The Power of Perspective

Scripts are written from a third-person present perspective. Telling a story this way can feel limiting, like you’re not writing so much as delivering a set of bland programming instructions. 

Kelly opens the car door. She sits in the car and turns it on. She drives down the road.

Another concern with the third-person present perspective is clarity. Many writers believe that they need to spell out the minutiae of what expressions are on characters’ faces or where the camera should focus on. 

Close up on John’s eyes making a sorrowful expression.

I get the impulse. As writers, it's a constant struggle to translate the vision in our heads to the page with perfect fidelity. We agonize over whether or not our scenes are conveying our intentions. We fear the reader won’t pick up on the nuances of our characters’ performances without including every smile, frown, and sigh into the script.

To write this way is not only boring, but it makes it hard to showcase your creative capabilities. If a third-person present perspective feels limiting, I offer the cliché that limits are made to be broken. Just like a skilled chef can play with the constraints of a recipe, a writer can spice up their work by playing with perspective. 

Perspective is what makes your script visually interesting. It’s an indicator of what the story would look like on film or TV, but it's also a valuable insight into your protagonist. To illustrate my point, let’s re-write the above example from Kelly’s perspective to see if we can’t glean some information about her:

Kelly trudges down the driveway and forcefully yanks open the car door. She drops heavily into the driver’s seat and practically punches the ‘push to start’ button. She whips the vehicle out of the driveway and peels down the street, never taking her eyes off the horizon.

These lines don't read like a set of instructions. There’s emotion in them. Kelly is frustrated. Maybe she’s running late, or running away from something. Either way, this snippet feels like it’s written from Kelly’s perspective. But maybe Kelly isn’t the main character. Maybe it’s her husband who’s watching her from the window:

John uses his fingers to open a hole in the blinds just wide enough for him to peer out but not be seen. In the driveway, Kelly slams the car door and drives away without even glancing up or looking back at the house. John’s narrowing eyes follow her through the peep hole until the car disappears from view.

This is essentially the same action, but Kelly isn’t the protagonist. This time we are in John’s perspective and we learn a few things. He doesn’t want Kelly to see him watching her, and he feels annoyed that she didn’t even look back at the house. We don’t have to say that he feels annoyed, we understand it intuitively because the action is written from John’s perspective.

A lot of information can be communicated through the action description if we treat it less like a blueprint for the action and more like a window into our characters. We should experiment and have fun with our prose, although we do still need to play by the rules. Just like the experimenting chef can’t substitute almond milk for beef sauce and still call it Spaghetti Bolognese, we can’t include a half page about what our protagonist is thinking and still call it a screenplay. That’s a novel. 

Don’t overlook perspective. It will enhance your script, enrich your visual language, and make for a far more enjoyable experience for the reader.