I’m about to get cracking on my submission for a prestigious short screenplay competition. I wondered if you had any advice specific to writing shorts? If you were judging a shorts competition, what would you be looking for?

– Kirsty
York, UK

A short film, like a short story, can’t waste any time. You need to give us your principal characters and establish their motivations immediately. There’s very little stage-setting before you get to the inciting incident and the ensuing complications.

The hero’s fundamental problem/challenge/obstacle needs to occur by the time you get to the 1/3rd mark. So, if your short is meant to be three minutes long, the big event needs to happen on page one. If it’s a 10-minute short, it happens around page three. It’s not that you’re worried about your reader getting bored before then — if you can’t entertain us for three pages, there’s a problem — but rather that if you delay any longer, your story is going to feel lopsided: too much setup for what was accomplished.

Beyond that, I wouldn’t worry much about traditional structural expectations. Funny almost always works better than serious for a short, because there’s not enough time to create the narrative movement you expect in drama. But there are exceptions. The Red Balloon for example. And I loved Walter Salles’ chapter in Paris, je t’aime, which was simply a sad rhyme.¹

So think funny, or poignant — but only if French.

I’ve put the script for my 1998 short film God up in the Downloads section.² It’s 30 scenes in 11 pages. A lot of story happens, quickly. But many successful shorts take the opposite tack: they’re essentially just one joke, fully exploited. Todd Strauss-Schulson’s Jagg Off is that kind of short, as are most of the SNL and Will Ferrell videos you’ve seen.

For the competition you’re entering, however, I’d be careful not to submit anything that felt too much like a comedy sketch. If I were a judge, I’d be looking for a script that doesn’t seem like it could end up on Saturday Night Live. (Or the British equivalent.)

Good luck!

1. That said, it probably wouldn’t have stood out in a script competition. ↩
2. The short is a bonus feature on The Nines DVD. ↩

I have a character that appears midway through the script, but is never introduced by name and the reader should not know who he is at this point. So, let’s call him something descriptive: ONE-LEGGED MAN. All the while, in other scenes, his actual name is being mentioned. Let’s say: KEVIN SUGARMAN. Towards the end of the script he introduces himself to a character and it becomes important that the reader understands that ONE-LEGGED MAN is KEVIN SUGARMAN.

From this point out what do you think would make for the smoothest read:

1. Continue calling him ONE-LEGGED MAN
2. Call him ONE-LEGGED MAN/KEVIN SUGARMAN
3. Or start calling him KEVIN SUGARMAN

– Ruckus
Atlanta, GA

This happens in scripts all the time. There’s no perfect solution, but your general goal should be to confuse the reader as little as possible for the fewest number of pages.

If One-Legged Man has dialogue as “ONE-LEGGED MAN,” keep using that name through to the end. It’s confusing to have dialogue blocks with differing names.

If One-Legged Man has no dialogue (or very little dialogue) before he becomes Kevin Sugarman, it may be worth swapping his name, particularly if he hasn’t been prominently featured in a lot of other scenes. The slash technique (One-Legged Man/Kevin Sugarman) works best in scene description, and then only as a reminder to the reader. The guy’s name shouldn’t be 25 characters long every time you use it.

Finally, there are times when the best solution is to simply tell the reader that the character’s name is Kevin Sugarman from the time he’s first introduced. From what you’ve described, it sounds like the reveal is very important to your story — it a key joke or plot point. But in many cases, it may not be worth the trouble and possible confusion.