The Only Way by Tony Wilson - Short, Thriller - {no logline} 9 pages - pdf format

New writer interested in feedback on this work, please be nice

Hi, Tony.

First up: scene numbers belong only in shooting scripts.

Quoted Text The room is still. Dark. Quiet.

Good.

Quoted Text It’s as if the air has been sucked out of the room; like a snuffed out life.

Not so good. Write only what we can see.

Same with:

Quoted Text There’s a small, broken piece of plastic in his fingers.

Okay.

Quoted Text The plastic, jagged and bleeding, sits in his hands as a reminder.

How do we know this?

You bold and italicize words, sometimes at the same time, and sometimes in ALL CAPS. Avoid this wherever possible. Emphasize only when needed and let the action do it.

This section, for instance:

Quoted Text Nothing reaches him through THE FOG. As he stares up to the ceiling, his ears fill with the sound of the wind howling. Waves crash in his ears. He can smell the fire burning, can hear it crackle and dance. The room around him is cluttered and messy. The walls are adorned with posters and memorablia. There’s barely enough room for life to exist in these walls. It doesn’t matter. He sees none of it. In his eyes he sees fog and mist roll over a purple sky. He watches as stars begin to twinkle up in that dark sky. THE ONLY WAY

This belongs in a novel, not a script.

Quoted Text Jameson stands on a rocky and rugged cliff overlooking a cold ocean... [...] Old cigarette butts litter the floor around him.

Floor or ground? Maybe this is a dialect thing — I've heard it said some British people use "floor" in place of "ground".

Quoted Text A loud KNOCK is heard from the trunk. Jameson looks back to the trunk. Jameson can’t help but get closer to the trunk. SILENCE hangs on the air. He’s closer now. He stares at the trunk.

Repetitious.

Quoted Text Jameson begins to reach his hand out.

Reach, or reach not; there is no "begins to".

Quoted Text The car begins to...

As above.

These issues and others (grammar and punctuation, mostly) hold this piece back from being what it could be.

Right now it's a short story. That's the way you've written it. Not an uninteresting story, but it's not the script for a short film.

It's important to know what a script is and isn't. The literary devices essential for a novel or novella or similar aren't suited to screenwriting, which is all about the action. A terse and bare-bones description of events. What happens and to whom and how are they responding. What constitutes nice writing in a book is mostly just a hindrance when in a script.

The story kept me reading. If you correct the issues above I suspect this would make for a compelling little short film.