Friend of the site Erik Bork has written a great new article on the first rule of screenwriting: Show, don’t tell. Erik writes,
At first, it might seem obvious. Film and television are visual media. You always want to give the audience something to watch. It’s boring to hear characters “speak information” to each other. It’s undramatic, and not entertaining.
But this most basic principle of dramatic writing goes beyond that — and it is an issue, at some point, in almost every script.
It’s not just that spoken dialogue is not an engaging way to transmit facts to the audience. It also doesn’t work very well. Readers and viewers are not able to absorb and process nearly as much information as writers tend to think, when it’s merely spoken in dialogue. Such information tends to just “bounce off”, especially when it comes out in undramatic situations, where the audience isn’t glued to the screen, because something really compelling is going on… Readers and audiences don’t want to work hard to have to take in, process and remember facts they’re being given. They’re there to be emotionally engaged and entertained.
