In Defense of the Screenplay

My last screenwriting professor observed, with typical unhelpfulness, that screenplays are the only written documents that nobody reads for pleasure, on account of how boring and fundamentally artless they necessarily are. He was probably referring to the "blueprint" nature of the screenplay. That is, while novels, poems and essays are finished pieces of art, the screenplay is only a code that will hopefully lead to passable art somewhere down the line.

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder, and there's simply no reason to think of a screenplay as essentially ugly or banal. It's worse than untrue—it's downright unproductive. The fact that not a lot of people are reading screenplays before bed certainly doesn't mean that screenplays aren't without their own rich aesthetic potential, and if you aren't trying to make your screenplay beautiful and sharp and exciting and easy to read… Well, why aren't you?

A screenplay's aims aren't (or shouldn't be) far away from a novel's, after all. In the broadest sense, we consider novels successful when they are strongly evocative; you know what the world of a good book feels like, looks like, etc. But a screenplay is supposed to evoke even more vividly its own internal reality in the mind of the reader, because that reader may eventually spend copious amounts of time and money trying to reify the evocation on celluloid. It's an insane thing to attempt, but that's another story.

I think if we want to write well in any medium, we have to be conscious of the reader's experience. How easy is the work to read? How clear? How evocative? How exciting? How memorable? And we have to realize that all these things are results, and that it's worth theorizing about how different syntaxes and word-choices affect them. We all know that exciting screenplays are good and boring ones are bad, but how do we get to the exciting screenplay?

Frankly, it's hard to look at a page in screenplay format and not think of a poem, or, going further in the same direction, a painting. My point is only that screenwriting is beautiful, and that it's not so much like assembling a car engine as some teachers would have you believe.

Are you conscious of the reader's experience when you write a screenplay?

– Max

Photo by Flickr user Matt-Richards