1/2: One of the scripts I got over the weekend is astonishingly bad. The story is average, nothing really wrong with it. The formatting is passable, only just, though more than a few mistakes and typos. All of the problem is in the usual places, and those are:
1. Dialogue. It's just dreadful. I reads like what people think other people sound like but don't sound like at all, really cringe. It's not even dialogue, really. It's sophomoric jokes someone thinks are funny AF and exposition. Oy vey.
2/2:
2. Structure. This problem is a byproduct of terrible dialogue. If your dialogue doesn't tell a story well, you can't tell the story well. You especially can't tell it efficiently or engagingly if's stumbles, stutters, drags, skips, and is generally uneven.
3. Characters. Caricatures aren't characters, and they're especially not main characters. Gimmicks aren't characters. Catchphrases aren't characters. Interesting characters are characters.
@thedisasterautist
Quick question: does having experience working in other literary fields: plays and novels, provide some advantage for screenwriters in terms of being able to structure and create characters?
@MariaAragon64: Overall, any related fiction writing experience is a boon, especially playwrighting. All of the stories are structured basically the same, but each has a form, for lack of a better term, to tell a story, i.e., screenplays are "show, don't tell" and there aren't internal monologues and Stephen King level descriptions of minutiae in screenplays. The audiovisual medium is a far cry from the text-to--imagination medium.
@thedisasterautist
Yep. You have to learn to rethink your approach and strip it down past Hemingway levels, which is why I gave up trying to figure out how to write scripts.