When can you break the rules. It’s a good question. It shows that you know that the rules can and should be broken. But, it’s the wrong question.
The real question is, why do we have the rules to begin with?
Well, they’re essentially training wheels. I wish I could show you guys some of the awful and bizarre things I’ve read in amateur scripts. Paragraphs that fill up a whole page, 3-page outlines just describing a mansion and page after page of nothing but dialogue.
Thankfully for you guys, I’ve read scripts like that so you don’t have to. And yet…
What’s the lesson here then?
Well, a smarter man than I summarised it best:
“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” – G. K Chesterton
He was one hell of a literary critic, so let’s dissect this.
He’s saying: Don’t break a rule until you know why it’s a rule.
Let’s look at a more basic example, the idea that a scene should be around 3-4 minutes long is a pretty commonly touted one. Why’s that?
Most scenes are almost always better when they’re shorter. If we can get the same impact in three pages that we could get in eight, do it in three!
So then what happens when we break that? When we make a scene 14 pages long?
This:
Would that scene be better at 3 minutes long? No, of course not.
A fence has been removed, with great success! But why did it work?
It’s like the suspense is a rubber band, and I’m just stretching it and stretching it and stretching it to see how far it can stretch.”
How much tension can you build in 3 minutes? Nowhere near as much as you can in 14.
That being said, 95% of the time you do want scenes to be around 3 pages long. If we were stretching out an exposition dump to 14 minutes then your audience is going to be asleep by the time the scene ends.
Now I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that some scenes can be longer than 3 minutes, so let’s attack something more sacred, more fundamental. Full stops.
If you read the 2018 blacklist, you’ll see scripts like Cobweb at no. 7 and, well…
It has no full stops on any action lines.
And it’s amazing. I don’t normally like horror, and it’s not an enthralling script in many other ways, but the lack of full stops keep me scrolling thoroughly down throughout. I never felt any sense of conclusion at any point, because there were no natural breaks in reading the script. It worked fantastically well to rachet up the tension throughout.
In a much slower script though, like a romcom, this device would’ve felt out of place. It’s used to rachet up tension, not for a meet-cute. And it’d have ruined the cadence of a film with a more nebulous set of goals. For Cobweb though, it was perfect.
So, if we return to our original thought, why do we have rules?
So we know when to break them.
P.S. There are a couple of other considerations here. The more the reader doesn’t feel they’re in safe hands with your script, the more likely any rule-breaking will be seen as an error.
Also, when you give it out to be read by other amateur writers, or for coverage, which can mean amateur writers too, unfortunately. Then sometimes they will come down on you for rule breaking like this; I’ll put my hand up and admit I’ve done so in the past too. But if a script like Cobweb can be one of the most successful in Hollywood, then I wouldn’t worry about one or two sour eggs too much. If you keep getting negative feedback about it though, then I’d reevaluate taking down that fence…
The Fellowship Of Ink 