Authors of this kind of book are almost always indebted to others for advice, help, and corrections. I want to thank Daniel Tibbets, Senior Vice President at Bunim-Murray Productions in Hollywood, formerly Vice-President and Studio Chief at GoTV Networks, for information and material that enabled me to understand the development of mobile media formats in which he pioneered. His new work in second screen production continues to innovate in a fast moving industry, which we are trying to explain even as it changes. Without this contact, many phone conversations, and emails, Chapter 14 would be less authentic and be less up to date.
Since I use Writing for Visual Media to teach introductory courses in scriptwriting, I learn a lot from students and their struggle to master visual writing. They have sometimes shown me by their honest mistakes the shortcomings of certain passages that needed either more or clearer explanation.
I am particularly grateful for the support and detailed feedback given me by Kathryn Morrissey, my editor at Focal Press, without whose suggestions, many good revisions, and new features might not have come to pass.
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Praise
“Worth its weight in gold . . . ! It doesn’t get any better than this: Here we have a master teacher— Anthony Friedman, bringing 21 years of writing, producing and directing experience to bear writing the third edition of this very impressive text . . . An impressive book that delivers what it promises . . . an essential purchase for anyone interested in writing for the visual media.”
R. Neil Scott, Author, Former Professor & User Services Librarian at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)
“An engaging textbook that trains, entertains and concentrates on contemporary writing issues in an accessible way. This book delivers a treasure trove of valuable, well-written information aspiring writers can use to familiarize themselves with the challenges of visual media.”
Jared Castle, marketing and public relations consultant, writer
“A comprehensive, well-structured, and well-written introduction to writing for electronic and digital screens wherever they might be found.”
Nathaniel Kohn, University of Georgia
“. . . a critical text that is accessible for students. This textbook provides comprehensive examples and exercises to push students to engage with real-world examples that will be needed once they become professionals. Broken down into five parts, this book allows lecturers to focus on critical concepts either in order, or in smaller chunks. The section on Interactive and Mobile Media is a welcome addition to a mediated world that is going global with the use of a Smartphone!”
Dr. Ann Luce, University of Portsmouth, UK
“Anthony Friedman is a master at his craft for writing for a variety of media. He is also a master when it comes to explaining his methods to the average lay man. I thought the book was brilliantly put together . . . I feel this book is well worth the purchase price, and the time spent reading.”
Stephanie
Manley, editor of CopyKat.com
“If my journalism students could only have three textbooks during their journalism academic career, I’d be pleased to know that “Writing for Visual Media” was one of them. From producing PSAs to defining target audiences to writing for interactive and mobile media, and finally, marketing oneself in this ever-changing media landscape, this text has the tools that journalism and new media students need now and tomorrow.”
Deidra Jackson, Instructor of Journalism, University of Mississippi Meek School of Journalism and New Media
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PrefacetotheFourthEdition
Once again, it is time for a new edition thanks to those readers and writers who have expressed confidence in the content of this book by buying the third edition and to those instructors who adopted it as a textbook. It has always been the author’s ambition to bridge the world of a pure textbook and a trade book about writing that would appeal to all writers and would-be writers everywhere who are not already experienced professionals in media writing. Even professionals might benefit from a refresher or from looking at a different kind of visual writing than the one they know. Although some elements like exercises concede to the needs of instructors and students, the style and approach are not exclusively academic. Sometimes the academic gets in the way of learning.
A new edition is a kind of reprieve. You see mistakes; you see opportunities not only to improve the prose, even though it seemed to read alright before, but also to re-order the exposition of ideas within chapters to achieve greater intelligibility as well as develop new ideas. Reviewers invited by the publisher to comment on the previous edition often oblige me to re-examine my approach, sometimes leading to changes but sometimes confirming for me that I needed to stick to the convictions that underlie the book and that inspired me to write it in the first place. With each successive edition, I have been encouraged to preserve most of the content and the order of many chapters, retaining the approach that presumably accounts for the relative success of previous editions. At the same time, I have been keen to find new ways of getting certain ideas across and embarrassed to find passages that could be considerably improved in clarity and style.
The order in which key ideas are transmitted matters to the success of the transmission and the consequent assimilation of those ideas. One way is better than another even though, in the end, a writer must assimilate them all and possess an integrated understanding of the whole. Hence the new order of chapters in the third edition has been preserved, although internally chapters benefit from some rearrangement of the contents and headings. Some sections and headings have been moved between chapters where, on critical examination, they seemed to belong. Discussing the method of analysis, brainstorming, and thinking that precedes actual script writing now comes earlier than explaining the problem of describing sight and sound and the necessary stages of script development. I decided to rewrite Chapter 8 and move the list of genres that cluttered up the chapter to an Appendix. This allows for a deeper, more complete discussion of storytelling and dramatic theory together with an analysis of films that illustrate story structures. I have also expanded some other chapters and dealt with new developments in media and their impact on writing.
Every instructor structuring a writing course around this book will have an individual approach, and no doubt no order or exposition will suit everyone. The convenience of the linear layout of books is that users can edit and re-order the sequence of chapters to their own preference although I do make a strong plea to try it my way.
The website had errors, which have been corrected. Perhaps more important, the interactive content has been expanded to include more video clips, links, and scripts. The website will be updated regularly. It is difficult, impossible, or simply too expensive to get rights to entertainment video clips, which explains why I continue to use examples of films and television for which I already have rich materials when more contemporary production might be more desirable. Publishers insist that the author pay for the rights. Sorry, I can’t afford them. I believe that film, television, and video should, like print media, be subject to the “fair use” provision of copyright law. However, publishers do not seem prepared to pioneer and defend this in a court of law. So I have to rely on scraps, trailers, and whatever can be found on websites and on YouTube.
With the passing of time, examples from many ads and PSAs inevitably become dated. Some of these I need and want to retain because they are either classic or because I have the scripts and video clips for the website and face restrictions of copyright for material that is desirable in an ideal world but unobtainable in a real one. I have updated many examples and references where possible, thanks again mainly to YouTube, which has flourished to become a major resource for all since the last edition.
Some readers didn’t like the printing of key terms in bold throughout chapters that was introduced in the third edition. The problem is that we do not know how many did like that change. I believe identifying key terms helps readers. Bolding them for every occurrence in the chapter produced clutter. By way of compromise, we have kept the list of key terms at the beginning of every chapter and removed the printing of those terms in bold in the body of the chapter. These terms form part of the glossary and are still set apart from other terminology by bold type so as to make them more readily identifiable and accessible. Key terms are specific to a chapter as far as possible. This does not exclude repetition where useful and germane to the chapter heading.
Although the premise of the book that is expressed in its title must control the content, the audio component of the visual medium remains largely unchanged from the third edition. Since we have to describe both sight and sound in visual media, writing for the voice is a component of visual writing even though audio is heard not seen. Nevertheless, it supports the visual. Writing for radio, which is sound only, receives some attention particularly in connection with writing PSAs. This cognate discipline that we can explore to help us define more clearly what is meant by visual writing therefore remains unchanged from the third edition. However, audio values as a component of the PSA sound track receive more attention.
The argument of the premise of the book is that writing broadcast news is not visual writing equivalent to other forms of scriptwriting. Despite the clear argument in the Introduction, some continue to object to the exclusion of broadcast journalism. Some curricula are organized in such a way that media writing includes broadcast journalism and are taught from a foundation in journalism that sets it apart from other forms of writing for media. Such a foundation course is broader and served by another kind of textbook with a different premise. Several good textbooks of this kind exist and take a different approach. Likewise, copywriting is yet another writing discipline that is only treated in the context of the visual writing that is demanded by ads and PSAs. Such writing is strongly visual and rich in visual metaphor and needs to be included.
Another misunderstanding that some users have relates to writing for the internet. This is not a book about new journalism just as it is not a book about broadcast journalism. Although writers creating web content often rely on still images, video clips, and perhaps even audio clips, they are not visual writers as such. Web pages or blogs consist mostly of text meant to be read not to be produced. Although the style changes from print, there is no visual writing as such. If video of any length is going to be produced, the video segment depends on the methods expounded in this book. Video clips or stills do not generally need scripting as separate elements. They are short unedited clips or plucked out of archives. In addition, the visual experience of a website, its design, its look,
and functionality result from graphic design. Writing concepts and treatment for websites that might precede graphic design are, however, grist for our mill. In this context, writing for the web for the purpose of this book means conceptualizing functionality, look, and navigation, not writing the text that is read in blocks or in sidebars. That is prose exposition.
The chapter devoted to writing for mobile media platforms, which was new to the third edition, reflects the way digital media and mobile platforms have evolved over the intervening years and changed how content is created and written to account for the second screen experience and the emergence of new formats that encompass multiple media distribution.
I have realized, partly in retrospect, that this is not just a book about how to write for visual media; it is also by turns, a reflection about the history, evolution, and origins of a medium and the kind of writing on which it depends. Media writers have to understand the forces that are changing the very media they write for. Nowhere is this more critical than for new mobile media platforms. This is not just a writing manual. It is also a book about the economic, production, and social contexts in which writing for visual media occurs.
I do believe this is a better book, a better website, and will reward its readers.
anthony.friedmann@gmail.com Lake Conroe, Texas
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What’sontheCompanionWebsite?
This text is designed to work in tandem with a website. Interactive online media provide us with a new opportunity, hitherto impossible to achieve in a writing textbook, to link script blueprint and resultant image in the visual medium in which it is produced. Reading a screenplay or PSA script and connecting them to finished, produced media closes a gap in most people’s imagination. This should help everyone grasp how visual writing works by seeing this critical link. Although the printed book contains some examples of scripts, the website provides many more and also more complete scripts.
An interactive visual glossary of script vocabulary for camera shots and movements enables the reader to see live action or still media that correspond to the term and hear audio that corresponds to the audio terminology. This in fact was the germinal idea for a companion CD-ROM that was bound into the first edition.
There are many links to useful websites about scriptwriting, movies, television, games, and social media. All this and more would be impossible to include in a standalone printed book.
HOWITWORKS
Throughout the text words and phrases have been highlighted in bold against a background whenever the website contains supplementary material to consult. This is a prompt to the reader to open the website and explore the content cognate to the chapter being read. In the e-book, this should be an active hyperlink and allow immediate access in another tab. Many URLs cited in the printed text become active links in the e-book avoiding the tedium of typing the URL into the browser.
In previous editions, many footnotes and other references mentioned the web address for imdb. com inviting the reader to look for background information about a film. Everybody in this field knows this website and with a few exceptions, we have now adopted a policy of assuming that any reader who needs production information or to watch a trailer can and will consult that website if need be.
The companion website provides an interactive menu that corresponds to the chapters of the book. The interactive navigation is modeled on the chapter outline so that all the links for a given chapter are accessible under the heading for that chapter. All supplementary materials referenced in the printed text can be accessed via this menu. There are also other options for interactive navigation that follow useful themes or topics so that readers can consult the website content independently of the chapter navigation:
• many corporate, and feature film scripts
• storyboards
• video clips of scenes produced from many script examples
• an interactive glossary of camera shots, movements and transitions
• links to relevant websites
Over time, some URLs become invalid because the World Wide Web is a changing environment in which many websites are not permanent or undergo revision. The companion website will undergo revision from time to time to supplement material or remove links that are no longer active, typically when the book is reprinted. New content and new links will be added to the website during the life of this edition so that the site can be consulted continuously for material that may not be flagged in the text.
Readers should understand that the website contains material, especially video clips that can take several minutes to download depending on the speed of the Internet connection, the clock speed of the computer processor being used, and the available RAM. The URL of the companion website is: www.focalpress.com/cw/friedmann.
SUPPORT AND SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS FOR INSTRUCTORS
Materials such as tests, lesson plans, and a syllabus are provided on the Focal Press website for this book. Instructors are required to complete an online form to request access.
Introduction
THEPURPOSE
Although this book is intended mainly for students in colleges and universities who are taking introductory courses in writing scripts for media, it is also meant for all writers navigating the transition from writing for the printed page to writing for visual media. It assumes that the reader begins with minimal understanding of the nature of writing for visual media. The mechanisms for creating video content and setting it before an audience is open to all in the era of YouTube. Many people can shoot digital video, whether on a portable point-and-shoot camera or on a cell phone. You can even make money uploading videos because Google will pay you for viewers’ impressions. The greater the number of impressions, the larger the audience for their contextual advertising! These videos, however, are rarely scripted. If you want to be the next Jenna Marbles and live off self-shot viral videos, you probably do not need this book. This comment is not meant in any way to belittle these witty and stylish mini-productions that have a large audience. However, if you wish to earn a living as a writer of commercial media content, you have to investigate how it’s done and learn some craft skills.
Most beginners have had a large number of experiences viewing visual media: films, television, and video. They probably contemplate the originating creative act that lies behind such programs without much idea of how it’s done. They may not understand visual thinking, or if they do, they don’t know how to set it down. They don’t know formats. In short, they don’t quite know where or how to start. This book is designed to get the beginner started. It is not intended to make fully fledged professionals out of beginners, but it does deal with every type of media writing, and it does cover all the material a beginner will need to write viable scripts in the main media formats.
Other books dedicated to specific genres offer more exhaustive and more specialized information about how to work at a professional level writing for film, television, corporate video, or interactive media. Broadcast journalism for current affairs and sports is another discipline that is well covered in more specialized works. A selected bibliography at the end of this book lists many of these more advanced books that focus more narrowly on writing for a single medium; the bibliography also includes more general works and the sources quoted or referenced in this book.
THEPREMISEOFTHISBOOK
This book is based on the premise that the fundamental challenge of writing for visual media arises from learning to think and write visually, that a script is a plan for production, and that visual media are identifiably different from print media. Granted, the production medium of television is visual,
the production script refers to B-roll, and investigative reporting demands visual input. Although broadcast journalism overlaps visual writing in some of its forms, journalists have concerns about sources, objectivity, and editorial issues that predominate. Shaping a news story delivered to a teleprompter does not really require visual writing. If anything it is writing for the ear. Even though a news script might make allowance for B-roll and story packages, those inserts are not written as scripts but captured on location by recording events. News production, however, does not need visual metaphor and is principally made up of and controlled by the concept of talking heads reading from a teleprompter. That still sets apart this kind of writing, which must apply the disciplines of journalism; this leads in another direction. However, for the sake of comprehensiveness and contrast, we include the script format for broadcast studio production in Chapter 4, in the appendix, and on the companion website (www.focalpress.com/cw/friedmann).
Although writing for the audio track has been part of the job of scriptwriting since sound was added to motion pictures some 90 years ago, writing for the ear alone concerns only words that are to be heard rather than words that describe a visual experience on screen. Our focus is a body of technique that is concerned with writing for audiovisual media that are based on sequencing images. Writing for radio, with the exception of a show like Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio, usually consists of writing radio ads, which are a form of copywriting and, therefore, guided by advertising concerns, or it is news and involves the journalistic issues already mentioned. Therefore, writing purely for radio is limited to radio public service announcements (PSAs) as an adjunct to visual PSAs. However, in context, writing dialogue, voice-over narration, and other audio concerns are given the importance they deserve.
This is not just a book about how to write for visual media: it is not just a writing manual; it is also by turns, a reflection about the history, evolution, and origins of this kind of writing; it is also a book about the technological, economic, production, and social contexts in which writing for visual media occurs. Media writers have to understand the forces that are changing the very media they write for. Nowhere is this more critical than for new mobile media platforms and the sudden emergence of the second screen dimension in television storytelling. Finally, the question of how to earn a living by writing for media raises ethical, esthetic, and creative conflicts that are inescapable. Understanding this difficult relationship between art and commerce, always in the background, is examined in detail in the last chapter.
OBJECTIVES
To become good at your craft, sooner or later you need to specialize. You need to hone and refine your writing skills for the way in which a particular medium is used. This does not mean you can never cross over from one form to another, but if you are going to make a living writing for a visual medium, you will have to be good enough in at least one area to compete with the pros already practicing the craft. That is a few stages away.
To get there from here you need to learn:
• How visual media communicate
• Visual thinking
• Visual writing
• Scriptwriting terminology
• The recognized script format for each visual medium
• A method to get from brain static to a coherent idea for any media script
• The role of the writer in media industries
SECONDARYOBJECTIVES
Even if you don’t end up writing for a living, you may find yourself in a job that requires you to read, interpret, evaluate, buy, or review scripts. Whether in preproduction, production, or postproduction, there are dozens of activities that require you to be able to evaluate the written plan that is the script. You need to be able to construe the final product from words and ideas on a page. Some of the jobs that require you to do this are producer, director, casting director, cinematographer, story editor, literary agent, studio and TV executive, film and video editor, and actor. Other positions in the visual communications industry might also require that you be able to read a script and deduce what it will cost to make a product that an audience will see. In addition to the people who have to evaluate and buy or reject scripts, these positions include art director, set designer, talent agent, casting director, lighting director, and sound designer. Virtually anyone who has a role in bringing a script to the screen needs to be able to read the blueprint from which a program is made. Before production, the script is the movie or the project or the PSA. The logic of project development and the economics of production dictate the importance of the script. If you work in the visual media industry, you will need to be able to follow the way a script translates into narrative images that communicate to an audience, and to read the coded set of instructions that a script embodies. The script is cheap to produce compared to producing the script.
THEBASICIDEAOFASCRIPT
When composers want someone else to play their music, they must write it down as notes in a form that other musicians can read, decode, and then turn back into music. This problem has been solved in the music world by inventing the musical score with a clear set of rules for the symbols which designate the length of the note, the pitch, the loudness, and rhythm that should be reproduced. Even composers who don’t write music need arrangers to write it out for them because most music involves groups of musicians playing different instruments simultaneously. There is always a barrier between the music score and the auditory experience of hearing the music. You can’t hear the score just by reading it unless you are a trained musician. Even then, you need to play the notes to understand what the composer intended and create a musical experience for a wide audience, most of whom cannot read music or play an instrument. Likewise, you can’t see a film or video by looking at the script. If you are a trained director or editor who knows how to read a script, you can visualize in your mind’s eye what is intended, just as a musician can hear in his mind’s ear what the music should sound like. You can translate a static page into a sequence of images flowing in a time line. Today’s nonlinear video editors display programs in a graphic time line, which is a kind of storyboard metaphor for the content of a program. In the end, the production process is needed to make the script into images that are accessible to all viewers even though they cannot read a script, frame a shot, or edit a sequence to make narrative sense.
Like all analogies, this one breaks down. Musical scores are used over and over again for numberless performances, whereas a script is used only once. So another useful analogy is the blueprint, the drawings an architect makes for a builder or contractor to erect a building. After the building is finished, the blueprint has little interest except perhaps for maintenance or repair. The person who buys a house or who lives in it might not be able to read the architect’s plans any more than the audience at a concert is able to read music or an audience for a film is able to read a script. The home dweller hardly thinks about the plans of the house, even though this person may have strong views about how successful the building is to inhabit. If you like living in the space, then that is a measure of the building’s success even though you do not necessarily know how to design a house.
Likewise, if you watch a TV series, enjoy a movie, or understand a corporate message, you don’t think about the scripts on which they are based. You get an audiovisual, intellectual, and emotional experience. You laugh, cry, reflect, or go into a rewarding imaginative or mental space. So a script has little value except as a blueprint to make something. Think of it this way: you couldn’t sell many scripts of Star Wars or Jurassic Park (or your favorite movie), but you can sell a lot of tickets to see the movie made from it—millions of tickets in fact.
META-WRITING
I introduced the term meta-writing in the second edition of this book to clarify and explain how visual writing works. The process of visual writing is elusive because it originates in the imagination before writing happens. Writing of any kind arises in the mind in some pre-verbal phase that seeks words to embody an idea. Languages are many, and the writing process is not confined to any particular language. Anyone who knows another language well can be faced with a dilemma of which language accommodates the idea. I am fluent in French and have written scripts, stories, and letters in that language. I have come to realize that visual thinking is independent of what language I am using to write the script down. Writing does not originate simply in words although words might enable the process. Writing for visual media involves yet another complexity, namely that the language used to describe the visual idea is not what the audience itself experiences. The language we use as visual writers is a referent for images or a construct of images that underlies the produced result and accounts for how and why it works. The term meta-writing refers to that ur-writing or prewriting activity of the creative imagination. It is expressed as a concept, a premise, or some pre-script document that then has to evolve through further elaboration in a treatment into a set of written instructions that eventually become part of the script itself. That script is sustained by a vision that the audience grasps visually and not through words. So the audience is really responding to what is in effect the meta-writing.
We can verify this by an analysis of some CSX television commercials. One of them consists of a montage of brief shots of all kinds of people breathing in. We then see another montage of the same people breathing out and swimmers racing. It incorporates the following text intercut with images:
CSX trains move one ton of freight 436 miles on 1 gallon of fuel. Less fuel = less emissions. Good news for anyone who breathes.
The final tag line completes an idea that can only be assimilated visually. If you see this television ad, you understand it and know what it means. If you try to express your understanding in words, you might have difficulty. Expressed in words, something is lost. Let’s try and then view the ad online
We live in a gaseous atmosphere just as fish live in water. That atmosphere is being altered by human activity burning fossil fuels and changing the gaseous makeup of that atmosphere. This same activity also emits pollutants which contaminate the environment and impact the health of the human organism that must breathe that gas polluted with carcinogens and other particulate matter detrimental to the respiratory system. Reducing that pollution benefits
everyone who breathes, indeed every animal that breathes (a shot of a dog exhaling is included). So if we can get trucks off the road and do the same job of transporting goods by rail, which uses fossil fuel energy more efficiently, we all benefit. We are a railroad. We understand this. Every year, our train operations reduce the amount of CO2 being pumped into the air by over 6.5 million tons. It would take 152 million tree seedlings 10 years to absorb that much carbon. We want you to appreciate how important our older technology is for the survival of the planet and its life forms—you. Although railroads are old transportation technology, they are the energy and environmental solution for tomorrow.
Expressed in words, the idea is lengthy and somewhat clumsy; expressed visually, it is elegant and can be accomplished in 30 seconds. The human brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text. It is primordial and in our genes. Nevertheless, text is still immensely valuable. It either backs up or completes the visual idea. The tag line for the campaign completes the idea in words: “How tomorrow moves™”.
The transmission of a visual idea cannot take place without live action images, which have to be produced. The audience then experiences the meta-writing as images. The audience gets the idea that started the whole process. This is why understanding how you do meta-writing is so important to visual writing. It happens before you write, but you have to find words to explain it to someone else so that it can be produced. Learning how to do this entails more than the traditional writing skills. It is less dependent on facility with language or descriptive wording than a capacity to think in images. This is what meta-writing means for visual media.
THELEARNINGTASK
Your job right now is to begin to understand how you put this plan, this score, or this blueprint for a movie together. Whether it is a PSA (public service announcement), a corporate communication, or a feature film, you have to figure out the process. You have to learn in what forms media industries communicate, buy, sell, and produce their ideas. You have to try it out before your next month’s rent is at stake.
The most difficult part of writing is the constant revision. We have to rewrite and revise until we get it right. Writers whose work you watch on TV and in the movie theater have spent a long time studying how it’s done. One day, I was explaining this to a communications student who played on the college basketball team. I asked him what the coach had him do in basketball practice. His eyes lit up and he described some of the shooting drills. Then I asked him what he thought the equivalent drills would be for a writer. He wasn’t so sure and did not understand that a similar degree of practice is the foundation for successful writing. Since we are comparing writing to basketball, consider this quote from Michael Jordan: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
If you have to shoot thousands of baskets so as to be confident about sinking a foul shot, let’s think about what it takes to get to be good enough to score consistently in a competitive writing game. Some people will put in a lot of time practicing basketball because they love the game. Scriptwriters keep writing because they love the medium and they love to create. Isn’t it the same idea? Practice, practice, practice! Don’t give up! Don’t get discouraged when your ideas don’t work out right away, and, above all, enjoy the creative act, even if you don’t make points every time!
A complex topic such as visual writing has an evident linear arrangement that is implied in a table of contents with numbered chapters. That is dictated by the structure of the medium. Another paradigm that can explain this assembly of ideas is a wheel: It has a center, a circumference, and spokes. You can begin almost anywhere and get to the center.
CONCLUSION
This book is about learning the fundamentals of scriptwriting. It is designed to take you from nowhere to somewhere, from no experience and no knowledge to a basic level of competence and knowledge of what the issues of scriptwriting are. It gives you a chance to explore your visual imagination and try out your powers of invention. My fervent wish is that readers will find an improved route to understanding the process of writing, acquire a better understanding of the different types of visual writing, and finally see how to get on the path to doing their own writing. Later, you can confront the full range of writing issues particular to each genre in each medium by taking more advanced media writing courses dedicated to specific media formats, or by reading more advanced texts, or by further self-directed writing experience. In the end, you learn, not by reading alone, not by thinking alone, and not by talking about doing it, but by doing it. “Just do it!” as the Nike ad used to say. Just write!
DefiningtheProblem
Many people, including readers of this book, have confidence in their basic ability to write but are unsure of how they should apply it to writing a script. To know how to write for visual media, it is important to understand how such writing differs from the writing most of us have learned to do until now. To change these habits and learn how to write a script, we need to see the specific problems that this different kind of writing solves. Above all, we need some kind of method to solve those problems. The first part of this book is devoted to a logical and pragmatic analysis of the reasons why scripts are written a certain way. If you understand the problem, you will understand the solution. This part also introduces you to a basic process of thinking, a method of devising content, and a method of writing in stages or steps.
Writing is a peculiar business. It is at once an intensely private act whose intention is to become public. If it works well, the writer disappears and the writing itself has a life of its own. This is true for all writing, but it has a particular importance for scriptwriting and writing for media because the words constitute instructions to others to do something and create content in another medium, which is essentially visual. So you could say that the writing doesn’t count; yet it does in ways that are critical for the final product if perplexing in the process.
I had always thought of myself as a pretty good writer, and I liked writing before I ever wrote a script. Many of you might feel the same way. I started writing scripts to have something to shoot in film school. After all, I could hardly hire a professional scriptwriter, and people around me were too busy doing their own projects to help out with mine. Besides, I wanted to write my own scripts. A lot of you are probably students in media production and will have to invent content for production projects. We all learn the hard way, by trial and error. The following chapters are intended to minimize those errors. Although there is a considerable body of craft to learn, this part of the book is about what a writer should understand before dealing with specific visual media, their formats, and writing screen directions. Let’s begin.
