Tuesday
May 30, 2006

Loose Ends posted by kza

(The following is an attempt at the kind of post they sometimes do over at Signal vs. Noise — that is, a “statement of purpose” kind of deal that’s both kind of controversial but also kind of vague. Is mine a homage or a parody? I’m thinking a little of both.)

SCREENWRITERS:

Stop tying shit together.

Yes, if you’re writing a mainstream narrative, cause and effect is often necessary. Foreshadowing — that’s usually a good thing. It’s good to be introduced to a character, concept, event, etc. in a “teasing” way, only to get the full introduction later on.

But not everything needs to tie into something previously shown, nor does it need to tie into something later on. Not everything needs to be a “plant”. Not everything needs to be a payoff. I don’t need to be constantly paid off. What am I, a mob shakedown guy?

When everything is a plant with an accompanying payoff, you’ve gone from creating a world to creating an artificial world. It’s not clever. It’s not “good writing”. It’s hermetic. In a sense, it’s paranoid. Ultimately, it’s suffocating.

Open that world up. Bring up something — a character, an image, a place — and then drop it. The real world is too big to encompass in a screenplay. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t suggest that enormity. And just because your screenplay takes place on the dragon-infested island of Mythia doesn’t mean you can get away with hermeticism. For every noble prince, there’s a peasant somewhere toiling in the mud. For every exciting quest, there’s a courtier who’s fallen in love with the princess, or a steward trying to run a castle, or wizard trying to make the mortgage on his tower. We don’t need the full stories — we can fill them in ourselves. But we need the sense that this is a living, breathing world, one that exists outside the boundaries of the protagonist.

And living, breathing worlds have loose ends.

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