comprehending much in few words.
Ecclesiasticus
The viewer hears the words but once. There is no second chance. So the viewer must be able to recognize, understand, process and file their meaning away immediately.
When the words and sentences – whether on-camera or narration voice-over – are muddled, complex, literary, ambiguous, illogical, passive, weak, coded or out of recognizable chronology, the viewer simply ignores them. And watches the pictures instead. Or turns to another channel.
When the viewer turns us off, we have only ourselves to blame. There can be no excuses. After all, we cover the most fascinating subject in all the world – people.
Writing for Storytelling is a matter of boiling down choices until only the words that must be said are said:
- Writing should reveal, un-mask, strip naked.
- Never write what you can show.
- Conventional TV news stories contain 75% narration, 20% interviews and 5% actuality. Which is strange, because actuality, followed by interviews are the most powerful ways of passing on information that can be remembered. Narration is the weakest. Good Storytelling turns the numbers around. And makes the stories a hundred times better.
-
Actuality is always more interesting than narration. Always. - Less is always more.
Here are some guidelines for writing good stories for TV:
• One thought to a sentence – take it literally. But not all the time because breaking the rhythm at the right time can be a good thing. But certainly as a base.
One thought = one sentence is the absolute basis for good TV journalism writing. Particularly when the words are voice-over narration and have to compete for attention with the pictures.
The sentences may look choppy and unattractive on paper. But you give them life in the performance.
• Conversational language – Other versions of the same guideline are "write like you speak" and "write for the ear, not the eye" and "write it as you would tell it."
But, in fact, you’re not looking for real conversation – that’s too messy. What you want are words and sentences that are close to real conversation, are cleaned up to get rid of repetition, naughty words and false starts, but still sound like real conversation.
The script should sound like the language used by reasonably intelligent people when they talk to each other socially about things that matter. Reasonably intelligent people, incidentally, mostly speak in sentences containing no more than one thought.
There is enormous power in conversational language.
• Strong, short, simple words – Words with guts and power. Taut, vivid, tangible, edible, potable, smellable words coming together to make images. In English, Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin words.
In all languages, use words appropriate to the meaning, emotion and circumstance of the story. Which means different words for a story about ballet than a police raid on drug thugs.
• Active Voice – "The mouse kicked the bear" rather than "the bear was kicked by the mouse."
• No clichés, codes or jargon – Particularly, no journalistic clichés, codes or jargon. Like "tight security" and "world class" and "party faithful" and "bottom line" and "ongoing" and "basically" and so on and so on and so on.
• Avoid euphemisms (the substitution of a weak, soft expression for a strong, tough one.) For example, people aren’t actually retrenched or downsized. They’re fired. (Ask them!) And avoid outworn metaphors ("Achilles’ heel" "fishing in troubled waters", "playing into the hands of ..." etc.).
• Chronological structure – Write chronologically unless there’s a good reason not to. Chronological writing is by far the easiest for the performer to perform and the viewer to understand .
This guideline applies to individual sentences as well as entire stories. For instance: "He knew he had a problem when he realized he was standing right between the wounded lion and her cub" is better written as "that’s when he realized he was standing right between the wounded lion and her cub. That’s when he knew he had a problem". (It’s also better because it’s two sentences and each of the sentences has only one thought.)
Write first what comes first. Then what comes next. Until you get to the end. Then stop.
• Focus.
• Less is more.
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Last Revision: May 14, 2002
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