10PTT: Snare by Pitchpatch

[Pitchpatch]

I never dated this draft, but I believe I wrote Snare more than a decade ago.  It's based on a book I don't have rights to.   I recall wanting to try a book-to-screenplay writing assignment and chose this one (thank you, unnamed popular horror author with the initials PS).  I never returned to the project after that first long draft.

Looking back after all this time, yeah, I think the writing holds up. A few quirky stylistic mannerisms that I've since shaken loose, but the writing does the job.  Storywise, I see now it meanders a little and needs tightening.  These first ten pages bristle with looming conflict, but I sure take my sweet time.

For this 10PTT, as usual, I've left the original dialogue unedited.  I tinker with the description only.

So. Snare, page 1.  Here we go.


"It is a chilly, windy night."  Aye carumba.  Imagine a storyteller sitting among a flock of kindergarten kids and she kicks off with that line.  Stilted indeed.  Loosey goosey.  Shake it out. Write it like you're that storyteller talking face to face with those kids.  "It's a chilly, windy night. Pale blue light from a full moon makes the graves and headstones glow as if lit from within..."

At (1): We've got 'roadhouse' in the slug. No need for repetition here.

At (2): Toward/towards -- both correct.  Just use them consistently. Later on this page I use 'toward' so let's pick one and stick with it.

"out of" -> "from" -- never stop looking for contractions, where you can substitute one word for two.  Generally, less words take less time to comprehend.  And fewer words means less space consumed on the page.  The small savings add up.

At (3): "From the roadhouse comes the music of a country-and-western band" -> "From the roadhouse comes country-and-western music" -- the rearrangement helps the brain parse the sentence fluidly.  In the former version, the brain receives 'roadhouse' > 'music' > 'country and western'.  In the second version the brain processes 'roadhouse' > 'country and western' > 'music': when we hit 'music' we already know what type it is.  Yes, this is pedantic.  Welcome to my Obsessive Writer World.  But these little things do help to speed comprehension.  The less time your reader's brain takes to form the intended thoughts, the more your writing engages.

Let's stick with the topic of minutia.  "From the roadhouse comes country-and-western music."  "Country-and-western music comes from the roadhouse."  What's the difference?  Comprehension.  While reading, the mind constantly juggles whatever information it has at the time, trying to make sense of it all.  New pieces get added and the mind juggles again, searching for the most appropriate meaning based on everything supplied so far.  This happens quickly, of course.  But you can speed it along by placing your spatial and chronological cues up front.  Give the reader's mind the important bits early, so it can build a foundation in time and space and easily slot in the remaining parts of the sentence.

At (4): "Gwen immediately fidgets with the..." -> "Gwen fidgets with the..."  Redundant word.  With the added bonus of pulling back the sentence to one line instead of two.  Always look for sentence blocks where you can lose a word or two and reclaim a line of whitespace.  Any way you can save whitespace is a good thing.  Screenwriting today is all about slim, low-page-count scripts.  Yes, the more literary screenwriting style from the forties through seventies is nice.  Maybe the tables will turn back one day.  Right now, every word must earn its place on the page.

[Pitchpatch]

At (1): "... front door of the roadhouse." -> "... roadhouse entrance."  Another occasion where condensing turns a two-line sentence into one, saving space.  And the brain interprets two words quicker than four.

At (2): "Gwen puts the game down..." -> "Gwen puts down the game..." -- this harks to the writing guideline: keep related words together.  Switch on.  Put down.  Pick up.

John switches the light on.
John puts the bag of groceries down on the counter.
John picks his keys up from the beside table.

None of these is wrong.  But 'on', 'down', and 'up' are all slightly orphaned from the words they modify.  Where orphaning impacts readability would be something like:

"He takes the book titled How To Get A Leg Up down from the bookshelf."  I deliberately loaded that example with a confusing juxtaposition.

The point is, try to keep related words together.  Orphaned words can lose context and potency.  Worse, they can force the reader to reparse what they just read to make sense of it.

"The heater is making the windows fog up." -> "The heater is fogging the windows." -- The latter is more active.  Subject, verb, object.  Heater, fogging, windows.

At (4): "A strange hollow ringing sound becomes audible..." -> "A strange hollow ringing sound rises..." -- ripping out a passive, colorless phrase with a single active verb.  Could trim further to: "A strange hollow RINGING rises over the sighing wind."

At (5): "A blast of wind gives the bottle fresh momentum." -> "A blast of wind kicks the bottle forward." -- same as above: saying the same thing but in a slightly more active manner.

[Pitchpatch]

Some minor edits on this page.  Nothing exciting.

[Pitchpatch]

Some nips and tucks.

[Pitchpatch]

Not much to do here.  You're forgiven if your Nintendo DS seems like a better idea right now.

[Pitchpatch]

Woohoo.  Action stations.  Red spattered across this page.  So what's going on?

At (1): "Mr Olsen leans over to extract the keys from the ignition." -> "Mr Olsen leans over to take the keys from the ignition."  "Extract" feels like an overblown choice here.  It's a simple action requiring only a simple verb.  Additionally, with the next sentence you could easily lose the repetition of "keys": "Mr Olsen leans over to take the keys from the ignition. He examines them in his palm.  Discovers blood smeared over his fingers."

At (2): "Her face goes slack, too, and her eyes become disconnected." -> "Her face goes slack, too, and her eyes lose focus."  Nothing much wrong with the original, but there was something bugging me about "her eyes become disconnected."  Seemed a bit jarring and, perhaps, amusingly literal. Thus the switch.  Probably I'm worrying over nothing.

"Tears begin to course down her cheeks." -> "Tears track down her cheeks."  This change pulls back a line, saving space, and "track" is a shorter expression of the same thing.

At (3): "... sits there rocking back and forth." -> "... sits there rocking."  Same as above: saves a line.  Also, "rocking back and forth" is a tautology: rocking already suggests back-and-forth movement.

At (4): "... face to the sky and hollers --" -> "... face to the sky --"  The dialogue clearly depicts Mr Olsen screaming his daughter's name.  We don't need telling.

At (5): "... as he drives along a country road." -> "... driving a country road."  Drives along a country road.  Drives up a country road.  Drives down a country road.  Drives on a country road.  Drives around a country road.  Does it matter?  He's driving a country road.

"The car radio is tuned to a classical station." -> "The car radio broadcasts a classical station."  Whenever I see 'is' in a sentence I sharpen my knives.  'Is' usually signposts a passive sentence.  Like here.  Scrutinize all your 'is' sentences.  Something is something: those are lazy sentences.  Don't let these slackers hang around stinking up the place.

[Pitchpatch]

At (1): "An elderly couple sit at one of the booths along a window."  -> "An elderly couple sit at a window booth." -- A stark example of "get it written then get it right."  Getting it right means expressing a clear thought with effective words.  Rarely does the writer use too few words during a first draft.  "2nd Draft = 1st draft – 10%" (Stephen King, On Writing).

AT (2): "is doing something" versus "does something."  "The waitress idles over to Miles while he is perusing the menu board."  -> "The waitress idles over to Miles while he peruses the menu board."  You'll see sprinkled through these ten pages where I've written "is doing something."  An old habit I'm happy to leave behind.  Verbs ending with 'ing' tilt toward the passive.  I like to weed them out, retaining a few only to prevent style monotony.

The edits at page middle serve to tighten that large paragraph and save whitespace.  By today's industry-standard screenwriting style, I've used unusually large description blocks.  Honestly, I don't see a problem.  But if I restarted this project today, to begin with I'd gut those long paragraphs.

[Pitchpatch]

Basic trimming on this page.  In my opinion, a good example how a series of small edits can make your narrative a little more streamlined, a little more dynamic, proving the idiom "Less is more."

[Pitchpatch]

Mostly dialogue on this page.  Why don't I rewrite dialogue as part of a 10PTT?  I suppose because dialogue is far more subjective.  And more forgiving than description on the page.

Which is more likely to earn a pass: a script with excellent dialogue but horrible description or one with horrible dialogue and excellent description?  I could only guess.  I'll leave that discussion to the professionals.

On the other hand, some producers ignore description and read dialogue alone.  They flip through a script and skim down the central dialogue column, letting the characters themselves tell the story directly.  If that happens, your carefully honed description was for nothing.  Thankfully those producers are rare.  And anyway, your script would arrived in that producer's hands only after an industry reader evaluated and judged worthy your screenplay's total reading experience.

[Pitchpatch]

And we're at the end of this 10PTT.  Concluding with a whimper, unfortunately, but I hope it was worthwhile overall.

Giving the page a final look, I'm not thrilled about the repetition of "stool": "The crewcut man springs from his stool.  His friends ease off their stools to back him up."  Perhaps better as: "The crewcut mans springs to his feet.  His friends ease off their stools to back him up."  Meh.  No biggie.

As for the narrative proficiency of these first ten pages, there's a strong sense of growing conflict throughout.  That's good.  But it feels like I'm taking too long about it.  It feels like those ten pages should be compressed to five or six.  I mean, that opening scene is fully six pages long!  That's an indulgent waste.

Feel free to suggest other edits you feel work better on the page.

Pitchpatch out.

[Tom & Jerry]

Did you scan your own script for this Pitch?

As always, informative, to the point, and great advice for anyone.

Feel free to carve up the first ten pages of OOW on here if you want. 

[Pitchpatch]

Yep.  Quite an old paper copy.

I just found another old script of mine: Oblivion.  This draft circa Sept. 2000.

Bwahahaha. Oh man, I need to 10PTT this one next.  (Although methinks OOW is next in line! Thank you!)

I treasure this printed copy I've got here.  Check out the cover -- the result of my kids scribbling over it.  They were rugrats back then.  Time flies.

[Tom & Jerry]

Is that a jew star?

[Pitchpatch]

Is that a jew star?

Don't read too much into it.  Random doodlings of children.  But yes, does look like a Star of David.  I didn't scan the back cover because a few of those doodles back there look like... well, like dicks.  Or rocket ships.  Yeah, let's go with that.  Or not, after reading the first ten pages.

[Pitchpatch]

One thing I'd tweak additionally on these pages is the numbers.

- MRS OLSEN, an attractive mid-thirties lady, takes ...
- Beside her sits her twelve-year-old daughter GWEN.

Both can be written in numbers.  Most grammar guides say: spell out numbers ten and under; figures otherwise.  Why bother?  Because as I preach over and over, accumulated small space savings add up to page savings over a whole script.  By switching numerical words (eleven and higher) to digits you might stop a line from orphaning, saving a linespace.  The effect might cascade and pull back a paragraph from atop the following page.  Every trim counts.

- MRS OLSEN, an attractive mid-30s lady, takes ...
- Beside her sits her 12-year-old daughter GWEN.