Читать книгу 39 Steps to Better Screenwriting - Paul Chitlik - Страница 14

Step 8

Details

Writers like to think that details don’t matter, but they matter a great deal when what you have to express yourself are twenty-six letters, a handful of punctuation marks, and a blank screen. If one of those lands in the wrong spot, you could have a big misunderstanding, not at all what you intended, or a disaster.

Many punctuation warnings start with a sentence something like this: “Let’s eat Grandma.” Or, it could be this: “Let’s eat, Grandma.” The comma makes all the difference in the world, so a detail like a comma is important.

Spelling is also important as some people would have a hard time eoyj s drmyrmvr ;olr yjod/ (would have a hard time with a sentence like this.). The difference between what you couldn’t read and what you could was my fingers were placed one letter over on the keyboard from where they should have been. Small detail, and I’m sure you would never do such a thing, right? But it happens, which is why proofreading is so important.

Another thing which seems elementary (and should have been taken care of in elementary school in this computer age) is that when submitting your work electronically, you should put your name in the filename. As a professor in a major film school, I often see this for a filename: beatsheet.

Okay, whose beatsheet is that? If I download two or three like that, what happens to the first one? It gets erased and I never see it. So, when learning or when submitting to an agent or a producer, always put your name and the title of the script in the filename.

Then, crazily enough, students often don’t even put their names on their scripts, whether submitted as a whole or just some pages. Why not? Because they figure I’ll know who sent them from the filename. See above.

And even if I know from the filename, once they get bunched in my “to read” folder, and they have no name on them, to whom do I attribute them?

So, always, always, put your name in the filename and your name on the inside of the file, preferably on a title page, but at least on the first page of script. Think about it. If there is no name on the script that you send to a producer who has hired you to do a script, they can’t give you credit. No credit, no pay. No pay, and the dream goes up in smoke.

There are more details to remember. Incorrect sluglines. Format in general. And deadlines. Contact information on your title page (no Writers Guild of America registration on the title page … but register it nonetheless).

My students get penalized if they’re late with a script. So do professional writers. How? By creating a bad reputation. By seeming to be difficult to work with. If you’re writing a freelance sitcom script and you’re late, you could interrupt a very precise schedule. Do it once, and you may not get the chance to do it again. Do it twice and I guarantee you won’t be able to do it a third time.

Just a detail. But details are important.