An excerpt from my script review for World War Z which will be available 08/26/25:
4.) Dialogue and Description
Alright, here’s the main focus of discussion.
So this script was 120 pages of actual text. I started reading at 7pm and a little after 9pm was only on page 80.
I didn’t have time to finish since I had to get to bed to work the next day, and only finished reading last evening.
Keep in mind, I had zero distractions and did nothing out of the ordinary from how I previously read scripts.
If your readers are consistently taking a long time to finish your scripts, then that’s a real issue.
The standard is 1 minute per page, but if you go a little over on a page or two, that’s not the end of the world.
A reader spending 2+ hours and only making it two thirds of the way through your script?
Sorry, but that’s a real issue that needs addressing.
One of the major problems was just how descriptive and flowery the writer chose to be.
There were multiple pages with walls of 5 to 6 line blocks, one after another.
Page 7:
Then a legless, armless body hits right next to us. Dark,
syrup-thick blood spatters all. This shredded body lies
inert…eyes liquefied from the blast that tore it apart.
Head broken open. Ghastly. Smoking. And then it begins
snapping it’s jaws at the empty air, at our existence.
It’s teeth chip-splinter-break from the force with which it
bites empty air: this distinctive, disturbing sound like wolf
traps opening and closing rapid-fire, but mixed with the
tinkling of glass or enamel breaking. The biting is rhythmic,
mechanical – like this thing is a vastly lesser form of life
now, cursed by DNA to some Sisyphean task in the food chain.
A lot of time was spent on the teeth of these zombies, which I get, is both scary as a visual and how the virus spreads, but do we really need this level of explanation?
Remember, you’re not adapting the novel word for word!
You could easily have trimmed this down…
This shredded body lies inert…Head broken open…
Suddenly– jaws begin to snap at empty air–
Teeth chip-splinter-break from the force with which they
bite, craving flesh…this distinctive, disturbing mechanical rhythm that will be a new normal.
That “should” read a lot quicker and easier than the original text, because we’re trying to convey a clear message, not win an award for best prose.
Page 29.
Want to know why it took me so long to read this script? Just glance at page 29 with its two lines of dialogue but Jerusalem style size walls of description.
Note: Don’t do this in your script.
Break. Up. Visuals.
Page 76:
And then we notice…
… we begin pushing-in as well…zooming and dropping until we’re at ground level…
And then we see this very first line of Zs…
We begin to pull back out and up now as we watch this pyramid…
From another page of all description, with limited dialogue.
Just tell us what we see without referring to the person reading the script.
This is where you do write like a novel, in that we only ever read what the characters are doing, no reference to us in the story at all, or how we’re viewing it.
The technique is simple…just describe the scene.
(The dialogue was fine.)
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