The White Space

Screenplays are typically 90-120 pages long, but the trend lately is 105 pages. A year ago, the trend was 110 pages. Anything beyond that is starting to be described as “beefy”. Writers have so little room to write the actual story, it’s amazingly difficult to put in a viable plot with theme, emotion, and development into so few pages.

As a result, some writers will cram abundant amounts of extraneous information, description, or dialogue tangents in an effort to ensure that readers “get” their story. This is a mistake. Readers, executives, agents, actors, etc. for the most part are skim readers. Our time is valuable and we have a zillion scripts to read. More white space is an appealing feature on a script. It says “easy read”.

When I get a script, I will thumb through it, looking to see how much white space the writer has taken up. I can usually tell what genre a script is just by the layout. Short dialogue is usually a comedy or buddy film; longer dialogue is typically a drama (or a writer that thinks he’s the next Tarantino); Shorter action lines in greater numbers indicate a thriller or action.

This is not a rule of screenwriting or necessarily a typical habit of readers. But it’s still something that works. For me, at least.

If you’re writing a comedy and your characters go off on tangents all the time, it could probably be rewritten to be a tighter script. If you’re writing an action film, but your action lines run beyond 3 lines per paragraph, it can be rewritten and tightened up. If you’re writing a romcom but your two leads don’t have close to equal screen time/dialogue, then you might want to rewrite your script so that the two have more interaction.

You get the idea. White space on a script is like air conditioning in a car. It could be the coolest car ever, but if you don’t have AC, I’m not buying it. Comb your script for anything extraneous, explanatory (what we call exposition), and get rid of it! Rework your piece so that it looks appealing to a reader at first glance. Hopefully, when they take your script for a test run (aka a read), they won’t be distracted by the mechanics and they’ll fall in love with your story.

White space, people. Use it!