Young Writers Society

In my writing group we were given a task called 'without words'. We had written two character profiles and a description of a setting inspired by photographs and decided on an interior and exterior problem for each character. We then had to write a screenplay scene based on these, but with absolutely no dilogue. This is what I wrote.

EXT. COUNTRY LANE. AUTUMN. 1950. AM

Mary, 40, is walking along holding a photograph of her brother, 20, in soldier's uniform, smiling. Tears roll slowly down her cheeks. Suddenly, a gush of wind blows the picture out of her hand. She runs after it with a look of desperation on her face. It gets stuck on a low-hanging branch and she reaches out to get it, looking hopeful and relieved, but it blows away again, out of her reach.
Cut to Nigel, a 52-year-old African-American, further down the lane. He is looking around, as if searching for something, and he whistles loudly to beckon it to him. The photograph blows towards and he jerks his hand up reflexively to catch it. Mary runs round the corner towards him, looking frantic. She sees the picture in his hand, snatches it away from him and holds it to her chest, eyes closed. She looks immensely relieved. She opens her eyes and her and Nigel's eye's meet...

Interesting, is pretty much all that can be said.

Without going into too much detail we already see atleast what is going on with Mary, her history, imagination takes over easily filling in the blanks. With almost the same amount of lines for Nigel i feel there is less to image. The only thing I can see is that he is an older african american man.. but not so much.

Maybe it's easier to be empathetic towards Mary, clear is her sadness. Nigel, I am uncertain of his emotion and have no empathy to like him or even imagine him.

But this isnt my norm to judge, so if all of this is what you are going for then keep on you did a good job

Keep on writing though, i did enjoy how quickly you conjured Mary in my mind.

Hello MadHatter!

I absolutely love screenplays! I work on my own all the time but had never thought of a no words one, that's a really cool prompt to work with!

I think you establish both characters well. We know Mary is upset over the death of her military brother. The thing is you have to remember that screenplays are usually devoured by the eyes, as visual representations on the screen. So with out any words there is no way for the audience to know the picture is of her brother which makes that description useless on the page. You want to focus on what your audience will see, especially in a piece without dialogue. Besides if you leave the part out about it being her brother it adds some mystery. It could be a lover, an ex, a son, ect. That way when Mary meets Nigel there is some apprehension by the audience. They can imagine, what now? Is he going to be her new lover? Is he going to help her work past her recent loss? Will their relationship be romance based at all? (Audiences love to try to guess what happens next).

We can also see Nigel has experienced some sort of loss. He has lost something, from what I read I assume a pet-most likely a dog. A lot of people can become very attached to their pets so it is plausable to think Nigel is experiencing the same level of hurt as Mary. It might help make what he is looking for more clear if he is holding a toy or whatever could relate to what he is looking for.

Oh, another tid bit. The exactness of thier age is not so important. Just like with the brother thing the audience can never know their exact age. Also it is easier to cast if you give an age range instead. For Mary, early forties. For Nigel, early fifties.

I think it would be beneficial if you provided a paragraph describing the lane. You have to set the mood. Personally I imagine it to be either early morning and foggy or late evening, around dusk. The colors would mostly be shades of grey and white- because I also imagined it being winter. I imagined Mary's cheeks being red from the mixture of cold and crying and I imagined Nigel's breath fogging up in front of his face when he whistled. But those are all my own doings (obviously feel free to use them in your rewrite, it bothers me not) you have to give us that place to be in, you have to show it to us and make us believe it exists.

Let me know if you rewrite, I love reading scripts and think this was really interesting and inspiring!
Love always!
Christine Lefevre