Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Establishing setting
The play and screenplay people want to watch
Long-form genres
In this chapter
· Where the play happens
· The action during the play
· Play dialogue and other sounds
· Screenwriting in particular
Plays, screenplays, and screenwriting draw on many of the same tools. If you love films and would like to write for the stage or the movies, this is the chapter for you.
Plays—the traditional form that has led to the others—primarily are driven by language and dialogue. Characters often speak in monologue for minutes at a time to express their inner lives, and these speeches are often the high point of the play. Great playwrights are eloquent wordsmiths. One need only invoke the name of Shakespeare to prove that.
Movies, on the other hand, are driven by images. A scene with a long monologue is often considered expository and in need of paring down or cutting. “Find a way to show us this instead,” is usually the note the screenwriter gets in such instances—especially if the film is a mainstream Hollywood type.
Movies often have long sequences of no dialogue where story is told through action and editing. Great screenwriters are visionary story architects. However, this really only applies to screenplays written after about the late 1950s or so and especially after the mid-1970s. Prior to that, dramatic and narrative principles for both forms were considered almost the same.
As opposed to plays, contemporary screenplay formatting is very regimented and uses a lot of standardized jargon. Stage plays, on the other hand, have a few rules but they’re much looser. In 10 years, my professional drama writing friends have encountered and written scripts with all manner of formatting: some looked almost like screenplays while others were blocked almost like a business letter or a novel. If you have no template from a publisher or production company, the main thing is to stay consistent and readable.
Actors generally prefer it when the play script is not formatted like a screenplay. It reassures them that the writer knows there’s a difference. They also appreciate having room in the margins to jot down their thoughts and rehearsal notes.
WATCH OUT!
There are a few differences between plays and screenplays that fall into the two main categories of aesthetic and stylistic characteristics. The aesthetic differences (you might also think of them as “cosmetic differences”) describe the look of the script. Both forms have conventions for tab stops and/or capitalization for dialogue, parentheticals, transitions, and scene headers. While screenplays are largely harmonized, the stage play format is further differentiated between American and international formats.
The stylistic differences recognize the media being depicted. Stage plays tend to be more dialogue-heavy because that’s what the audience in the cheap seats needs to make sense of in the scene. The screenplay, however, acknowledges the contribution of both the camera and other members of the cast & crew. As a rule of thumb, a good screenplay only describes what will be seen or heard. A character’s internal motivation has no place in most screenplays, nor should the screenwriter tell the actor how to read a line or tell a director where to put the camera.
In this chapter, we stay more or less focused on the writer’s duties when it comes to plays and screenplays through the topics of set, action, verbal sound, nonverbal sound, and notes on screenwriting. Now let’s allow your mind’s-eye camera to roll!
Establishing setting
It’s important to establish the time and place of your story in the opening scene of your play or screenplay. Doing so gives the audience the geographic location and era in which the story takes place right at the start.
By clearly describing the time and place early on, your audience will be immediately engaged in the plot and won’t wonder where and when the story takes place. You’ve probably seen films that fail to do this, and you’ve probably looked for clues about the setting and the year as you tried to follow the story. It’s a distraction. Good plays and films use what’s known as an establishing shot to identify time and place.
Although screenwriters shouldn’t use camera directions in a script and playwrights shouldn’t tell a director what to do, it’s the writer’s job to provide clues for the audience that pinpoint the time period. For example, the story might take place in present day or many years or decades in the past. It can also be set hundreds or thousands of years in the future.
When establishing the setting, or place, you need to give the audience hints about the geographic location of the story. For example, a story can be set in a U.S. city like New York, and we might see the New York City skyline or a Broadway street sign in the opening scene. The story can also be set in Kansas, and we might see a road sign that reads, “Kansas City.” It could be set in ancient Rome, in India in 1836, in Los Angeles in the year 2095, or on a distant planet in the year 3000.
Another technique for establishing time and place is the use of a subtitle onscreen or a placard in a play that gives the place and the date. Here’s an example:
EXT. JUNGLE—DAY
Heavy rain falls on dense forest, thick with tangled vines. Mist rises from the forest floor. We HEAR monkeys SCREECHING and birds CALLING.
SUBTITLE FADES IN: BORNEO, INDONESIA—1980
In this example, the scene is described, but it could be a forest anywhere in the world. However, when the subtitle flashes on screen, it tells the audience that this forest is in Borneo, Indonesia, and the year is 1980.
You must establish the time and place of your story at the beginning of your play or screenplay. To do this in your opening scene, ask yourself these two questions:
When does the story take place? Does it take place now, in the past, in the future? When possible, use visual clues to pinpoint the time period. For example, car models, clothing styles, and other elements can identify the time.
Where does the story take place? Describe the geographic location. Include specific details that identify the location such as road signs, skylines, titles on buildings, historic landmarks, etc.
WRITING PROMPT
What other dramatic or cinematic devices can you use to give the audience specific information about the geographic location and year? Would subtitles provide this information?