What Transcribing A Non-Native Speaker’s English Can Teach You

So here’s another instalment on the subject of learning about writing dialogue by transcribing real speech, this time a non-native English speaker, speaking English.

As witnessed by a recent discussion on the Shooting People screenwriting forum, it’s not always obvious how to write dialogue which has a strong regional or foreign accent. The consensus seems to be that it’s best to keep phonetic spelling to a minimum, while making sure the speech itself reflects characteristic local phrases or grammatical errors, and indicating the particular accent in parenthesis.

The following excerpts are taken from another favourite podcast of mine, CBC’s Writers & Company, presented by Eleanor Wachtel. In this interview she talks to Antonio Skarmeta, the renowned Chilean novelist and screenwriter, whose English is excellent, but still clearly not his first language.

In this snippet there are a couple of aspects which typify his use of English. Try reading this with the requisite pronunciation:

....................SKARMETA

.................(Chilean accent)

............…and one day my father said to

............me: “Listen son, have you seen

............that you have now enough stories

............to publish a book?” And I

............haven't notice it, because

............for me it was fun to write!

“…have you seen that you have now…” is a not turn of phrase a native speaker would normally use, and “I haven’t notice it…” is the kind of grammatical error that a Spanish speaker would easily make.

Here Skarmeta talks about one of his mother’s favourite songs:

....................SKARMETA

............This a very sad song, because

............it's about a couple who cannot

............go living together because of

............some mysterious thing, that is

............never made clear. The man say

............to the woman, we have to part,

............I'm sorry... I'm so sorry about

............it, but there's nothing we can

............do about it.

Here too, a couple of characteristic mistakes: “This a very sad song…” and “…who cannot go living together…” and “The man say…” which when coupled with the accent are more than enough to suggest a Spanish speaker, speaking English.

Using these kinds of real-life speech patterns is far more effective than trying to mimic a Spanish accent phonetically. And nowadays, with so much speech available in MP3 format on the web, eets a piss of cayk to practees zis skeel. You see?

The main priority is to make the dialogue just as easy to read as the dialogue of a native English speaker. As soon as the reader has to make an extra effort to read unconventionally spelled dialogue, you run the risk of distracting their attention from the flow of the story.

I hope Mr. Skarmeta, whose impressive oeuvre includes the classic Il Postino, doesn’t mind me using his English to make a screenwriting point. Suffice it to say that his English is infinitely more impressive than my Spanish…

What Transcribing Real-Life Speech Can Teach You

Here’s an exercise I’ve taken to recently: Writing out, verbatim, sections of speech from podcast interviews. Not scripted shows, but interviews with people in live situations. Not only does it give you great ideas for idiom, jargon and so on, it also forces you to really listen closely to what speakers do in between their words. There’s a hell of a lot of humming and hawing, umming and erring going on there! Not always simple to transcribe, and not always essential, but a great way of sharpening your awareness of what makes for authentic sounding dialogue nonetheless.

One of my favourite podcasts at the moment is To The Best Of Our Knowledge, which has some fascinating reports, including one about karaoke, from which the following dialogue is transcribed.

The speakers are members of The Gomers, a live backing band that plays request tunes for singers to get up on stage and sing to at the High Noon Saloon in Madison Wisconsin. They call their live karaoke style, Rock Star Gomeroke. In the following excerpt, band member Steve describes how a woman with a broken leg got up to sing:

....................STEVE

..........There's a woman who came up,

..........who was extremely drunk, AND she had

..........a broken leg, so she was on

..........crutches, in a cast… in a fairly

..........full leg cast, like it was a big

..........boot that kinda went up to the

..........knee area but down to the foot…

..........and she started spinning around!

Doesn’t this create a nice crescendo? Not just a broken leg, not just a cast, not just a big cast, but a big boot, and the woman spins around!! The general tone of speech here is informal without being slang, and the person speaking is trying hard to describe the scene accurately. Plus he’s also trying to make it fun to listen to, he’s performing as he speaks, as it were.

Here’s regular Gomeroke singer Terry-Lynn describing what it’s like to sing with the Gomers:

....................TERRY-LYNN

..........…and it's… drawing you out of

..........your daily humdrum existence,

..........where sometimes, frankly, maybe

..........somebody doesn't really give a

..........crap about you as long as you

..........show up for work…

I personally wouldn’t have thought to write, “sometimes, frankly, maybe… etc.” but there it is, it’s functional, authentic and it renders a subtext: A person trying to be diplomatic while at the same time expressing an emotion (frustration, anger). Plus the phrase humdrum existence gives this speech an educated register.

Here’s band member Bith (hope I got his name right…) talking about the joy of playing in the Gomers:

....................BITH

..........Each of us has, like, different

..........biases, and everything? I think…

..........when we're on stage… together…

..........it's like, whatever we're

..........playing? We're gonna, like, do

..........our best, no matter what… and

..........that's what makes Gomers

..........enjoyable for me… to play with…

..........for me.

This guy also has a very distinct way of speaking, with his constant interjection of “like” and his question tag “and everything?” Plus he does the sing-song “ending a sentence that isn’t a question on a question-mark thing?” So here’s someone who is perhaps less verbally oriented than the other two, who perhaps doesn’t think he’s finding the right words to express what he’s feeling?

And so, the subtleties of these different people appear in the way they speak. Of course, in real life, as participants in conversation, we pick up all the nuances unconsciously. However, in order to be able to write dialogue which deliberately expresses something about a fictional character, you need to know what your options are. And this is one way of honing that skill.

In a following post: Transcribing a non-native speaker speaking English…

Selling Pitches To Hollywood, Dream Or Business Model?

I’ve been quiet for a while, as I’ve been busy investigating the possibility of selling pitches to Hollywood, as opposed to hawking an actual finished screenplay. My thinking is: If I can support my spec writing by selling a few ideas this year, I’ll be a happy man.

But not being convinced this is a sound business model, I started out by posing the question of whether an outsider like me has any chance of selling ideas rather than scripts to Hollywood, on Twitter, TwelvePoint and Shooting People. The responses there, mainly from fellow screenwriters, was overwhelmingly: “Yeah, wouldn’t that be cool? But dream on, my friend!”

Not satisfied with that response, I went on to query various people who have more substantial industry access, and whose answers might be based on current, first-hand experience. Here are just a few of the responses I received:

Steve Kaire, high concept pitch guru:

It's extremely difficult to sell an idea on its own. I've done it with the contacts I made in Hollywood but it's a lot more difficult these days.

David H. Steinberg, aka Hollywhooped!, at DoneDealPro

The age of selling naked ideas is long gone. Maybe in 1988 you could have walked into a studio with Ace Ventura, but these days you need a completed script, A-list talent attached, and if possible, financing!

There are still people in the business of brokering ideas, but guys like Bob Kosberg are now forced to get someone else to write it on spec, or at least to try to package the project. That’s a lot of work and it means that the idea itself is worth less and less. As you know, the hard work is in the execution so ideas aren’t worth very much to begin with, but now, the odds of selling an original idea are so small that the naked idea is practically worthless, even if you could get someone interested.

Philip Botana, independent producer:

The only people who can sell off of a concept are those that have access to decision makers that can make it possible. This is usually a sales agent, producer with a distribution deal or someone with access to finance and the other two elements (producer and sales agent).

The market is also changing. There was a time when you could sell a concept at AFM and raise the money through the foreign market. This has become increasingly difficult despite the exceptions to the rule often mentioned in the press.

Scott Myer at Go Into The Story:

Sure, you can sell a treatment. The question is where does the money go? Answer: Not much your way. I don't have direct experience with this on the scripted side of things, but re non-scripted TV, networks pay anywhere from $10-25K for series concepts. That may seem like a decent amount of money, but if the thing actually goes to series, you're looking at an overall budget of anywhere from $2-10M. I would think you'd be looking at a similar, if not greater disparity on the feature film side.

… my instinct would be to do the work and write a spec script -- to maximize the possible financial benefit and give yourself - and your story concept - the most protection.

Marylin Horowitz, New York based producer-writer and script coach:

My personal opinion is that a great idea is so rare that when there is one, and it's communicated clearly, a deal is made. As to the form it is sold in, it varies from situation to situation. Someone always seems to be winning "script lotto," and someone's nepotist bad idea story is also always getting made. Bill Goldman said something to the effect regarding Hollywood that "Nobody knows anything."

So the opinions from inside the industry seem to suggest that pitches do get bought from time to time, but there are a number of qualifications:

• The idea has to be exceptionally good.
• It doesn’t happen very often.
• Almost only established and represented screenwriters sell pitches.
• The price paid for a pitch is a fraction of what is paid for a script.
• Selling a treatment is more feasible and safer in terms of copyright.

As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out. I’m still brainstorming pitches as well as working on a spec script, and at some point soon I plan to approach the market with a small collection of my best pitches. Because one thing seems clear to me above all else in this context: It’s worth a try.

I’ll keep you posted on developments!

Is There A Market For One-Page Pitches?

This past week I initiated some interesting discussion over at twelvepoint, as well as on Twitter and various other forums. The question I’ve been trying to find an answer to is whether there is a market for one-page film concepts. Not as a pitch for a finished screenplay or as a means of soliciting a writing gig, but as a stand-alone commodity.

Writing one-pagers is an excellent way of honing your storytelling and pitching skills. It forces you to articulate the main elements of a story idea clearly and enticingly. So compiling a stock of one-pagers is probably a good idea for any screenwriter. But what if you could monetize the one-pagers themselves too?

It’s not an academic question. Imagine being able to support your spec writing with a day job consisting of brainstorming, writing up and selling great ideas for movies. Sounds ideal to me. Which is why I’m looking into it so seriously. However, so far the only thing I’ve been able to confirm is William Goldman’s famous adage: No one knows anything.

Various places and people on the web offer facilities for selling pitches. People like Robert Kosberg, sites such as buymymovieidea and tvfilmrights all claim to be in the business of buying synopses rather than completed screenplays.

Equally, there are plenty of people out there, such as Christopher Lockhart who vociferously advise against trying to sell ideas rather than screenplays to Hollywood. Not just because you can’t copyright an idea, but also because the chances of anyone buying an idea rather than a script are infinitesimally small.

So who’s right? Does Hollywood buy ideas or not?

I haven’t found out yet, but I’m continuing my investigations. I’m also continuing to write the one-pagers, working on the assumption that it can’t do any harm to build up a portfolio… As Jared Kelly, commented in the twelvepoint thread:

Completed GOOD screenplays take so long there's an excuse for not having many of those to hand (but never an excuse for not increasing the numbers) but all writers have too many ideas and not enough time to write them, so develop those ideas into pitches during down time and have them ready to dazzle the world. You never know...

Indeed. I’ll keep you posted on this story as it unfolds…

When Knowing Your Screenplay Inside-Out Can Be A Disadvantage

I recently listened to the director’s commentary on Duplicity, written and directed by Tony Gilroy. Because of his hyphenated position on this movie, he is in a unique position to provide some insight into various choices he made before and while directing his own script. One such choice relates to the opening sequence, which was only added at a very late stage, when it became clear that without it, audiences were confused.

The sequence, which isn’t included in the only pdf version of the screenplay I could locate online, is a piece of backstory featuring the two main characters, a pair of corporate spies played by Clive Owens and Julia Roberts.

Owens comes on to Roberts at a garden party in Dubai. He doesn’t know she’s a spy. She knows he is, but pretends not to know. From the garden we cut to Owens in a deep, drug-induced sleep in a hotel room, while Roberts goes through his personal items and removes a secret file.

From this brief sequence we learn that the world these characters populate is one of deception and double-crossing, in which any tactic is acceptable. We also learn that Julia Roberts is a sophisticated, ruthless operator, and that Clive Owens, although suave and full of self-confidence, is also vulnerable.

During the rest of the film Roberts and Owens, who have meanwhile become a couple, refer to “Dubai” a number of times. Owens refers to the incident with bitterness, while Roberts is annoyed that he won’t just let it go.

Now, the nature of the story is such that you never really know who’s deceiving whom. Plus the structure of the story is a chronological mix of the present and increasingly recent episodes from the past. It’s quite a puzzle, which is the perfect form for a story dealing with people constantly trying to second-guess all the other characters’ intentions.

However, test screenings of the film without the opening sequence showed that repeated references to an incident the audience hadn’t seen, was just too much mystery. So the opening sequence was added.

As Gilroy looked through the rest of the film to see if this addition necessitated any other edits, he realized that the backstory sequence added an entire new layer to the rest of the story. Simply showing up front what the characters refer back to during the rest of the film, adds humour, raises intriguing rather than confusing questions about what the characters really feel, and leaves the suspense intact.

Gilroy was surprised to see the effect of such a seemingly cosmetic change, and his anecdote clearly shows how challenging it is to know how much information and backstory to show and when. It’s crucial to spell enough out for the audience so they understand the story, and leave enough up to their imagination to keep them actively involved.

It’s easy to forget that what may seem obvious to you, because you’ve been living with the characters and the story forever, might be invisible to a completely fresh audience. In this case, I think Gilroy got the balance just right, but only after test audiences had shown him that they needed more information.

Ten Questions To Answer BEFORE You Write Your Screenplay

As a result of a couple of false starts I made on screenplays recently, I’ve been giving some more thought to the kind of considerations you need to make before you commit to writing up an idea. The result is a rather longer post than usual, but hopefully worth the read!

It’s kind of counter-intuitive to the creative mind to consider whether it would be sensible to do something that tickles the creative fancy. After all, creativity has a lot to do with being able to tolerate and integrate seemingly irrelevant information and intuitive, undirected activity.

However, there are at least two important arguments to make against writing in the seclusion of your ivory tower, without thought for what you’re going to do with the screenplay after it’s finished.

Firstly, you will have infinitely more ideas for films than you will ever be able to write up as finished scripts. You can afford to be picky without fear of running out of ideas.

Secondly, a screenplay is the starting point for a sizeable business venture, organized by people other than you. If the screenplay isn’t in some way obviously going to attract an audience, no one will put their money or time on the table to produce it.

Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go ahead and make your own films, especially shorts (in fact I’m exploring that option right now myself). But when it comes to longer-form material which you plan to sell or pitch to producers, I think it pays to ask yourself some serious questions before you start writing.

Here are ten question I’ve come up with. I’m sure there are others.

Does the idea fit a recognizable genre?
If you tell someone what kind of film it is, will they be confused? It makes no difference if your story combines different genres, if it’s art house or hi concept, the question is: Will your story fall into some recognizable category? If not, how will you pitch it? How will you explain (to a producer, an investor, an actor) who the potential audience is?

Is it also original?
Is your idea what Karl Iglesias calls “uniquely familiar,” or what Linda Aronson calls “real but unusual?” It’s no good writing a generic romantic comedy or a boilerplate crime thriller. Your screenplay has to have some element in it which makes it stand out from other, similar, screenplays in the genre. That could be an aspect of the subject matter, something extraordinary about the main character, a little-known story world or location.

Is there an obvious marketing hook?
Is there something famous and intriguing you can refer to when you pitch the idea? Your story might be related to a dramatic event in history, or a political controversy, or an international sporting event, or a well known urban myth, or an unsolved scientific or theological problem, etc. In other words, does the idea spark the imagination by referring to something that most people can immediately relate to?

Does the main character have an unequivocal, concrete goal?
Can you explain in a simple sentence, specifically, what the main character wants and how the audience will know if he’s achieved it? Is it clear why the main character wants to achieve that goal? Check out what people like Laura Cross have to say on this topic. The same goes for the main character’s weakness. Can you describe it easily?

Is the main character interesting?
Which can mean all sorts of things at the specific level, but at the general level this question asks whether the main character is memorable and intriguing. That could be because of something special the character wants to achieve, or it may be a way of behaving that arouses curiosity.

Is the idea meaningful to me?
Here’s one to consider carefully in your ivory tower, because this really only relates to you personally. How are you going to persevere through months of writing if the idea has no resonance with what you believe in, or doesn’t explore a question that intrigues and challenges you? It’s one thing to take on a paid job with a certain professional distance between yourself and the material. It’s quite another to slave away on your own on something you have no idea if anyone will want to produce, and which you yourself don’t really believe in anyway.

Can I articulate its moral premise?
I’m really into Stanley Williams’s moral premise concept these days, and although I don’t agree with his politics, I’m convinced he’s right in asserting that you can find the DNA of your story if you articulate its moral premise. What sets of values are in conflict in your story? What psychological and physical dilemmas relating to these values do the various characters have to deal with? Is the story all about just one thing? Big things to think about, but worth investing the time.

Is it a film I’d pay to watch? Really?
Or as Marilyn Horowitz puts it: Are you your own film’s biggest fan?. I often find this a surprisingly difficult question to answer truthfully. It really requires a radical shift in perspective to imagine your story as a trailer or a poster and be honest about whether you would take an evening off to go and see it. This relates to the question of whether the idea is meaningful to you, but it’s at a different level. The level of the consumer, faced with an array of movies at the multiplex or online, and having to choose. Would you rather see your movie than the latest offering starring Meryl Streep or directed by Quentin Tarantino?

Is the narrative a good metaphor for what the story is about?
Does the story express an idea without it literally being a story about that idea? Can you describe, or do you have an intuition about what the theme of the film is? There are so many different opinions about whether a screenwriter “needs” to be able to articulate the theme of a screenplay before writing it, that I’m not going to burn my fingers on that question. But you should at least have a sense that your story is dealing with something larger than just its plot.

Are there any immediately obvious pitfalls?
This is tricky, because you don’t want to think critically about your idea too soon. But as soon you feel yourself committing to an idea, which usually means imagining scenes, mulling over story beats, hearing bits of dialogue, etc., it’s time to take a step back and ask the difficult questions before you go any further. Are there any huge holes in the basic plot? Does the story require prohibitively expensive locations or special effects? Is there some glaring lack of logic in the basic set-up? And so on. Usually these are the things you know intuitively but prefer to ignore so that you can get down to the writing. And sometimes these are issues which can realistically be solved further down the road. But if you sense there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea, don’t even go there.

I honestly never thought I’d think about writing screenplays this way. It seems calculating and mercenary. But then again, a screenplay is more or less a business plan you’re about to write. And I’m sure I would have saved myself a LOT of time and effort if I had asked myself these questions before embarking on some of my less, shall I say, sellable projects. Still, you live and learn.

Why It’s Good Idea To Have Lots Of Ideas

I recently had a horrible moment when I saw the trailer for the documentary talhotblond. It was one of those moments when you realize something you’ve been working on (in my case a synopsis for a lo-budget thriller) has sort of just been done by someone else. I’ve written before (here) about the value of seeing the bright side of having to put a project aside, but it also makes a lot of sense to pre-empt the situation by making sure you have plenty of other ideas to fall back on.

A great source of advice on generating ideas for movies is the Getting Ideas section of Linda Aronson’s book Screenwriting Updated. She sets out a systematic approach to generating ideas, based on Edward de Bono’s distinction between lateral and vertical thinking. Without going into detail here (buy the book, it’s well worth it!), her method entails deliberately choosing triggers, such as aspects of a genre, on which to brainstorm as many ideas as possible. She essentially advocates quantity above quality when brainstorming.

Aronson advises jotting down ideas in a single sentence. Not in the form of a cleverly constructed logline, but a quick and dirty, general notion of what a story could be about. Critical review of the viability of your ideas is a subsequent stage of the process, So is honing the one or two ideas that survive critical review, into workable set-ups for a screenplay.

But her most important advice, at least in my view, concerning the brainstorming stage of generating ideas, is this:

Keep to one sentence because if you start to plot a whole story you will commit to it, thereby shutting out a whole range of other potential stories.

This is such a difficult lesson to learn, but it’s true. However interesting an idea might seem at first glance, you’ve got to be prepared to interrogate yourself about the idea before you commit to writing it. I know I’m not the only screenwriter who’s had to learn this the hard way. I.e., by spending a lot of time and energy fleshing out a story only to discover too late that it isn’t actually a good cinematic idea after all.

It’s all part of growing up and becoming professional, I guess. You need to get the notion that there’s an endless supply of ideas out there in the cosmos, and that it makes good business sense to reject a thousand silly ideas in order to get to one or two really good ones… And to do that, you first have to generate lots of unusable ideas.

So my synopsis for a lo-budget thriller has now been moved to the pile of “good idea but wrong time,” and I’ve moved on to other stories which have cinematic potential.

How to judge which ideas are usable? More on that next time.