As long as its obvous.

It can be subtle, as long as it's obvious.

I’ve worked with two writers this week who both had me referencing perhaps my favorite concept from Billy Wilder, “It can be subtle, as long as it’s obvious.”

(His exact words were always much more elegant, but the way I learned it 30 years ago has always stayed in my mind.)

Like these writers and many before, I struggled with the same perspective.

I wanted to be a smart writer. I wanted smart people to like my work.

So I thought that meant being “subtle.”

I was even worse than most! When I first started writing plays, I genuinely fantasized about college classrooms dissecting my work, and I was determined to give them something to dissect!

I wanted symbolic imagery, references, coded messages, and a lot of dumb things that we now call “easter eggs.”

None of this came from confidence.

Just the opposite. It came from insecurity. I didn’t have faith that what was happening in the moment was interesting enough.

I was worried about what the reader (the audience) was thinking about me, rather than how they were emotionally reacting to the events on stage.

But once that confidence shifted, so did my perspective.

And in reading a biography of Billy Wilder, I came across this line, and I thought I would never, ever put it better than that.

If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.

This is an old line, but writers find a way around it by saying, “It’s on the page!”

It’s just subtle.

So we have to adapt it and say…

“If it doesn’t read…”

That is, if the moment doesn’t register with the audience, it might as well not even happen. What’s the point? (I am not attempting to rhyme in this one.)

Certainly, you can write a moment for fun, and if some people get it, great! And if others don’t, that’s okay, too.

But if the audience NEEDS to see this moment to understand what’s happening, or have the emotional reaction we want, that moment needs to be clear as day.

You do not have the tools of the director at your disposal.

You do not have the music cue. You do not have the actors. You do not have the unequivocal visual framing.

You have only the words you put on the page.

You cannot even be assured you have the reader’s full attention!

You have no idea what the reader’s physical or emotional environment is like. Are they pressed for time to read three screenplays on a Sunday?

Are their kids running around screaming? Their spouse pissed at them?

With dialogue, trust the reader. With action lines, trust no one.

People like to read dialogue. It’s easy. It moves their eyes down the page.

Action lines are tougher. Writers use too many words. They have whole sentences that are unnecessary.

It’s the first thing a reader starts to skip.

Early on in our writing, we blame the reader. We say they’re lazy or inattentive. Or… (gasp!) Not smart! They don’t get it.

All of this may even be true! But it doesn’t matter.

Because the longer we are in this business, the more our living depends on it, the more we realize that the onus is on us to write something that compels the reader’s attention.

It’s our job to write something that rewards reading every word.

It’s our job to make sure the audience DOES get it.

Know what you want.

The moment in question with the young writer was a scene of two people alone in an apartment. There is sexual tension, and it gets a bit much for one, and he decides it’s best to go home before succumbing to it.

We have seen this kind of moment before. I have a similar one in a screenplay of mine.

It’s always the characters, the relationships, and the details that are going to make this kind of moment stand out.

The writer’s focus was on what she didn’t want.

She didn’t want to be too obvious.

Because this was her focus, this is what she got. She wasn’t too obvious. In fact, the moment was cloaked in so much non-obviousness that it didn’t exist.

So I pressed her to make a choice about the moment. Is the moment about him avoiding the temptation, or is he really that tired?

“Can’t it be both?”

Which is what I call a non-choice.

This kind of non-choice hides behind being two things at once, but it’s just another way of not being either one.

This is a kind of self-deception we commit. We tell ourselves a weak choice is actually just us being subtle or nuanced.

We’re embarrassed to be clear. To state plainly: this is what this moment is.

Because when we do, there is nothing to hide behind. No denial about the reader “not getting it.”

We are stuck with our effectiveness or ineffectiveness. The moment worked or it didn’t.

And the failure is ours and ours alone.

We allow ourselves to feel judged.

Which is just another way of worrying about how the reader feels about us, the writer, rather than the story we are writing.

And sometimes, we’re just simply not as clear as we think.

This one is frustrating, but easier to fix. We think we’re as clear as can be, yet the reader still misses it.

In this instance, we just go back and turn that clarity up a notch.

Be clear about the moment.

This is the first step to every solution. We must make a choice. We make a choice about what a moment is, how the moment before it created this moment, and how it creates the next.

Moment. To moment. To moment.

And then we must decide how we communicate that moment on the page.

We have two principal guidelines that we never sacrifice.

Clarity of intent.
Emotional truth.

If we violate either of these, we rework the moment.

I mentioned I have a similar moment in a screenplay of mine.

First, I am going to give you a half-baked version of it:

This is a classic “guy is injured, attractive lady tends to his wound” moment.

Believe it or not, it’s natural to the story, but it still necessitates bringing something new to it. In this case, Keyes does not want this moment. He wants to get out of there.

But in this example, it’s just plot. This happens, and they say this. What the moment is is unclear.

Sure, actors working on this scene could figure it out, especially given the context of what happened before it, but I don’t have that at my disposal.

The director could make this clear in the movie, but I’m the director of this version of the movie, and I have to make this scene clear to the reader.

Here is a trimmed version of how we actually wrote it:

To be clear: I am not looking for notes! There is no need to email me to tell me what you don’t like about my writing. :)

I share this to illustrate a point. By making the moments in the scene clear, the scene itself and what it’s about is more clear.

This clarity would be in the final film, so it should be in the first version of the film: the screenplay.

Show, THEN tell.

It is perfectly okay to simply give the reader the same thought the audience would have when watching the film.

This is from Drew Goddard’s screenplay of PROJECT HAIL MARY. It’s from the opening moment when Grace is trying to figure out what is happening:

Not only does Goddard flat out say, “He’s in outer space.” He makes it clear that this moment isn’t just about our understanding…

It’s about Grace’s understanding of this as well: “Oh god I’m in space”

The moment is clear. The moment is obvious. The moment is sincere.

Choose when we understand the moment.

We don’t have to know every significant moment is a significant moment then and there.

In THE GODFATHER, there is a meeting with Don Corleone, his son Sonny, and their soon-to-be adversary, Sollozzo.

Sonny speaks out of turn, and the Don shuts him down and apologizes for his spoiled son.

At the time, it’s a moment between father and son, showing Sonny’s lack of wisdom and the Don’s disappointment, but Coppola makes sure we remember it. Why?

It’s also a huge moment in the plot.

It’s when Sollozzo realizes that if he kills the Don, maybe he can get a deal.

But we only know this in hindsight.

We realize this later when Sollozzo says, “Sonny was hot for my deal, wasn’t he?”

As storytellers, we get to choose when the moment is clear to the audience.

You can do it at the time. You can do it later.

But if you don’t do it at all, the audience never registers the moment for what it was.

Guard emotional truth.

It’s not the obvious moment that we reject. It’s the insincere moment that we wince at.

Don’t confuse the two.

There is a great line in the director’s commentary of AS GOOD AS IT GETS. In it, James Brooks praises Jack Nicholson’s performance throughout the film because “We always know what he’s thinking.”

Yet, how can that be if subtlety is such an asset?

This is the genius of the performance and, frankly, the genius of anything we praise as being subtle.