Hello again! My name is Garth, and I’m a reader for the Killer Shorts competition. I read 200 scripts this year, and I’m back to give you some advice and (hopefully) some words of encouragement.
Every year, the readers write up an internal list of the scripts we liked the most. This is where we fight for the submissions we’re passionate about in case they wind up on the bubble or something like that. Since I’m prone to turning everything into an exhausting exercise, I always write a lengthy tier list. “Favorites,” “Other Special Ones,” “Ones I Liked Enough to Want To See Advance,” and so on and so forth. The list of scripts I liked this year was longer than it’s ever been.
For me at least, this has been the best year of the competition so far. Despite some negativity in this article, I don’t want to lose sight of that. My favorite scripts of this season are some of the best I’ve read in my three years at this competition. Even the worst scripts I read weren’t outright trainwrecks.
Still, there’s always room to improve! And more importantly, before we get into my bullshit, I feel positive. You should feel positive. (Unless you didn’t move forward, in which case, you have the right to not feel positive.) We all should feel positive. Alright, let’s get into it!
Stop Writing In Camera Movements (Or: Creating Artificial Proximity With Production By Inserting Camera Movements Does Not Make You Look Like A Professional)
I always end these articles with a list of small bits of advice. Mind your typos and your formatting and stuff like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if I included “Stop writing in camera movements” every year, and if I didn’t, then I should have. To my memory, I’ve never really elaborated on why you shouldn’t do this. I just said that you shouldn’t, and I probably did so in a grumpy and curt manner. So allow me to finally do so. In a grumpy and curt manner.
First of all, there’s your basic screenwriting 101 stuff.
Camera movements eat valuable space on the page. Space you definitely don’t have to give in a competition where the maximum page count is so low. Their inclusion also makes your descriptions less clear, and they make for an overall clunky reading experience. On top of that, I’d argue that you’re also denying your audience a certain level of involvement. Part of the way a reader, be it a casual one or otherwise, engages with a script is by making the movie in their head. They make your story tangible by casting their own actors and choosing their own angles. By writing in all the camera movements, you’re taking that level of participation away from them.
However, none of those are the most egregious problems.
There exists an idea that you can advance in screenwriting competitions by implying that you’re already on track for production. By suggesting that actual professionals might be involved in making this film a reality. Hell, money may have even changed hands, therefore you have to take this script seriously for some reason.
Writers make these insinuations with “subtle” tricks. Sometimes it’s by numbering scenes. Sometimes it’s by overusing transitions. Some even throw delicacy out the window and include giant watermarks for their production companies. (While we’re on the subject of watermarks, don’t fucking add watermarks. They accomplish nothing and they make your script way harder to read. Everybody hates them. Don’t fucking do it.) Usually, it’s a combination of those tactics, which is how you know it’s something the writer’s doing on purpose. However, the most prominent example of this is when the writer adds in camera movements.
An occasional “ZOOM IN ON” here or a reference to a tracking shot there is fine. I’d prefer none at all, but that’s just me. It becomes an issue, however, when they’re more aggressive. I’ve read scripts for this competition where the writer includes literally every camera movement they see in their minds. However, the less extreme examples aren’t that much worse, and in either case, it comes off as trying too hard.
I want your untainted vision. When you write in camera movements, you’re giving me a demonstration of professionalism. You’re putting the artifice of art in front of the actual art, and you’re forcing me to swerve around it to get what I actually want.
I will grant that there’s the possibility that I’m reading too much into this. Maybe the inclusion of camera movements was an honest attempt to communicate a vision. Or the writer included them because they simply didn’t know they weren’t supposed to do that. Some would even argue that this isn’t really a problem and I’m just being an asshole.
First of all, I know when writers are doing this on purpose. Don’t ask me how. I just do. Second of all, even if I didn’t, it should be enough to know that inserting camera movements may lead a reader to think you’re trying to manipulate them. We can be very petty sometimes, so it’s best not to take the risk.
We want your work in its purest form, and we don’t want to have to dig to get it. Just let your work speak for itself.
Shock Value is Boring
Did you know that there is a fetish for anthropomorphic airplanes?
That is airplanes from various eras of history with all four limbs and female attributes of comedically large proportions posing lustfully for the audience.
I bring all this up for two reasons. The first is that I thought it would be funny to start a section with the sentence, “Did you know that there is a fetish for anthropomorphic airplanes.” The second and much more important reason is to demonstrate the futility of trying to be shocking.
The problem with shock value is not that it’s offensive. The problem is that the internet robbed the very concept of “shock” of all its meaning and value.
Every year, I read a pile of scripts that rely solely on shock value to stand out. Sometimes it’s scripts that feature a ton of heavy violence or a bunch of explicit sex and/or sex crimes. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two. (There’s also always one or two necrophilia scripts.) Whatever the case may be, I read these scripts and I don’t feel scandalized or whatever it is you want me to feel. I just get bored and start looking at anthropomorphic airpla– I mean, umm… puppy videos.
The issue is that you’re not just competing against individual scripts in any given competition for your reader’s shock value. You’re also competing against everything they’ve experienced in their lives so far, and that includes their time on the internet. A catalog of the totality of human perversions, objectionable behavior, and awful opinions.
You’re competing against the twelve-year-old who called me a slur in a video game. The racist fuckface whose Twitter account just got reinstated. The bizarre fetish my friends found out about and shared images of in our Discord.
You can’t shock me if you tried. I don’t mean that in some performative masculine way, I mean the internet has literally zapped that feeling out of me. Now my friends send me pictures of sexy lady planes and you know what I feel? Absolutely nothing.
Granted, you may have reached the conclusion that my soul is dead and… you might be right. But the thing is that I’m not a particularly online person. My internet time is relatively low, and I deleted most of my social media accounts years ago. The same, probably, cannot be said for many of my fellow readers in this competition or others. What do you think they’ve been exposed to, and do you really think you’re going to top it?
The point is that if you’re relying solely on shock value, you’ll fail and you’ll look stupid for trying. It makes you seem unaware that the internet exists and the idea that if I want to, I can open a tab and find something a thousand times more shocking than your script with zero effort whatsoever.
All of this, however, is not to say that you can’t write explicit or shocking content at all. It’s that it can’t be the sole purpose. I read the most sexually explicit script I’ve ever read for the competition this year and guess what? I gave it a high score and recommended it to move forward! Sadly, I can’t go into the specifics, but it had something more substantive in mind than “Let’s try to offend people!!!!!”
There’s a way to do it. Just do it right.
Turning the Tables Isn’t Enough
There’s a formula I saw a lot this year and in previous years as well. It goes like this: A hunter (whatever that may be) stalks a target, but then it turns out the target knows the hunter’s been hunting them the whole time and turns the tables.
A serial killer tracks his next victim, but the next victim’s actually lured the killer to an isolated spot to get some revenge. The end. The slasher’s about to tear the coed apart, but it turns out the coed has some sort of training or she’s a psycho killer herself and ends up doing something horrifying to the slasher. The end. We’re put in a scenario where X is about to do something terrible to Y, but Y’s actually the one in charge. The end.
You get the idea.
It’s not that these scripts are bad. Quite the contrary in fact, as I ended up giving high scores to quite a few of these. The problem is that a lot of writers think that simply having this one twist is enough.
Much like shock value scripts, much depends on what you do with your twist.
If your twist adds to the substance of the script or provides greater meaning to the narrative beyond just having a twist, it’s not a problem. Maybe it contributes to an arc or informs the subtext. However, it becomes an issue when the turning of the tables happens and then the script just ends or we learn nothing new after it happens. You’re not standing out because so many other writers are doing the exact same thing, and even if they weren’t, you’re not giving me anything I can sink my teeth into.
The difference, I think, is primarily in one of character. A turning of the tables works when we’ve gotten to know our characters enough and we can understand their actions and motivations. Once the tables have turned, it means something. It works less when it’s a generic serial killer tracking a generic woman, and then the woman does whatever she’s going to do to the killer before we end. What did we learn? Why should we care? If the answer to that second question is just “It’s a nice little twist” or something like that, you haven’t done enough to advance.
Turning the tables is fun, but fun is also fleeting. There has to be more behind it.
Please Write More Plant Horror
Yes, I know The Last of Us exists. Yes, I’ve played the games.
Let me be a little more specific here, as you probably can’t touch cordyceps or fungus any time soon. Please write more plant themed horror about nature fighting back against the encroachment of humans.
I usually get a handful of these a year, and even when they aren’t good enough to advance, they’re always a lot of fun because they play with our assumptions of what villainy looks like. Most of the time, we can compare a horror movie threat to something tangible. The monster attacking the cabin might be supernatural, but it still fundamentally behaves like an animal. We understand that its motives are to kill and eat us. The serial killer invading the married couple’s home may be crazed, but he’s still a human. You can hurt his feelings and he’ll bleed if you stick him with something sharp.
Plants are alive, but they don’t operate like the usual horror movie creatures. They don’t appear to us as threats, but they’re capable of harm and the vast majority of us can’t really explain how that happens. When we write plants as villains, be it when they’re infecting someone’s mind or ensnaring us out in the wild or eating us, the question of whether or not they’re sentient adds a layer of creepiness. When it does what it does, does it have intent?
They’re common yet alien, and much like corporate horror, their presence is another way of adding subtext to your script without really having to try that hard. Be it the evil potted plant someone brought home or the mysterious flower growing in the backyard or the mysterious vines near the vacation property, it’s all humans vs. nature. The tiny things that grow from the ground we take for granted have had enough of our shit.
It doesn’t even have to be plants. It can be the flora and the fauna. (Though, preferably, you stick with plants. We have a lot of fauna horror already.) What’s important is that the theme remains. We messed with the natural order of things, and now we have to pay for it.
The Ghost Hunter Problem
I wish I could remember where I heard this, but years ago, I heard a writing tip about wedding scenes.
The tip is that since weddings have a pre-set order of events built into them, you can deploy your story beats at key moments the audience will already know to anticipate. The variables of any given wedding scene may be subject to change. The kinds of characters that occupy your wedding scene and the role they play in the wedding or their background or whatever. But no matter what, there will be a ceremony, there will be a reception, there will be the individual traditions at the reception (speeches, dancing, cutting the cake), and there will be whatever happens after the wedding. The structure’s already there. You just have to fill in the blanks.
The issue with weddings, however, is that there’s a built-in structure. Once you decide to write a wedding scene, you’re locked into that structure unless you go out of your way to break it. You either have to take advantage of it or you’re writing a wedding scene that’s literally like all the others.
I bring all this up because the submissions I encountered the most this year were scripts about people making ghost hunting media, be it a Youtube channel or a podcast or a TV show or social media or whatever. The issue with not all, but the vast majority of ghost hunting scripts I read is that they run into a similar dilemma.
We will meet a team of ghost hunters. They will go to a location that is supposed to be haunted or something bad happened there or whatever. They may or may not fake the ghost encounter, but they will be attacked by the evil thing that makes the space haunted.
The issue is that, unlike wedding scenes, you’re limited in the way you can play with the formula. Weddings are a common event that everyone has to go to no matter your personality type or station in life. Ghost hunting is a much narrower kind of experience. The members of the ghost hunting team either believe in ghosts or they don’t. (In most cases there is, at minimum, one believer and one skeptic.) The ghost hunters will either survive in the end or they won’t. The supernatural entity will be real or it won’t be and something else will happen.
Notice, however, that these are all binaries. You have one option or the other. True, that’s a tad bit reductive, but to go back to the wedding comparison, there are so many variables about weddings that can change the story or its context. The trappings of ghost hunting scripts are much narrower.
I will say that not every ghost hunting script I read follows this formula. But the ones that didn’t were few and far between, and even then, the ones that broke from the formula did so in the same ways and it stopped being novel very quickly.
The point here is not to say that you can’t do ghost hunting scripts. The point is that you need to bring in some of the variability that wedding scenes have. Those getting married can be from different cultures and socio-economic backgrounds, and those details have an impact on how a wedding scene can play out. Can the same be said for ghost hunting scripts? Maybe! I don’t know! I want you to find out! That way, I can recommend more of your scripts! So find a way to shake up that formula, or at the very least, give it more nuance.
In fact, let’s go one step further. Don’t just be wary of ghost hunting scripts. Be wary of the confines of any idea. Sometimes, having barriers is a good thing. It can keep you from going off the deep end and they give you rules to play with. However, they can also trap you in a formula that every other writer has to follow. So just be careful.
Remember to Have Fun, and Always Keep Writing
Some of you are probably here because your script didn’t make it into the quarterfinals and you would like some insight into why.
First and foremost, I’m a writer myself, and I’m more than familiar with that disappointment. Secondly, there are always exceptions to the rules above. Some people only wrote in a camera movement or two and that’s it. As mentioned, some people wrote thoughtful scripts with explicit content. Some writers did more with their reveals and did something different with their ghost hunter scripts.
Were you the exception? Who knows. I didn’t read every script and there are assuredly submissions that made it into the quarterfinals that ran afoul of my “rules”. Maybe you wrote one and maybe you didn’t. Maybe nothing I wrote about applies to you at all.
I say all of the things I said in this article not to chastise anyone for the decisions they made. I say these things so you can be mindful of them next time. Because there will be a next time. And since there will be a next time, be mindful of what I’ve said or whatever anyone else says, but remember that you’re ultimately in the driver’s seat when it comes to your own work. Rejection sucks, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have fun and love what you’re doing just for the sake of doing it.
Talent absolutely plays a role in who advances in these kinds of competitions. But let’s all be honest with ourselves: It’s also a lot of arbitrary bullshit. You got the wrong reader on the wrong day. Maybe that reader read something similar that they like more, or maybe they’re just in a bad mood. Whatever. Once your script is submitted, you’re no longer in control. If you didn’t make it forward, the only value you get from dwelling on it is how you want to change things up next time.
So if you did a thing I said not to do, it doesn’t mean you’re not talented. It just means that you have some more tools in your arsenal for the next time around. Do not feel bad or stop writing on my account. Just keep writing, and try to have fun.
A Few Quick Bullet Points
- Typos matter because our judges expect a certain level of polish. If we send them a script with a bunch of typos, it makes us look bad as a competition and they won’t want to work with us. Personally, I don’t give a shit about typos as long as the story’s effective. But I don’t have the luxury of ignoring them, and there were plenty of great scripts that can’t move because of this issue. So proofread, proofread, and then proofread again.
- Don’t do anthologies. The maximum page count is too short to make them work. Maybe if we were a thirty or forty page competition, but we’re not.
- This is something I want to write about in longer form at some point, but make sure you’re taking advantage of your premise. Bad example: If your script involves an object that grants wishes, and the first wish causes the problem, consider having some fun with the wishes first?
- Giving your character one surface level flaw and then punishing them for it is not depth. Another bad example: Guy is angry and then he gets attacked by an anger monster.
- Be wary of turning in a script that isn’t horror or a thriller. I know that seems obvious, but I read a lot of scripts that are more on the margins of the genres we cover. Sometimes, it leads to a frustrating scenario where I script I love gets rejected. So if your script is only arguably a horror or a thriller, know that it might not advance.
- Once again, great work everyone!
Photos courtesy of Jonny Clow, Jeremy Yap, Kraken Images, Andy Li, Sebastian Unrau, and Robert Zunkikoff at Unsplash.
