Tweetstorm: Javi Grillo-Marxuach on Writing Screenplay Scene Description

“Writing for the screen is the description of emotional and physical movement in real time.”

Twitter can be a gold mine for writers. Case in point, when pro writers generate a tweetstorm about the craft. Recently, Javi Grillo-Marxuach, whose television writing-producing credits include Charmed, The Chronicle, Boomtown, Lost, Medium, Helix, The 100, and the upcoming The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, uploaded an excellent series of tweets about how to think about writing action and scene description in a screenplay. Reprinted in full by permission.

“Writing for the screen is the description of emotional and physical movement in real time” may be the single best articulation of what scene description is about. The term itself may seem rather dry — Scene. Description. — but not when we understand it is more than just about what’s going on physically in a scene, it’s also about what’s happening emotionally. There is the External World of Action and Dialogue coupled with the Internal World of Intention and Subtext. When a writer brings an awareness of the importance of emotional dynamics to scene description, we can transform rote action into something meaningful and compelling.

But as Javi points out good scene description requires another type of awareness: “in a screenplay, you are responsible as the writer for the actual disposition of seconds and fractions of seconds taken up by the film — you dictate the viewer’s experience of time, and your script has to reflect that.”

We write in the present tense. As Javi notes, “because they describe things as they HAPPEN not as they HAPPENED. screenplays are about what unfolds before your eyes!”

That sensibility of writing in the moment is yet another way to transform scene description into something vibrant and alive.

Yet as Javi notes, there is another level of awareness a screenwriter needs to bring to writing scene description: “as a writer, you get to say what the camera sees, that may seem like a lot of freedom, but it also has substantial limitations… what it means to have control of TIME in your writing.”

As the late great William Goldman said:

“Rule of thumb: You always attack a movie scene as late as you possibly can. You always come into the scene as the last possible moment, which is why when you see a scene in a movie where a person is a teacher, for instance, the scene always begins with the teacher saying, ‘Well, class…’ and the bell rings. And then you get into another scene because it’s very dull watching a man talk to people in a room… In a book you might start with some dialogue, and then describe your clothing, and more dialogue. The camera gets that in an instant. Boom, and you’re on. Get on, get on. The camera is relentless. Makes you keep running.”

The camera is relentless. As a screenwriter, we have to write with a sense of economy. Minimum words. Maximum impact. We have to control the time. Enter late. Exit early.

Many aspiring screenwriters pay little heed to writing scene description. I take one level of subtext from Javi’s tweetstorm to be this: Take great care when you write action. Make each line count.

• Match the physical with the emotional
• Embrace writing in the present tense by writing in the moment
• Be acutely aware of time by writing economically and efficiently

You may follow Javi on Twitter: @OKBJGM.

For more screenwriting tweetstorms, go here.