Screenwriting Tip: Sentence Crafting

As a screenwriter you maybe have the movie running in your head, but what you should aim for is your audience, meaning the readers of your script (and not the viewers of the produced piece). The scriptwriter's weapons are sentences, and words.

We deal with art in time, and we want to reflect the time feeling in our script. You should be able to control your reader's reading tempo: when does he takes a breath, when does he reads fast. there are several ways of manipulating your script to do so, and one of those ways is the descending sentence.

Descending sentence is used to slow down the tempo of the reading, to create almost a halt, a pause in the script. To create a 'moment' without writing that artificial word 'pause'. Because nobody just pauses. There is always something happening, even the smallest thing.

Let us see this descending sentence in action. I use a draft of Coen Brothers' script for A Serious Man. I found this draft on Script-O-rama. Their scripts are such a delight to read, so fluent, like a story. So they are great to learn from.

His point-of-view: very close on the face of a classroom clock. We hear its electrical hum. Its red sweep-second hand crawls around the dial very, very slowly.

The last sentence in this short paragraph is a descending sentence. Of course, there are a few techniques used here to slow down the tempo: the repeat (very, very), the actual choice of words (crawls, slowly), but we focus on the sentence crafting.

It splits into three parts:

1. Its red sweep-second hand (5)
2. crawls around the dial (4)
3. very, very slowly. (3)

By using less words for each part, our reading tempo declines. It's a matter of delicate sentence design, something you feel more as you read it, and as you master the language and the use of words more - so this technique will come naturally to you. Feeling is everything here.

Try it yourself on everyday sentences, get the feeling of this, get crafty!