Crime Screenwriting

 

Crime Screenwriting

First of all, action scenes are all about movement.

Try to imagine yourself in the fight. When your fists are flying and you’re trying not to get punched, you’re not going to stand still and admire the room around you. In the fight — even if it’s third person — the reader should only see the perspective of the involved. The only thing your character should focus on is the task at hand. If they feel emotion, it’s all in their gut and instincts.

This would be a simplistic example:

Like a discarded toy, I was shoved down on the floor, and I lifted my half-lidded eyes to see him sneering victoriously down at me. In that moment, I could feel nothing but hatred for him, and a gripping desire to do something about it. I wanted to fight, to kill — I no longer cared if it killed me.

And so I staggered to my feet. My legs were shaking, but I leapt instantly into the fray. My fists pummeled any inch of skin I could find; the throbbing in my head only a dull pain now. All that mattered was getting my hands around his throat — squeezing until he turned purple — tightening around his neck until he —

“ENOUGH!”

I flew through the air and hit the ground with a thud. Hot blood trickled down my face — I could no longer see as the thick liquid obscured my vision.

And though my lungs screamed in agony, everything inside me protesting, I stumbled back on my feet.

In an action scene, paragraphs should be separated more. It will make the reader jump from action to action as quickly as they occur, and increase tension for the next move. This way, the reader feels their heartbeat quicken, their eyes dart across the page, desperate to see what happens next. Sentences should be straight to the point; describe exactly what is happening and when it does. Describing lengthy emotion and thought processes — unless it is crucial or in a slow moment — can wait for the aftermath or the cooldown. A fierce, bloody battle is not the time to describe the exact color of someone’s eyes or what the mountains looked like.

Action scenes will be drastically different with every novel you look at. In a book like Game of Thrones, the words will be more gruesome and gory, describing the bloodshed and vivid beheadings and brutality. This is useful for purple prose or literature, but you can bore the reader with lengthy description. If you purpose is to engage the reader, a book like Harry Potter is a much better example. It’s more to the point, more about the movements and physical descriptions.

This excerpt is in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling. Often, her scenes have been praised in literature classes I’ve taken.

Harry tore past Hagrid and his opponent, took aim at Snape’s back, and bellowed “STUPEFY!”

He missed — the jet of red light soared past Snape’s head. Snape shouted, “Run, Draco!” and turned to face him. Ten yards apart, he and Harry looked at each other before raising their wands simultaneously.

“Cruc —”

But Snape parried the curse, knocking Harry off his feet; Harry rolled over and scrambled back up again as a huge Death Eater behind him yelled, “Incendio!” Harry heard an explosive bang and a dancing orange light spilled over them: Hagrid’s house was on fire.

“Cruc —” Harry roared a second time, aiming for the figure illuminated in the dancing firelight, but Snape blocked the spell again. Harry could see him sneering. “Incarc —”

But Snape deflected the spell with an almost lazy flick of his wand.

“Fight back!” Harry screamed at him. “Fight back, you cowardly —”

“Coward, did you call me, Potter?” shouted Snape. “Your father would never attack unless it was four on one, what would you call him, I wonder?”

“Impedi —”

But before he could finish his jinx, excruciating pain hit Harry; he keeled over in the grass. Someone was screaming — he would surely die of this agony — Snape was going to torture him to death or madness.

Harry uttered an inarticulate yell of rage: In that instant, he cared not whether he lived or died. Pushing himself to his feet, he staggered blindly at Snape — the man he now hated as much as he hated Voldemort himself.

“Sectum —”

“NO!” screamed Snape.

There was a loud BANG and Harry was sent soaring backward, hitting the ground hard again. Snape closed in and looked down on him where he lay, as wandless and defenseless as Dumbledore had been. Snape’s pale face, illuminated by the flaming cabin, was suffused with hatred just as it had been before he had killed Dumbledore.

“You dare use your own spells against me, Potter? It was I who invented them — I, the Half-Blood Prince! And you’d turn my inventions on me, like your filthy father — I don’t think so…. no!”

Harry had dived for his wand; Snape shot a hex at it and it flew away into the darkness and out of sight.

“Kill me then,” panted Harry, who felt no fear at all, but only rage and contempt. “Kill me like you killed him, you coward —“

“DON’T —” screamed Snape, and his face was suddenly demented, inhuman — “CALL ME COWARD!”

And he slashed at the air. Harry felt a white-hot, whiplike something strike him across the face and was slammed backward into the ground. Spots of light burst in front of his eyes and for a moment all the breath seemed to have gone from his body.

Just rereading as I edited made me realize I had been holding my breath. This is what you’re aiming for.

You want the reader in the scene with them, like they’re fighting right alongside your characters. Work out the beginning, middle, and end of the scene. Once you have it planned, try not to over-write as you go. Write the first thoughts that come to your mind, like the reflexes you would have in a real battle, and don’t let yourself overthink. It will GREATLY improve dramatic timing.

The wording should be quick and direct, avoiding run-on sentences and unnecessary details. By writing to a certain pace, keeping what the reader is experiencing in mind and incorporating your own style, an action scene will vastly improve. The goal is for the scene to be so immersive that it’s easy to lose yourself in the action, to feel the pain and hurt at the same time as your characters.

That is the impact of a well-written action scene.

Michael Haneke is the mastermind behind this crime thriller, serving as both writer and director on the film.

Two preppie-looking young males invade a family’s house and systematically destroy their minds before killing them.

There is a small bit of redemption when the family’s matriarch kills one of the two antagonist, but this is counterbalanced when her bound body is dropped in a lake at the film’s end.

The Critics’ Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is:

“Though made with great skill, Funny Games is nevertheless a sadistic exercise in chastising the audience.”

‘Formulaic Structure’ is a structure in a story that has been done so many times that it’s used as a template.

The problem with using a paint-by-the-numbers template is that it can become boring if the audience recognizes the structure. If the audience is so into the story that they don’t notice the structure, then it’s a job well-done! But most people have to learn how to write that well.

Other people twist a formula inside-out to try to hide it.

And other people… don’t use a formula (or use a very simple one and work with it in different ways).

For example: Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But how do you get from the beginning to the middle and to the end?

That’s where story structure comes in.

Or not. There’s a different way to write a story.

Before I begin explaining how, I want to caution you that screenplays have a technical structure that you should adhere to.

A screenplay is a set of instructions that tell a director, producer, actors, etc. how you want your story to be presented on-screen. A screenplay is a work-in-process document, not the final product. The film is the final product. The screenplay is one of the steps in the process of how to get there. (And there are different types of screenplays used in different steps of the movie’s production process. And television and animations have their own formatting and layout for their scripts; it’s slightly different from a screenplay.) Make sure you get the formatting right!

Also, some people want screenplays to have act breaks. You don’t need to write them in before your screenplay is done. Even if you don’t write with a formula, your story should fall into Some Kind of Act structure, and you can write the Act headings in the appropriate places once you’re done.

Now, on to how I write:

And I’m not the only one who thinks like this. Prolific comic book writer, Chuck Dixon, also uses a method similar to this, but his is more refined (better), so I’ll include some of his tips here.

Every story has a Beginning. The Beginning informs the End. If you know how a story began, you can figure out possibilities for how it ends, because the end is supposed to ‘end’ the story that began at the beginning. If your ending doesn’t do that, it’s not the ending of your story. Then you have to figure out where your story really ends (and whether you’ve written that ending earlier in your story, or not at all, or whether your story has gone off the rails and isn’t the story that you began writing).

A ‘formula’ is how to get the story (the plot) from the beginning to the end.

But you don’t need a formula to do this.

A ‘formula’ is a series of events that are common to many stories. But instead of looking at the events and trying to replace them as milestones, try looking at what caused the events.

You’ll often find that what caused the events is related, but not because the authors were trying to stick to a formula. It’s more likely they were trying to write the way things tend to happen in real life.

And to understand real life, you have to think from a systems approach.

Everything has systems. Ecosystems. Biological systems. Government systems. Legal systems. Social systems. Traffic systems. School systems.

All of them are systems.

A system is a set of rules that dictate how things should be done. It’s a system that allows things to work together efficiently.

Think about it.

If you want your character to get a job, that character has to engage with an economic system. Jobs are part of making a business operate. Businesses operate based on value or profit (the business wants to get something out of it, to grow). The use, and price, of products and services is based on supply and demand. Payment is made (often) in money. Laws govern and regulate businesses and how they operate.

So your character would have to get a job at a place that wants the skills that he has to offer because he can make the business better, more profitable, or more stable, or more efficient. Does your character have the skills required to do that?

If you look at what your character has, and what the business requires, you can figure out what roadblocks or obstacles your character has to overcome to reach your character’s goal.

Maybe your character has to go to school? School is a system. It’s a system that demands entry based on age, or allows entry based on educational experience. Does your character have what it takes to meet the requirements to enter the school? Can your character afford to pay tuition? Can your character meet the assignment deadlines and pass the exams? All those things are regulated.

Whether in family, business, or crime, there’s a social hierarchy. There are relationships. There are rules of conduct. All that is part of a system.

If you set the systems in place in your story world, you can figure out how your character is going to get from Point A to Point B based on the natural roadblocks in the system, and what your character has to do to get past them. Or you can think of a way for your character to go around them, but that often involves working within systems too. Or learning how to use a system in a different way, or navigate around in a system differently.

Of course, characters can be there to cause roadblocks or conflict. They could try to use/manipulate the system(s) to their own advantage.

And that’s where you look for weaknesses or loopholes in the system.

There’s enough in a story to provide obstacles and drama, if a character develops his/her story world. And it makes it easier to write (in my opinion) if you have an idea of how your story world works because then you know where (and how) your characters can flow through your story. And that’s really the path that the plot takes - the movement/work of your characters throughout the story.

That having been said, a screenwriter analyzed top movie and found the following:

'Everything in the story must change.'

There has to be a pattern of change.

A screenplay has 3 Acts.

In Act 1: there are 6 sequences following one another. In each sequence, 2-7 pages long, the protagonist pursues one (physical tangible) short-term goal. Each goal is one step toward achieving the overall story goal.

At the end of each of the sequences, the character discovers "fresh news" that is news to the character (and the audience) about what the character is doing. That puts an end to that goal and starts the character off on pursuing the next short-term goal.

At the end of 'Goal Sequence 6,' the protagonist receives a surprise (that surprises the audience too) and sends the protagonist into Act 2.

Act 2: there are 6 more 'Goal Sequences' in the first half of Act 2. And goal 12 is the 'mid-point sequence' which contains a lot of layered things. "It's a very interesting part of stories that work."

There are 6 more 'goal sequences' in the second half of Act 2: 'goal sequence 18' always contains 'Stunning Surprise 2,' which sends the character into Act 3.

Act 3 contains 3-5 'Goal Sequences' that makes the character meet the main goal (and sets up a sequel, if need be).

The average for top screenplays is 21-23 goal sequences (so Eric Edson says).

You simply follow the basic guidelines and expectations (keep everything short/sweet/to the point, engage the reader early, introduce the concept and conflict early, etc.). Everything beyond that is up to you, the story teller.

Show me twists. Show me turns. Lead me the obvious way, only to twist it in the opposite direction of what I'm expecting based off of what has come before.

1: Difference between story and script.

Do you want to write a story or a script? Be clear about it because both are different and both are difficult for the novices. Let us see what are the main differences between these two.

Story: Requires genre, story line, characterization, premise, a starting, a middle, and an apt ending. The main objective of a story is to TELL about how the characters feel while things are happening to them, and how the characters are reacting and overcoming them. Hence, story writing mostly involves psychological perception of characters towards a certain situation.

Script: the other name of script is screenplay, which literally means what are you going to play on the screen? A story is to TELL and a screenplay is to SHOW. Without a story, you can't write a script. And without a script, you can't shoot or even explain a scene in a simple manner to actors or other crew members on the sets. So, without a good screenplay, a director will fail to direct the team in successful direction.

So both story and screenplay are different. And in film making both are important. In Hollywood, most of the script writers are not story writers, but in bollywood it is not so. Now that we know this difference, let's move to step 2.

2: Goal and method of script writing.

Film makers goal: To give a product of 120 minutes of audio/video to audience. How good is that product depends almost on all the factors right from story to final mixing.

Script writers goal: To mould the story in the hand into a proper document. This document will serve as a blueprint for the entire production and post production of the movie. How is this done?

A) Divide the story into scenes. (Note: A scene is a part of a story which happens at one location at one time. Generally a commercial movie has around 60 to 70 scenes.)

B) Divide the scenes into sub scenes. (A scene may sometimes be lengthy and may also involve two or three locations like that of a telephonic coversation between friends, then the scenes need to be divided into sub scenes as they cannot be shot at one time.)

C) Divide scenes/subscenes into shots. A shot will guide the team on framing aspect of a scene. Generally a scene starts with a very wide/wide frame to tell the audience about where it is taking place. And then it gradually moves to mid frame, and to close ups and extreme close ups at times.

D) Start every scene with proper scene no, location, time.

Ex: Scene 5 Location: Market Time: Morning

E) Start with proper scene description. Start every sentence in a new line. Most of the times, one sentence in the script will require one shot.

Ex:

There was a market.

People were busy buying and selling vegetables at various shops.

Bunty was observing the shops and the people.

F) Before a particular dialogue, write the character’s name.

Ex:

Bunty to shop owner

Uncle, yeh kaddu kite ka hain?

Shop owner

Ek kaddu 20 rupay.

Bunty

Par baajoo shop me tho 10 ko hi Mil raha hain.

Shop owner

Tho wahi pe khareed na, yaha pe kyu aaya. Chal footle yaha se.

3. Honing the script writing skills

A) Before you write a script, download and read some scripts from internet. This will give you an idea of what a script is and how it looks like.

B) Read at least 1 to 2 books on script writing to gain exceptional clarity on the process. Sometimes, though there is a story in your hands, you might wonder about how to present in in a visual format to audience, as they might be lacking dialogues, intervals etc. These books are there to guide you. One book that I personally like is Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. It is simple and easy to understand.

C) Watch movies and observe how the scenes are shot. One is an action scene, and the other one a love and then there is a comdey scene. Take a love scene for instance, observe how hero looked at heroine, how well she smiled and lowered her eye lids, then how he came near her, and then how she shied and turned away. Each shot is a part of script written by some screen writer somewhere. So, observe as much as possible and try to understand how it would have been written.

D) Though reading and observing are good, there is definitely no replacement for doing. Why don't you write a script for a small story today? And check whether your script is really helping your team in the process of film making. If no one is ready to shoot your script, why don't you yourself go ahead and make it and check where you stand as a script writer?

All the best!

If it is an original work, then it is already unique because it is your story. However, if you are looking to shed a new light on it in a way that stands out from other crime thrillers, then I would suggest thinking about how the "average" story in your genre pans out, who the key players generally are/whose point of view the "average" is generally placed in, time period, etc. There are so many ways that you can go about this to create something unique. You can change up your point of view and tell the story from a different angle. You can place the story in a different era: past, present, future; real town, USA, other country, completely fabricated city/town, or even a different world/planet. You can add a subgenre to further differentiate your tale from the rest by adding a touch of romance, or sci-fi, etc. The list goes on and on. I hope this helps. Good luck with your writing.

First off at their primal level all stories to be told have already been told. If you break down your story too much it will have much and more in common with many stories/films already out there.

The thing is most stories (especially crime thriller/mystery ones) tend to have numerous archetypal stories within them so you can mix and match the pieces at will (for fun learning all the different plot devices/character types go to Home Page - TV Tropes you will hate me if you do but I don't think they lack any plot arc or character archetype in existence). You can also lay false trails making characters look like their one type but are in truth another.

You can also mess around with setting. Most crime thrillers tend to take place in contemporary (at least for the time they were written) big cities. Yes there are plenty of exceptions (like small town for instance) but there are literally worlds of places that aren't heavily drawn on for settings.

When I was around twelve years old my step-father (who was perpetually looking to make money without effort) accidentally sold cocaine to the wrong guy.

An FBI agent.

After being arrested, he put his own mother’s house up for bail and then didn’t appear in court. This is called “jumping bail” and the court will automatically keep whatever money you posted for that bail. In this case, it was his mom’s house and they took it.

He was eventually caught and went to prison.

My mom wasn’t working. Everything we owned had been placed in storage and since the bill was never paid, it was all sold at auction. (Think: Storage Wars if you’ve seen it.) The car we were using was borrowed.

Nearly homeless, my mom was able to get us a small room to share with a friend of hers. And that’s when… sorry to interrupt.

I share this story to make the point.

The best way to make your writing unique is to tell a story.

It doesn’t have to be just your personal story although your story is special and one of a kind. The beauty is, no one else can tell it as you can.

Stories…

• Captivate readers.
• Change minds.
• Inspire.
• Make people like you.
• Are remembered and shared.

Whatever you are writing, big stories, small stories, simple stories, funny stories, or cautionary tales… the more stories you tell the better.

So…

After finding us a place to live with this friend, my mom came home with a new car. New to us. An avocado green Ford LTD sedan (built in the early 1970s), it was hideous. I complained about it every time I opened the giant passenger door and got in. Google it and you will see. I was so embarrassed by this vehicle that I refused to let her drop me off near the school. I was a kid and I cared about what other people thought about me.

And yet, my mom was able to pick up the pieces after things completely fell apart. She found a good job and worked hard. She bought that car (hopefully for only a few hundred dollars) all by herself.

Today I look back on that time and I’m not ashamed or embarrassed like I was then. I am proud of what she accomplished. If I could go back now, I’d let her drop me off in front of the school.

Now go tell your story!