer doesn’t want the audience to miss. When knowing is crucial, as in “Is that bridge going to hold?”, “I don’t know.” is a strong answer. It needs to be known if the bridge will collapse. Not knowing raises tension, jacks up the stakes, makes the obstacle more insurmountable. But not knowing twice in a row doesn’t do any of that, it is an aside, an instruction from the writer that it’s time to wring your hands. So you can have a double espresso, or a double vodka, but stick to one “I don’t know.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Always precedes the revealing of a character’s inner monologue. A shambling cousin of “What do you mean?”, this is a shortcut intended to weld the sudden and unmotivated unloading of a bunch of plot information to a shaky motivation after the fact.
If you are tempted to write this shortcut, consider it a question from your unconscious, which wants an explanation for behavior that doesn’t match the character. “Why are you telling me this?” is an invitation to a speech. Shiver. Instead of choosing this shortcut, find ways to communicate how the thoughts and feelings of a character have changed via subtext. Subtext is more powerful than expository speeches.
Use conflict, subtext and visual storytelling to scrub these cheats out of your screenplay. Your dialogue will read more smoothly and more professionally when you use techniques that improve your scenecraft.
-ANNIE LABARBA @annelabarba