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A lot of people ask how to write visually. To learn this, I strongly recommend everyone see The Illusionist, a movie that, I think, is a shoe-in for Best Animated Feature at this year's Academy Awards.
The story is about a french stage magician in 1959. He was having trouble finding work as no one wanted to see vaudeville-style acts anymore. While performing in a hotel in rural Scotland, Alice, a young chambermaid, decides to follow him. She thinks he is really magical.
There is not much dialog in this movie. And most of it is a mix of French, English, Gaelic and a thick-accented Scottish. There was probably less than one hundred words of English in the whole movie. Despite this, I understood everything that was going on. Everything was shown to the viewers; nothing was explained.
If you can catch this movie, you should. Not only is it a great movie, it was an educational one as well.
How big an issue is non-visual writing? It drives me crazy when I read it in a script and I always thought it was a major no-no, but I keep finding in lots of successfully produces movies. Is it less of a big deal then I thought, or is it just that an already successful screenwriter can get away with it?
...I always thought it was a major no-no, but I keep finding in lots of successfully produces movies. Is it less of a big deal then I thought, or is it just that an already successful screenwriter can get away with it?
Oh, boy....those type of questions are a big ol' can-o-worms, Jess.
How big an issue is non-visual writing? It drives me crazy when I read it in a script and I always thought it was a major no-no, but I keep finding in lots of successfully produces movies. Is it less of a big deal then I thought, or is it just that an already successful screenwriter can get away with it?
When a successful writer, you can break all the rules you want. Tarantino can write his next script on toilet paper and it could be four hours of talking heads. People will get in line on a rainy day to read it. Newer writers? The line's a lot shorter.
How big an issue is non-visual writing? It drives me crazy when I read it in a script and I always thought it was a major no-no, but I keep finding in lots of successfully produces movies. Is it less of a big deal then I thought, or is it just that an already successful screenwriter can get away with it?
The thing about pro writers being allowed to break the rules whereas new writers can't? It's a myth.
It all depends on where you are in your writing journey.
It all depends on you.
Pro writers can't break rules if they are trying to sell a script through proper channels - it will never make it. But the director of a movie can break any rule he wants with his script. So if the writer and the director are the same person then your first statement is false. It is only the case when trying to sell one.
Rules are there for people starting out. While they serve some purpose, they are frustrating. I usually look at someone who's stuck in the rules as a beginner. But a beginner should be. A beginner should not be thinking about how the movie will be directed, they should be thinking about how to tell a story. When do you cross over that beginner line? When you break the rules and no one notices, or if they do notice - they don't care.
I believe professional writers go through the channels like the rest of us. Their scripts still gets reader coverage -- by the same readers who cover newbie scripts. Their scripts still have to get approval from all the right people before it can move forward. And a lot do still get passed on. Being a pro doesn't give you a free pass to break the rules. Because nobody cares about the rules in the first place.
It's a myth.
In my opinion, the rules came about to curb writers who wrote technical documents instead of scripts, or were too novelistic in their writing style. But it was gurus that devised them, not people in the industry. And in the advent of money-making guru advice, many writers got a fucked up learning. They develop an eye for spotting rule breakages -- so they never become invisible to them. Hence I have noticed many writers who write perfectly well getting chastized for breaking rules and told to write differently.
In my opinion, they are getting wrong/bad advice.
I have personally been through all this in my early years of writing. I used to beat the rule drum. And I was deaf to professional advice. Eventually I decided to ignore the rules completely and to just write the way I wanted: to write in the same style as pro writers. And that's when I started winning contests and getting Hollywood interest. However, I had to go through the time-consuming process of unlearning all of the bad advice first.
In hindsight, I wished I'd never went through the guru rule-learning process and jumped straight to the proper way of learning screenwriting: by reading professional scripts. I would've saved myself years of BS.
Egad! I had no idea I was opening up such a can of worms!
I'll take it as further proof that there is no one true way for anything, and hopefully this thread won't turn into round 3 of the debate because of my query.
Thanks to all who replied, and especially to bert and Red for the links to prior threads.
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