Information is the Death of Drama

...so you have to figure out how to hide information as something else

“YES THIS IS MY HOME, AND YES I AM DAVID MAMET, NOW TELL ME WHAT-THE-FUCK-DO-YOU-WANT NOW”

David Mamet once wrote a memo to his writing staff on The Unit. In it, he boiled down a problem every working screenwriter eventually faces when getting notes, or receiving feedback, or even just revising their script. A producer or executive will say something like, “I want to know more about this character.” Which seems like a harmless request for more information. The only problem is, information is really fucking boring and kills a scene dead. Which will likely also kill your script dead, because the moment someone is bored, they move on to the next script, or the next job applicant, or the next TV show or movie in their Netflix queue.

Here’s how the ever-calm Mr. Mamet put it in his all-caps memo:

AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR.

THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN *DRAMA* AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.

EVERYONE IN CREATION IS SCREAMING AT US TO MAKE THE SHOW CLEAR. WE ARE TASKED WITH, IT SEEMS, CRAMMING A S***LOAD OF *INFORMATION* INTO A LITTLE BIT OF TIME.

OUR FRIENDS. THE PENGUINS, THINK THAT WE, THEREFORE, ARE EMPLOYED TO COMMUNICATE *INFORMATION* — AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.

BUT NOTE: THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN'T, I WOULDN'T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.

Mamet’s loud, and he’s probably a prick, but he’s also right.

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Just because you can disclose more about a character, or just because a reader wants to know more about a character, doesn’t necessarily mean you should disclose more about a character.

If someone reads your TV pilot and says, “I want to know more about the protagonist’s father,” the proper response usually actually isn’t to include more pilot script information about the protagonist’s father, especially if he’s maybe number five or six or eight on the call sheet. Usually, the proper writerly response is to say, “I’m so glad you found him intriguing and want to know more! Tune in for episodes two, or three, or four, because we’ll be telling a whole mini-storyline where we discover some really juicy secrets.”

In fact, probably the best response to that I-want-to-know-more note isn’t to include more information in the pilot, but to instead insert a moment of mystery.

Say you have just one to three scenes with this fatherly supporting character in the pilot. What do you do with that real estate? Most importantly, you need to make sure that each of these scenes is interesting or affecting or funny or something. You have to keep your reader/view hooked. You want them to look forward to this character appearing and reappearing across potentially hundreds of scenes.

Besides making sure that this fatherly supporting character sparks interesting scenes — and I would argue that a supporting character should explicitly be designed to help you write more interesting scenes — the next most important trait for this fatherly supporting character is his relationship with the protagonist.

But if you make this father character reasonably interesting/entertaining, and you dramatize an emotionally resonant relationship with your protagonist, chances are, someone in the notes process is going to ask for more information about this father character. It’s easy to ask for more, and as a very funny film editor I spoke with recently about the post-production notes process put it, “everyone wants to get their turn to piss on the rock.”

So anyway, here’s the situation: you have a well-written fatherly supporting character in your pilot who shows up for say 1-3 scenes. You’ve written in an interesting dynamic for him and your lead protagonist. But someone involved in the development process asks for more information about your father figure.

As a capable writer, you know information by itself is not only boring, but you also don’t really have the page count anyway. But you feel the need to respond. So how do you do it?

Here’s my suggestion: don’t add in new information or backstory for the father figure. Instead, create one single new dramatic question for that character. Give them a secret, and hint at it in the pilot as a beat of mystery.

Don’t write a new scene, or anything like that. Instead, you can simply write a new header just before a pre-existing scene, or a footer after it. And it can be as simple as Don Draper opening up a little box showing military medals inside it and contemplating it as the distant sound of a battle rings. It’s just a moment that says: “this is important, and this is going to play into our story, but you’ll have to stick around to find out how.”

Even better if it’s clear that the protagonist doesn’t know about their father’s little secret. Now you’ve added some mystery to the character, you’ve pointed towards a future story line, and you’ve hinted at the possibility of conflict if/when the protagonist finds out about this secret.

So, instead of providing answers to questions a reader/viewer isn’t asking, try making your reader/viewer ask a new question. Most of the time, when a notes-giver is asking for more information about a character, unless there is confusion about who that character is and/or how they relate to the story, what the notes-giver is really asking for is a little more oomph for that character. And dangling a new very specific, acute dramatic question concerning that character — giving them a secret — will almost always give him or her that oomph. (You’ll just have to keep the reader/viewer’s trust by answering or complicating that dramatic question in the next script or two.)

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So when do you need to include more info? If I had to boil the issue down to two essential elements, it’d be these:

1) What information does the audience need in order to properly understand the story enough to become emotionally invested in it?

2) How can I stage that information so it arrives at the viewer as compelling drama, or an odd character detail, or a cool visual, and not as boring information?

Or, more simply:

Does this information lead to emotion?

How can I present emotionally-necessary information as something interesting?

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Information that doesn’t lead to more emotion is, to my eyes, worthless information. Scene by scene, ask yourself: what do I want the audience to feel here? Whatever the audience needs to know about the character or the situation or the stakes in order to feel that feeling at that moment of time is the necessary information.

That is, the audience only needs however much information is necessary to connect with the story emotionally on a moment-by-moment basis. Anything more than that is extra info. (You may want to include extra info for thematic or tonal or aesthetic reasons — just be aware that it is extra info, and handle it accordingly.)

If the audience doesn’t understand what’s going on well enough to invest in the character’s feelings, they don’t have enough information. If the audience doesn’t know enough about the character to give a shit about what they’re going through, they don’t have enough information. And etc.

So, information is necessary for emotion. Otherwise, action is merely activity and humans get bored. The craft and artistry is in how to present that necessary information.

When I was writing self-contained mysteries of the week for Longmire, I had to figure out how to place clues to that week’s mystery throughout the script, to give the viewer an opportunity to try and solve the mystery along with Sheriff Walt Longmire. Clues = information. But, if these clues appear on screen too obviously as clues, then the mystery is too easy to solve, and Walt looks dumb, and the spell is broken.

So, I had to find ways to get those clues on screen as something else. Here’s a top-of-the-head Longmire hypothetical: a dead body has been found in rural Wyoming. Sheriff Longmire and his Philly-raised deputy Vic Moretti drive to a neighboring farm to find out more about this dead person. On the drive, Deputy Moretti mentions how she’s starting to feel like an authentic country gal. But then as they walk up to the farm, a happy goat runs up to Deputy Moretti and starts licking her, and she’s grossed out about it, and Sheriff Longmire is amused. They find the farmer and find out that the dead neighbor person was in debt, recently argued with his ex-wife’s new husband, etc.

Ok. That moment with the goat should play as the sort of mildly funny little weirdly Wyoming character beat that Longmire specialized in, especially since Katee Sackhoff, who played Deputy Moretti, always had the funniest reactions to stuff like that. It’s a moment of character-based levity before the real investigation kicks in. It’s Vic Moretti being Vic Moretti.

But! If in act three we have one of the other deputies investigating a related crime scene and finding a murder weapon in a field, we can script that there’s goat shit there in that field, but the deputy (and probably viewer) is so fixated on the murder weapon that they don’t see the goat turd. And then if we have Sheriff Longmire showing up at the farm in the last act with goat turds in an evidence bag and presenting them to the farmer, saying that he bets it’s an exact match to the goat turds on the property, and we have the farmer pulling out a gun, then voila, we’ve got ourselves the answer to a mystery. All starting with a clue disguised as a quirky character beat.

So, the key to this hypothetical Longmire mystery is in disguising the important information as something else. Our first clue (the goat) arrives as a humorous character beat and as the punchline to the “I’m a nature gal now” set-up, and the fact that the goat moment is a mild punchline that’s been set-up by prior dialogue really helps to disguise the fact that it’s actually a clue. The second clue (the goat turds) is largely hidden by the big obvious clue of the murder weapon. We only really understand that these little script details were actually clues all along once Sheriff Longmire brings down the hammer in the final act.

I don’t write mysteries-of-the-week anymore, but I’ve tried to bring similar energy to presenting key pieces of information in my scripts anyway. When I have to get key information on the page/on the screen, I try to make it appear as something else. As a character beat. As a joke. As a background visual. As an emotionally-revealing piece of dialogue. Because information as information is boring. And boredom is the death of scenes, scripts, and screenwriting careers.

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“Exposition is BORING unless it is in the context of some present dramatic tension or crisis. So start with an action that creates tension, then provide the exposition in terms of the present development.” — Alexander Mackendrick, On Filmmaking

What I often like to do in my scripts is to take the banal, overlooked materials of reality — usually as found in blue collar rural Americana — and rearrange them with some kind of storytelling showmanship.

That is, I rarely approach storytelling with a sort of documentarian gradual patience. That means there are lots of films out there I couldn’t write or make — I could never make something like Nomadland, for instance. I have too much of a pulpy, genre-driven impatience. I quite admire Nomadland, but I’m much more dialed into something like Parasite, which likewise dramatizes issues of class, but with showmanship and escalating surprises and reveals.

So, all of my unsolicited advice about information and exposition here should be understood with that caveat. Everything I write, and all of my screenwriting thoughts, have a touch of pulpiness to them.

But I also think Mackendrick’s advice — taken from his book On-Filmmaking, my storytelling bible — can hold true for non-pulpy scripts as well. And that advice is simply this: sometimes the exposition should happen after the event. Sometimes the right screenwriting move is to withhold more information, not to give more of it.

That is, instead of laying pipe for a future development, sometimes the right move is to have some development take place, then have the protagonist find out why it happened afterwards while they’re coping with the consequences of the event and trying to learn enough to keep the next iteration from occurring. Tension!

It’s the push-and-pull of suspense and surprise. It’s you determining what the protagonist knows, and when. It’s you also determining what the viewer/reader knows, and when. Do you want the audience to know more than the protagonist? If that’s the case, then you should probably be staging shit in a way that builds up suspense. Or, do you want the audience to merely think they know more than the protagonist, but then reveal that they too have been largely in the dark? If so, the surprise had better be worth it, and it better make sense upon reflection/rewatch.

Way too often I read scripts that spend the first 5-10 pages “establishing” the characters and the relationships and core story elements. Basically, it’s 5-10 pages of information, like some prelude to the story, which really begins 10 or 20 pages in. I’m sorry to say, that’s almost never compelling. Screenwriting is not that easy. What I think you should be aiming for are an opening 5-10 pages that immediately engage and/or enchant and/or entrance your audience with stirring drama and/or mystery and/or comedy and/or suspense, but that also secretly gets across whatever key information and exposition they’ll need to carry them through the middle portion of the script and help your ending land on them with an emotional punch.

Information is an absolute necessity for any script to work. Information is also the death of drama. If you can reconcile these two truisms on a page by page, scene by scene basis — as stirring drama — then you’re gonna have a pretty decent chance at having a professional screenwriting career. And then you can join me in talking mild shit about a screenwriting hero like David Mamet on your substack, knowing full well you’d also totally geek out if you ever crossed paths with him in real life.