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keri halfacre

freelance writer

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Perfecting Your Settings

08/27/2019      Leave a Comment

My day job is literally putting together sets for TV. In visual mediums, the set does the vital job of communicating a lot of information in a very short span of time. Everything on screen is a visual short cut, but that doesn’t mean it can be forgotten on the page either.

Details in any setting are part of the layers that build a story. They say things about characters. All these choices speak, and sadly, sometimes they say nothing at all. Make the setting work!

perfecting your setting
www.kerihalfacre.com

Choosing Your Broad Setting

Think about how geography could lend itself to your story when writing settings. I personally adore the idea of urban fantasy set in New Orleans. Why wouldn’t you? It’s entrenched in history of taking in outcasts. There’s already a strong presence of ritual and religious themes. There are some of the creepiest haunted mansions and cemeteries and the innate danger of the Bayou. On top of, you know, being beautiful.

Does the sprawling Midwest with its farm towns and endless rolling fields of wheat not lend itself to a story about depression? Especially when it gives way to a blinding whiteout of a winter. 

A tropical island could be a perfect setting for a whirlwind romance, but what if it were the location of a thriller?

Alternatively, you could subvert a setting away from its natural association. A tropical island could be a perfect setting for a whirlwind romance, but what if it were the location of a thriller? What about an island could be emphasized to create those necessary unsettling themes? A small island is by nature very isolated. It could be very hard to escape. It’s surrounded by a deep, dark ocean. It could have a dark history in colonization and piracy.

Exercise

As an exercise, take your setting and pick out the traits that make it fit your story, whether they be bordering on classic fiction tropes or a subversion that force the audience to reconsider their first instincts.

Even Stephanie Meyer put research into choosing Forks, Washington as the setting for Twilight because it rained there more than anywhere else in the US. Consider that your minimum standard. 

The Street Was Full of Brick Buildings, Red and Brown with Signs Hanging Over Doorways…

So, you’ve nailed down what makes the setting perfect for the story. Now, time to show it off. First order of business is obviously to list paragraph after paragraph of detail to show the audience how vivid this setting really is.

You know I’m not serious. I hope you know I’m not serious. 

The art of establishing setting is in brevity and in specificity. I strongly believe that if you need to characterize a one-off character quickly, you describe their shoes. If you want to characterize your setting, you describe the cars driving around in it. 

He jammed the hybrid between two mud-speckled F150s in the parking lot. 

In a sentence, you know that he is not from around there. It’s not likely a big city. There’s mud, and there’s a presence of guys who drive muddy pick-up trucks. In a sentence, the setting is implied without describing mud puddles on the ground or the view from the parking lot. Cars is too general a term. If I replaced those Fords with glinting sedans, it would be an entirely different setting. If I said they were a pair of electric cars, you might guess it happened on the west coast. 

Drop in the detail. Drop in the specifics. Fight in as much detail in as few words. The ox-cart rattles over the cobble stones. The 4×4 shudders over a washboard range road. A roadster zips over asphalt. Summer tires skid over pack ice. Snow chains crunch through 7 inches of snowfall. The import bottomed out over the speed bump. The Grand Am clunked over the pothole. 

The car drove down the road. Two nouns and a verb get you a setting, yeah? Optimize your sentences. Squeeze the last drops of usefulness out of them. 

Exercise

Find the detail that really establishes a world for you. It might not be cars for you. There are other specifics that can say a lot fast. Take a look at your nouns and see if they are working as hard as they could be. The trees may tower, but what kind of trees are they? Neighbors walk their dogs outside, but what kind of dogs?

Familiarity

To write most efficiently, make the readers do half the work. Sometimes, as a writer, all you need to do is tap into one visceral memory and the audience can fill in the rest just based of that one detail.

But it has to be good.

My best tip for creating fictional locations relies on memory do. Invoke something familiar. As an example, most people have been to a bowling alley. I love bowling alleys, partly because you can drink at them and partly because they are always these nostalgic places with outdated decor. Mention the cartoon pins dancing on the monitors and the glow of black light and the reader will fill in the rest. You don’t even need to write about the tacky linoleum. They’re already imagining it.

Mention the cartoon pins dancing on the monitors and the glow of black light at a bowling alley and the reader will fill in the rest. 

If I were to propose a city as a set, those universal details would be in everyone knowing which neighborhood is the sketchy one, going to that one local hole-in-the-wall restaurant after school for the best Vietnamese subs, or watching hoards of sports fans in jerseys heading to the stadium on game day. These are things people can connect with. You don’t need to spend a lot of time describing a universal experience. The universal experience lends a sense of honesty and a story can always do with more honesty. 

Exercise

Write about something from your home town that you feel defines where it is and what it’s like. For me in my home town, there was the graffitied water tower (that has since been torn down), the designated smokers spot in the backwoods behind the high school, and the lake everyone kills their summer in. 

Tone

I like to think of my settings as a kind of character. They have moods. They have sticky hot days and thunderstorms that shake your bones and soak into your skin. Matching the weather to the tone of your scene might be a little on the nose if you do it all the time, but if you’ve established miserable constant rain showers, throwing a convenient one in won’t hurt. 

There are other factors other than weather that can establish a mood. The frustration of rush hour, the eeriness of an ill-populated town. The ripples waving through fields can invoke both the freedom of an ocean or the loneliness of seeing miles and miles into the distance. There’s both anonymity and hope in New York. There’s big dreams and crushing reality in LA. 

For ultimate setting characterization, have the setting actively detriment the progress of the characters (or, alternatively, help them). A storm can impede progress. Its isolation can keep characters from reaching out for help. That tropical island? Force characters to swim or sail. A skyscraper forces a character to challenge their fear of heights. Use those settings to force more conflict.

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via GIPHY

The Right Set for the Right Scene

Some of the best advice I ever read was simple. Could a change in setting amp up the tension of a scene? This lead to an epiphany for me, ending in a reveal of shock-worthy information coming out in a hospital waiting room instead of the comfortable privacy of a family living room. 

Think of George W. Bush being told about 9/11 while reading a childrens’ book to a group of kids. That’s the kind of terrible timing and tension you need in your book in your story. That’s the kind of thematic juxtaposition that is stranger than fiction.

What happens when you attempt to stage a fight in a library? Have a romantic scene on an ice rink. Trap your character and force them to deal with something on a bus or a plane. Have the worst possible thing happen at the worst possible place. 

Exercise

Take a scene and try it out in different locations and see how it changes the dynamic of the conversation or action.

The End of the Road

There are a hundred different settings that could be written a hundred different ways, but the important thing is to use them, like any other tool, to further your point. A light saber duel between student and mentor is memorable, but a light saber duel between student and mentor over pools of lava really sticks.

5 Things Wrong With Your Script

02/10/2019      Leave a Comment

In my daily life, I’ve had the opportunity to read a lot of scripts. When I say scripts, I’m referring to produced TV and movie scripts in the various versions that are distributed through the process of shooting TV or film. Not every aspiring script writer gets to see this. Being part of a production crew gives a lot of insight into what makes a script work. The big difference between books and scripts is that a script has to come to life. It’s limited by real life in a way that books are. So here are the mistakes I see the most from aspiring script writers.

5 Things Wrong with your script: kerihalfacre.com

#1: There’s Too Much Direction

This is by far the #1 thing I see people do wrong when they approach script writing: writers who essentially want to be directors. Let go of the idea that you will have any control beyond the dialogue you put on the page. Novelists are used to controlling every detail of a book, so it can be a tough transition to a process of what is a small part of a total production.

Do not include camera angles. Do not get too specific about what a character looks like. Do not describe the setting with details that are not important. This is not your job as a screenwriter.

Writing a screenplay is laying down the blueprint for a story. In the house that is this story, it’s fun to imagine what the decor will look like and what kind of countertops to order, but you have to understand that it is not your job. Someone else will be hired to make those decisions.



Do not include camera angles. Do not get too specific about what a character looks like. Do not describe the setting with details that are not important. This is not your job as a screenwriter.

There are entire teams of people dedicated to deciding what characters should wear, how sets should look, what color to paint the walls, how the actors should interpret lines, and where the camera should go. Please, please, please do not try to do their jobs for them. They are generally very good at their specialties and face real life obstacles. Some camera angles are chosen because of where the sun is in the sky or because there is a wall in the way or any number of things that influence these decisions.

The art of script writing is very much the art of not getting too attached. The best screenwriter is a flexible one.

#2: It’s Too Expensive

On the lines of the realities of shooting, things cost money. There are different ways to approach this problem. Your sci-fi western shoot-out extravaganza with the climactic battle in the opera house may be really good for screenwriting contests, but the odds of a first-time writer selling that blockbuster are very low.

Keeping cost in mind is even more important if you intend to shoot a script yourself, whether it be short film, web series, or full-length indie film. You could do it! There are grants for this kind of work!

It’s important to keep in mind the kinds of things that drive up cost of shooting.

Crowd Scenes

Parties are expense. Writing the word ‘party’ on a page can double the price of that shooting day in a second. It isn’t just a matter of finding and compensating background actors to play the party goers or baseball game attendees. As soon as you have that many people on camera, you need more people in hair and make-up and wardrobe, you need wranglers to be dedicated to making sure your background are where they need to be, and you need extra prop people to keep track of purses and drinks and food.

That’s before even taking into account party decorations or renting a venue to stage a party scene.

Special Effects and Stunts

Anything requiring special effects and stunts is instantly more expensive. The first basic issue is that they take twice as long to shoot, which means the crew isn’t able to do as many scenes in a day as normally possible.

Why does it take so long? Stunt doubles of course! As soon as a double is brought in, basically everything has to be shot twice. Once with the performer, doing as much of the scene as possible, and once with the stunt performer. Plus the extra time needed for the stunt coordinator to work through the scene safely for everyone involved. Some of this might be rehearsed (fight choreography, major stunts), but even basic things like falling off a horse or driving a car may require a stunt person for liability reasons. Production does not want anything to happen to their cast. An actor injury could mean massive rescheduling for the shoot, or cancellation altogether.

Too Many Sets

A lot of sets are a quick way to drive up cost. Even for a show with many sets in one building, moving from set to set can take upwards of 40 minutes to move all of the gear. If you have 6 sets to shoot in a day, half the shooting day has gone into moving equipment place to place. It’s not very time efficient to write a set into a single short scene, especially if that scene can easily happen somewhere else.

Big productions don’t have to worry about this as much as others. A small production on a tight shooting schedule will be put under a lot of stress by shooting small portions of the script across many different locations.

#3: It’s the Wrong Length

When talking about commercial film and television, there are two big factors that go into length: what an audience is trained to expect and where those pesky commercials go.

Most movie-goers have seen enough films to subconsciously know when major events should happen. Not every film follows a script act structure, but it’s better to follow the rules before you break them. There is too much money on the line for the movie biz to take risks on a new writer who doesn’t follow the rules. There’s always time to break the mold when you have experience to back it up—or take on a producer role and make that baby yourself.

TV is even more strict. Both half-hour and hour-long TV have a very strict act structure that follows the flow of commercial breaks. The ‘cold open’ or ‘teaser’ before the title sequence can only be so long. Plant cliff hangers at the end of act 2. That is the kind of planning TV writers must do

The rule is that every page equals about a minute of screentime. Look up the standard lengths of your medium of choice and follow closely to those guidelines.

#4: Character Names Don’t Work

Introducing characters on screen can be tricky. The audience wants to know the names of the characters. Unfortunately, there is rarely an omniscient narrator to give out those names.

And when those names are spoken on screen, it’s so important that they be clear when established. The best names for onscreen characters are ones that can be easily understood and not easily confused with other characters.

Naming the hero and heroine Izzy and Isaac is going to confuse watchers. They’re also going make certain crew members miserable.


Avoid names that start with the same letter or that sound similar whenever you can. Onscreen, short names with only one or two syllables are king.

Avoid names that start with the same letter or that sound similar whenever you can. Onscreen, short names with only one or two syllables are king. There are exceptions to the rule, but if you’re not working with existing intellectual property, why not choose names for their clarity and ability to be heard and recognized?

#5: The Formatting is Incorrect

This might be the most important, but I also think it is the most harped on, but I’ll touch on why the format matters so much in screenwriting.

This goes back to the one page = one minute equation. That equation is so important for estimating script length. We’ve already gone over why how long a script is imperative to this style of writing. Without that strict standard script format, the page to time translation doesn’t work. Without that rough, but usually accurate estimation, you could be stuck reading out every scene to ensure that it feels properly between commercial break to commercial break.

There is a lot of software out there designed to help screenwriters format. Celtx is available for free and is popular with independent and student filmmakers. Scrivener, a popular software with novelists and other writers, also has a script function. I have personally used Final Draft and found it fairly intuitive, which is one of my main needs from any software I’m new to.

For years, especially in school, I just used a template in MS Word using styles to make transitioning between headings a breeze. I’m making that same template available to you! The form below will get you my Word template with styles for sluglines, dialogue, characters, and more with some helpful hints for your screenwriting.


Sign up for your free screenwriting template for MS Word!

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Screenwriting can be a lot of fun, as long as there’s an understanding in the role it plays in the final product. The best thing about bringing words to the screen is the collaboration between people to make it work! So never forget to leave the space for that collaboration.

5 things wrong with your script

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