Both MM and FC, you have made me feel quite self-conscious about my own writing style – right on the tail of receiving notes from my amazing intern Rusty on my use of language on this blog!.

What to do?!

I guess: just write less words.

When spoken, a sentence marks a thought; and the full stop, the end of the thought. Modern language has become a sanitised parody of power via swearing instead of choosing strong verbs that reverberate and have innuendo. But, there again (and I know it is not always proper to begin a sentence with ‘but’ unless it is to mark out the sentence as requiring attention by the reader i.e. for effect) innuendo tends to be lost in the diminishing craft of reading never mind writing. There is a difference between howling and crying; between earnest (deadly as it is to act) and sincere.

Tight dialogue and tight scene images do not mean small words (in case a dummy is reading) – it often means one word to say the same thing as two, or three, or five.

Yes, punctuation matters especially in the dialogue. It forms the ‘Didascalia’ (the plural is didascalie and the spell checker hates this one too- thank heaven for wikitionary) – albeit the implied directions to the actor, and director and DOP, lighting person, sound person etc rather than the stated ones. An ellipse usually means the thought has trailed off, and the speaker leaves the words hanging. A comma isn’t just put in for the sake of simplifying the thought – it is a pause and a change in the direction of the thought. An exclamation mark is a bit more of a challenge and is situational – it might be a expletive, an interjection or even a forceful ending of a thought, and they tend to be overdone by people who don’t use strong verbs.

The problem with adverbs is that some people rely heavily upon them. “She moved swiftly into the space” sounds good until you realise that it is a direction – how does she move, yes swiftly but by what means? Does she ride a broomstick? Walk? Glide? Float? Run? Of course, when the character moves slowly do they walk slothfully, skulkingly (versus skulking – and no it isn’t in the spell checker but it is a proper formation), dawdle etc. ? How much more powerful and evocative are the instructions when they use better words?

Most times a first draft is the narrator’s voice for all characters and for all directions and it is almost a spewing forth of ideas and images that must be, and should be reworked on subsequent drafts. Different people have different ways of working their drafts and there are numerous articles on the subject. Unfortunately, some writers in their attempts to bring their imaginations to life on a page forget that they are creating an imaginary world which must be as specific as possible to allow others to enter that world both on paper and when it is being read for performance by the ‘Creatives’ and the Technicians. They also forget that different voices emerge in the telling (over the course of the drafting process) at different times and rarely all at once.

As for passive versus active voice in the telling of stories, even academic papers tend to favour an active voice in the arts and humanities whilst the sciences and maths prefer a passive one as theirs is the province of report writing. This doesn’t mean that all sentences are of the same length and of the same structure. There is still a good selection of sentence structures available for the active voice even if it is loosely based on “The cat sat on the mat.” Note the cat is the subject doing the action and the mat is the object having the action done to it. Somehow ‘The mat was sat upon by the cat” doesn’t seem to work as well except in screenwriting where you appear to be telling the reader that you see the mat as having the more important role – the close-up and the focus of the shot with the cat walking over to it and sitting down on it.

Present and past tenses also seem to present a problem. In film the convention is to use the present continuing tense as it tracks what the camera will/ should be seeing. The same holds true for treatments. Dialogue, of course, can be either depending on what the character is trying to communicate within the dialogue segment. On the other hand, simple past tense is the convention of the short story or novel. Notwithstanding this, in the last twenty years more and more stories are being written in the present continuing tense and in what in the 1990’s was known as ‘Euro-speak’ see ‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow’ – the novel by Peter Hoeg.

I won’t even try to touch on the other differences in writing for the different media, nor other aspects of punctuation or grammar or I will be writing a book not a quick response. And (just in case you haven’t gauged the tone by the imbedded remarks in the parenthesis,) it is about now I miss the wry looking smiley to give you a wink because obviously I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs…