One of the toughest things about screenwriting is including the audience.
By that I mean “letting them in on what they need to know.”
You can’t just tell them directly like you can in fiction. They have to learn by what they see and hear.
Mostly by what they see. That’s what “show, don’t tell” is about: characters can’t just speak information in dialogue for the purpose of explaining something to the audience. It will come off wooden and unnatural.
And the audience won’t really take in the facts and remember them that way anyway.
Instead they need dramatic scenes of conflict that get and keep their attention. Meaning characters trying to achieve things, with something in the way. Scenes where, without the audience realizing it, they’re also learning some key facts they need to know.
“But can’t we just trust the audience?” you might say. “Isn’t it better not to spoonfeed information? Let them figure things out over time? Or keep certain things mysterious?”
If you’re aiming for commercial storytelling (i.e. not arty/experimental indie work), I think mystery works best when it’s a mystery the main character is trying to solve, with high stakes.
I do not recommend “mystery” about how the world works, the key back story facts, the main character’s situation, and especially what they feel and want. Rather than withholding that, reveal, then complicate.
Because you want the audience to enter into the story. To feel emotionally connected. To not just be interested in finding stuff out but knowing enough to feel something about your main character’s problems.
To do that, it helps to have the scenes predominantly be from that character’s subjective point-of-view, ideally focused on them trying to achieve some intention and encountering obstacles to it.
Starting as soon as page one.
That gets readers’ attention and draws them in: someone is trying to do something that matters to them, and much is in the way. Will they be able to achieve their intention? It can be fun to watch them try.
What are they talking about?
Sometimes writers who want to avoid expositional dialogue err in the opposite direction.
They write scenes of characters doing things and talking to each other about situations and people the audience doesn’t know anything about.
Such dialogue might feel real. But if the audience is left wondering too much about what’s going on, what’s being said, and why, they feel left out.
That can mean detaching. Disengaging. Not wanting to watch more. Or, if it’s a professional reader, wanting to read more. They don’t feel invited in and included. It doesn’t feel like this is being written for them. Where they’re being presented a story to invest in.
Group scenes of more than two characters can be extra deadly in this way. Especially early in scripts. The reader is trying to keep up with who is who and looking for something to latch onto that they understand, can relate to, can feel something about.
If the scene is about your main character (or a team) trying to do something, that’s important and clear, then it’s okay to potentially have multiple characters on their side or that they have to deal with to try to get what they want.
But if there’s no strong want driving the scene and just several people kind of exchanging information and opinions, talking about the past, talking about other characters the audience hasn’t met… readers really tend to check out.
So I say avoid that. Passing “insider lingo” within a scene that otherwise has clear drama and intentions is okay. As long as the audience gets what’s at stake and the dramatic point of the discussion.
Focus on clear intentions and emotional POV
Ultimately we’re asking strangers to understand what’s going on and care about it.
They are not up to speed about anything. We have to take them by the hand and show them everything that matters for them to be able to get it and engage emotionally.
They need to care. And for them to care it usually means caring about a particular individual human they get to know well, with a major problem/goal that they’re actively trying to do something about.
The audience “rides on the back” of such characters and learns about their world through their experience of it, through what they’re doing to combat problems and reach goals. Through their relatable emotions.
That doesn’t mean you can’t “hand off” point of view from one character to another. But I would say do it intentionally. And only hand off to another “main character” (of their own story/subplot) who is engaged in pursuing their own clear, relatable and important objectives. Not to characters that don’t have an ongoing narrative.
Writers tend to underestimate how much they know that readers need to know to engage. And also how much they’re leaving unclear in their scenes.
And they tend to overestimate how hard a reader is willing to work to keep track of characters and information, and how much you can grab them through scenes that don’t do what I described above.
Of course we need to know far more than what’s on the page. But we also have to know what we’ll have to make clear on the page for readers and an audience to feel included. To care. To want to keep going.
(And that doesn’t mean telling the reader facts in scene description that the audience watching the eventual movie or episode wouldn’t know from what they’re seeing. That’s a no-no.)
You’re writing it for them
The difficult balance is that on one hand you’re writing for yourself, something you’re interested in and want to explore, told in ways that you think work, that you like. That’s where the best work comes from.
But if you’re looking to engage other people, from contest readers to agents and managers, to producers, actors and ultimately audiences… then their perspective becomes the priority.
What do you need to give them so that they’ll feel up to speed, engaged, and caring about what’s going on — and entertained by how it’s playing out?
It’s often hard for writers to think about that, and get out of their own perspectives. To know what’s needed to elevate a script from something that’s engaging to the writer to something with the capacity to impact millions.
Like any small business where the customer’s wants, problems and experiences are foremost in the founder’s mind, a script really is like a business proposition, where you’re trying to deliver something fresh and new that makes their lives better, that they really want to consume, that fulfills their criteria for a great way to spend an hour or two, in a particular kind of story and genre.
If you read professional produced screenplays, the kind that really move forward in the industry, I think you’ll find one commonality is that their writers are focused on giving the reader a clear, compelling, emotional and entertaining experience from page one. That’s the priority.
If you make it yours, too, and can execute that, you will tend to get the attention of readers in a good way, as a writer who “gets it” and is looking to reach them, include them, move them and entertain them.
