A Word of Advice by Harriet Blake - Short - When a young homeless man is approached by a talkative business woman, he finds out the dark streets are not the only dangers out there. 12 pages - pdf, format

Harriet

First off, your copyright(although not required) should be on the title page.

No fade in

First slug EXT. EMPTY STREET. NIGHT ... very vague location

Followed by a 14 line action/description... nobody will read that 4 lines max, some peeps will say 3

You have 2 characters named woman and man... give them a name, an age they're your main characters.

Also a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes.

The dialogue nearly takes up the whole of page 4 from the "Woman"...

I'm sorry this needs to be cleaned up, shorten the descriptions, shorten the dialogue and more important read a lot of scripts on this site.

Hope this helps

Mark

Hey Harriet.  Don't really recognize that name and I'm going assume either you haven't discovered there's a board here/haven't joined yet and just posted this.

Anyways, Mark hit the nail on the coffin.  One of the first things I do when I open a screenplay is glance over page one to see if it looks okay.  Sadly, yours was a bit of an eye-sore.

Huge blocks of paragraphs are big gripes for me.  I never go over three lines of action text which is usually the industry standard everyone sticks by.

I'd suggest going over this and fixing that up.  Less is more in screenplays.  Don't describe every little detail.  Just set the scene as fast as you can because you wanna keep the reader's attention.

Also, on your title page you wrote "A word of advice" and I'd write it: "A Word of Advice."

Like Mark stated, you must start off a screenplay with a "FADE IN:" on the left.

I agree that you should give WOMAN and MAN a name.

And then you had just one huge ramble of dialogue on one of the pages.

So far, still not digging the story and all the grammar/technical/spelling mistakes are putting me big-time.  I'd suggest, when you do discover this place exists, then check out some more screenplays to get the jist of how things go.  Good luck!

Curt

Im new here so ill make it quick

I agree with the first two....the women talks way to much pg 4 is an eye sore
the way you have dialogue after a description without stating who is talking also is a
big no- no

its crazy what that women did to the homeless guy at the end

either way this script needs a lot of work but good luck in the future

You start off with a 14 line description. That's no good. Chunks of dialogue with no idea on whose talking, can be very confusing.

On the flip side, I thought the dialogue was good at times. Maybe a bit too long. But other times maybe a little too on the nose.

If  man and women are the only speaking parts. For the most part... They really do need names.  Or a descriptive name at least.

As for the story...it left me thinking...Whats wrong with this girl? (The women, not you) it was like you were trying to describe the biggest evilest bitch you could. But besides trying to figure out, whose talking...when the names don't appear above the dialogue...The story felt like a bitchy rant from a pretentious bitch (the character, not you...lol)

The story was a little flat. ..Why is she so mean to him? Some sort of brief back story could have explained some of that. I mean she initiated the conversation, then went on this huge diatribe  against a seemingly harmless homeless man. Then pretends to scratch herself and get random drunk ppl to beat him up...then she smiles...and its fade out...The idea for the title was nice...but the story...I did not particularly enjoy.

Hope this sheds some truth on it.

Hello people
Well thanks for the advice. I'm a student so I'm still learning about certain aspects of script writing. The formatting advice I have to say was the most helpful and I've redrafted it with changes, and of course spelling alterations. I read through it again and I can understand why people found it annoying to read.

As for the feedback on the ranting dialogue. Well that was kind of the point of the person so won't be changing much of that. Totally fine that some people don't like that, but as the woman (who've I've now named) is supposed to just be streaming overly conservative ramblings, if I made her say less it would sort of take away from her character.

Reel-truth, you asked what the woman's problem and I did just want her to be overly conservative and just kind of hate the fact that this man was, in her opinion, not working hard and just living off other peoples charity, but I could see how she just came out a bit one dimensional, so I'll probably make changes to that.

And finally, for the overly long description. I have altered that, but it is confusing when I get so much varied advice on descriptions. A lot of script writers say the descriptions should be long and detailed, and others say it should be kept short. I guess in some part it's a matter of opinion.

Quoted from HarrietBlake And finally, for the overly long description. I have altered that, but it is confusing when I get so much varied advice on descriptions. A lot of script writers say the descriptions should be long and detailed, and others say it should be kept short. I guess in some part it's a matter of opinion.

Harriet, whoeer told you descriptions should be long, is giving you poor advice.

Descriptions should be visual, but only as detailed as necessary.

Passages themselves never should be over 4 lines.  Break your passages up by shots, ideas, thoughts, etc.  Do not have multiple shots, descriptions, or thoughts in a single passage.

Detail can be a fine line, but once you understand it, you'll never look back.

Hope this helps.

Twisted story, and I thoroughly loved it. Some good points made above...while I do see the need to have the woman ramble on and on, it would be nice to throw in some casual details in-between the dialogue, not only to break it up a little, but to further give the story some depth. But nevertheless, it was a decent story with a very cruel ending. Loved it. Good work

Hey Harriet,
I enjoyed it. I'm probably reading a revised version cuz I didn't see any large paragraphs of description although there was still a few little grammar and spelling mistakes, mostly in the woman's dialogue.

I thought her speech was well written although it did come off a little bit on the nose in places. Perhaps you could cut it up slightly with subtle actions as mentioned by Silva above.

Also while i thought the end was fairly original and shocking it wasn't exactly an 'ending'. i think maybe you could think of something to add after the man gets attacked to give it a proper conclusion. And also add FADE TO BLACK or something.

Good luck.

PS did anyone else have Tilda Swinton in their heads while reading this lol