WRITING YOUR SCREENPLAY: SUBTEXT
It’s a basic, universal survival instinct:
Look strong and stable.
Why? Because the weak, slow and inadequate ones get lost from the herd and devoured.
Human beings operate from a place of self-protection. We find this in the way that we speak to and treat one another. The words we say are the armor we use to keep ourselves from exposing our sad truths.
Seeing the truth underneath what a person says is the joy of engaging with a movie or TV show. Finding and bringing to light the essential core that exists underneath all the bullshit in the world is the very purpose of art.
In dramatic writing, we call this subtext.
Subtext is a hard thing to explain or teach because it’s about feeling beyond the words a person says. It’s about seeing the self-protection. It’s about intuiting the whole iceberg from just a glimpse of the tip that rests above water. This is both a writing and life skill that requires careful cultivation.
Just like when you write a poem every day, you train yourself to see the poetic and the beautiful in the smallest, most mundane of things… if you regularly look beneath what’s being said, you’ll see the essential, subliminal truths that exist everywhere.
Watch the news. You’re sure to see someone saying they’re in great health even as their bodily agony belies their words. A morose person will usually say they’re happy. An upset person will work extra hard to convince you they’re fine. A greedy person will try their darnedest to make you believe they’re charitable or generous.
Everybody tries look faultless to protect themselves, but as a writer, your job is to help us see the vulnerability and to the find the truth.
Over the past two weeks we’ve addressed character voice and dialogue. This week we’ll look at subtext because it’s an essential component of communicating via characters and story. One way to get better at harnessing subtext in your own writing is to seek it out in the scripts you read. With this in mind, we’ll offer examples from an array of different films, identifying the techniques used by the writers.
As we’ve repeated throughout this post, it’s easier to talk about dogs, speeding tickets, other people, music, Orpheus and Eurydice, geese, onions, wine, ANYTHING than it is to talk about or really deal with ourselves and our feelings. Most great scripts are completely laden with subtext. Hopefully these examples help you to refine your ability to intuit it.
If you’re looking to improve the subtext in your own scenes, try having the characters —
refer to themselves in the third person or tell a story about something that is a stand-in for their own experience or feelings
debate something trivial like who has control of the TV remote
speak in compliments when they really mean to insult (or vice versa)
For additional questions about these and other scripts, as always, e-mail library@wgfoundation.org
Until next time, happy writing!
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