Screenwriting : Formatting by Brandon Brown

Curious from whom you were told this. As a general rule - and don't we all love those - the more white space on a script, the less intimidating it can seem to the reader. More white space = less time reading. First thing I would say is start looking at your scene descriptions as paragraphs, not paragraph. How can you break it up? Second, I would say get lean and mean on your descriptions - for every three sentences you have now, take one out. What's the central idea you are trying to get across? Find that one thing that says in your mind, "That. That is what this scene is about." Happy pruning.

Pretty much what Kerry said, you need more white on the page. remove anything that's not required and break up your big print.

Think of yourself as the physical camera as you write. I'm not saying to add camera directions but every time you visualize a change of camera position or angle, then that should be a new paragraph.

What I do is give a new paragraph for a person. It makes it an easier read and tends to give feeling of shots.

Rather than:

Craig walls through the door. lovely followed by Harry. Steve comes through behind he has his rifle up scanning the room.

I might do:

Craig comes through the door.

Harry follows.

Steve is next, rifle raised scanning the room.

Three smaller lines are easy to read. Your eye will fall down the page giving a sense of pace to the action.

In a script I am doing at the moment I am using a page break to stop the read on a dramatic moment. The reason is every event after that feels like a different film. There is a before and after.

Have I don’t this before NO. Will I ever do it again NO. This bit of story needed it. use your page to get maximum effect on the reader.

Here is a resource autocrat.com .

I've developed a personal "Rule of 4":

No more than 4 lines of action before starting a new paragraph.

No more than 4 paragraphs of action before a dialogue.

No more than 4 lines of dialogue before something else - a new char speaking, a parenthetical, action, etc.

No more than 4 dialogues before an action.

No more than 4 pages before starting a new scene.

This keep the pages "clean" for the reader. It also forces me into "brevity mode" - finding ways to pack as much impact as I can into those self-imposed restrictions (although I break my own rules sometimes).

May not be for anyone else, but this works for me.

Brandon Brown try pasting or exporting Celtx to FD, see what happens...:)

Tasha Lewis 2 autocrat.com goes to Finlays Tea website.

John Ellis - You stole my 'Rule of 4'. I've been doing this for years. I even have a 'punch list' of mistakes that first time writers should avoid.

John Ellis, thank you for the update. Here is the correction autocrit.com

Tasha Lewis 2 - great! Autocrit seems like a useful tool. The Hemingway Editor is a similar product, although more limited in its scope - but a lot cheaper, too. $25 to download the app and lifetime license. Autocrit has a lot more options. The free plan seems very useful, but the $30 a month plan is too steep for me! :)

Brandon, there are a lot of great comments to your post, here a couple of things I have found too. First "Script" is minimal story telling. There is the world, the location, the establishing shot, the action, and the Character(very brief descriptions for casting) and thier dialouge. Someone where I read that if 20 different directors made a film from the same script there would be 20 different films and unless it is nessary to the story, leave out most of the emotion that is the actors value. There is a rule that 1 minute of script equals one minute on the screen. Most film dialouge are short sentences of five to seven words with the characters standing at 45 degrees to each other and the dialouge is just back and forth. Reasonably there is room on the page for about 10 to 14 lines of dialouge between two characters on one page of script and it is one scene. Last thing, I use Fianl Draft 11 because there is tool to assigned the actor(s) a voice and it will speak. If you have an App that can read text-speech try it, see how long your page really is. I have heard that some script readers will start a counter and read it for ten pages and see how long it takes, if the counter time is too long or too short it needs fixing, ie whitespace.

John Ellis, I'm glad you found it useful. The reason that it came up with the other spelling was the spell check. They have an affiliate program that could help you earn your monthly fee.

I have a 'punch list' of newbie errors that I've started sending out to the writers I mentor. It may be of help. DM me if you'd like a copy.

I would have to read it to see what they are talking about.

I learned the best way to write a script is to keep descriptions short and sweet. Make if brief and to the point. Adding more space would probably turn them off.

As others have said: sounds like the problem isn't format related, but writing related. Too wordy.