Longtime 10PTT survivors prisoners readers know I'm sensitive to passive sentences. Whenever I spot one I get an overwhelming urge to tip that lazy s.o.b. out of its hammock and chase it around back to go chop wood.  Something productive.

"is ----ing"
"is ----ed"
"are ----ing"
"is ---- by"

And all their mooching cousins spawned from the loins of Uncle NarratorVoice and Aunty TellDontShow.

Even if a passive sentence feels like it belongs on the page, I'll still do the mental exercise of flipping it over to active, just for fun.  Let's try that here.

-- "Rubble and wood and construction equipment are scattered around."

Our goal in this exercise is to remove the word 'are' and those like it. 'Are' is a benign-looking word. But what it's really doing is ever so slightly lulling your brain to sleep. If a dozen of these passive malingerers gather on a page you might actually nod off.  And while you slumber these miscreants will feast on your vitality and poison your mojo, and you should burn your toothbrush just in case.

We could go the sentence-fragment path:

"Rubble and wood and construction equipment all over."
"Rubble and wood and construction equipment everywhere."

We could merge the description into another sentence, to give it a more natural context:

"Two Organisation Todt guard work among the rubble and wood and construction equipment."

Or there's the simple change of:

"Rubble and wood and construction equipment lie scattered around."

-- "Dim work-lights are strung along the roof..."

"Dim work-lights loop along the roof..."
"Dim work-lights hang along the roof..."
"Dim work-lights snake along the roof..."
"Dim work-lights thread along the roof..."

Or, retaining 'strung' by switching word order:

"Work-lights strung from the roof pulse dimly..."

-- "Their noses and mouths are masked against the dust by grimy cotton scarves..."

"Grimy cotton scarves keep their noses and mouths dust free..."
"Grimy cotton scarves shield their noses and mouths against the dust..."
"They breathe heavily through grimy cotton scarves..."
"Grimy cotton scarves serve as dust-masks..."

So that's our passive-to-active exercise done, and now we're warmed up and ready to weed out the passives wherever they clump together on a page.  Moving along...

-- "At the junction of a dark side-tunnel..."

I think this sentence and the suggested edits exemplifies how trimming can improve comprehension and readability.  One thing good writers know is: less words is better.  It seems like a trivial thing, but less words means your brain processes those little squiggles into meaning a tiny bit quicker. Stephen King ruthlessly trims at least 10% off every page.  When you know what to look for, trimming isn't so tough.  Find a single word that means the same as two words.  Tighten the first sentence and cut the overlapping second sentence.  Make a noun more specific and do away with the accompanying adjective.  Anyway, back to Clive's sentence.

-- "... are working furiously, hammering huge lengths of timber across the mouth of the side-tunnel..."

Don't tell us these guys are working furiously. We can see it!  "Two Organisation Todt guards ... furiously hammer huge lengths of timber...."  We've shortened the sentence and lost none of the urgency.

-- "As they continue working..."

is the same as "As they work" so choose the shorter unless there's good reason not to.  Again, it can seem trivial, but all the little edits add up.  Earlier I suggested shorter words/sentences get processed quicker by the brain.  Syllable count is an example.  In the original there are seven syllables.  Revising gives three.  That's half the time required for your brain to make sense of it.  I know, crazy obsessive, right?  I'll take it to my grave.  FIST PUNCHES through the sodden dirt. Lightning rips the sky, silhouetting the fresh grave and unspoiled headstone. The rotting arm protruding from the earth FLOPS left and right, groping. Finds a golfball-sized stone. The hand blindly searches the air then connects with the headstone.  Slow SCRATCHING between BOOMS of thunder. The bony hand lets the stone plop to the ground. The arm retracts into the grave. CLOSE ON the headstone which formerly read: HERE LIES PITCHPATCH: HE WAS A GOOD MAN BUT A BAD RIDER OF EMUS. With words scratched out it now reads: PITCHPATCH: GOOD MAN, BAD EMU JOCKEY.

-- "... and begins to quickly fill them in."

Which is self-evident in the next line of dialogue.  Screenplays require some narrative hand holding, but know when to stand aside and let your characters do their job.

-- "The Sergeant glances around at the Private, but doesn't stop working."

A cut purely to reclaim a line of white-space. See my other 10PTTs for all the reasons you should reclaim white-space where possible.

-- "But the young Private seems impatient and cavalier. He ignores the comment..."

All that comes across in the Private's actions and dialogue.  Pointing it out here is redundant.  We get it.

-- "... is rapidly dropping..."

You see three innocent words.  I see The Three Stooges: one stumbles upon the other, who pratfalls into the third.

Six syllables. Passive construction.  Stretching a verb like toffee and pinning it with an adverb.  Bordering on contradiction: "dropping" implies gradual, "rapidly" implies... uh, rapid.  And if you "is ----ing" me often enough I will for realsies make you cry and your little dog too. Oh, I'm sorry.  I'll rephrase: "Pitch is making the writer cry."

For these subjective and sarcastic reasons, "is rapidly dropping" will not do.  So many better ways.  Tell them, Cyrano.


A god-damn peninsular. Nothing to do with the point I'm making, but thanks anyway.

Do not send three words to do the work of one.

-- "The Sergeant's voice is tight."

Tight. Okay. So that means... what exactly?  Constricted?  How would this play out on set?


Let context do the heavy lifting.  Don't tell us the character's voice is tight when it's self-evident in the dialogue.  "It's happening! Just like they said!"  We know it's not said with glee or rapture.  We know these two soldiers are fighting back fear.  Once established, stand back narratorially -- not a real word, by the way; however 'narratophilia' is -- and let the characters' actions and words take over.

-- "... his face now betraying an expression of sheer terror."

That's a fine sentence for a novel or perhaps a science paper titled Fear Modifiers And Their Effects On Nazi Tunnel Blockaders. It's a bunch of puffy verbiage, a roomful of yip-yipping, bouncing pink poodles. Daddy thinks those poodles need trimming.  Cue Leatherface and a pair of industrial electric sheers.

"his face scrunched in terror."
"his expression pure fear."
"his terrified eyes bugging out."

Say what you mean to say and say it succinctly.  If you're Cyrano de Bergerac, please, just keep talking and take as long as you need. Because sometimes brevity is not the answer.


-- "A German Army supply lorry crawls along a dirt road which winds through the forest, engine racing and wheels spinning as it slithers through the river of mud churned up by a hundred tanks and vehicles long gone."

A beautiful, beautiful sentence.  A feast of juicy verbs, a chain of vivid images.  Bravo.

Green green green green... green.  A storm of vibrant verbs.  Stop yer grinnin' and drop yer linen!

Damn, I want to see this scene -- if in fact it was shot and made it into another cut.

-- "... his free hand struggles to open the flap on his holster, to get to his P.38."

Line call.  It's a nice bit of description, but do we absolutely need to know about the flap?  Do we lose anything by trimming it back to become "unholster"?  The key element is Engels struggling on, refusing to give in to his awful injuries. So for my money, we don't need to deep dive into description here.

You'll notice Clive didn't just say "pistol" or "luger".  This author did his research.  He uses concrete, authentic terms and identifiers where he can, to further immerse you in the time and setting.

-- "... averts his eyes so as not to look upon the man he cannot help."

Another novelistic turn of phrase that reads pleasantly enough but in the script world would be attacked and torn to shreds by... *Pitchpatch scans the landscape for any roving packs of hungry wolves.  Nada.* ... Well, by me. I believe "averts" does all the heavy lifting here, so we lose nothing slimming down on the page what should remain a nice character moment on film.

Plus... wait for it... we reel back a line of whitespace.  Huzzah!  Bunker Nazis in there, Grammar Nazi out here.

So we're done with the prologue and now we start the story good and proper: THE BUNKER.

This is great stuff Pitch. I personally hated the movie and as a result never thought to look at the script. I will visit now. Particularly like your "The shockwave BLASTS through Kruezmann leaving a halo of red mist." Ah red mist, one of the better effects CGI has given cinema.

I don't remeber it. Just started with an approach to the bunker as I recall. Lousy art design, I remember that.

Found a link to the opening on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON3lF05fOzA