The Creation of the Script 1

Activities

Jimmy McGovern and Irvine Walsh

Structure

The first question that a writer asks might be: ‘Where to start?’ Jimmy McGovern answers, honestly and bluntly: ‘I haven’t got a clue, really.’

At the writers’ workshop set up by some of the sacked Liverpool dockers, McGovern begins by listening to a variety of anecdotal stories recounted by the dockers and their partners. ‘The more I heard, the more appalled I became’, he says.

Group discussion is a good starting point for your own drama-scripting workshop in the classroom:

Exposition

The exposition gives essential information that audiences need in order to understand a character or scene. For example, at the beginning of a new episode — including the first episode — the audience needs to know ‘the story so far’. Writers need to think carefully about how much to explain and how to explain it.

The television documentary relies on a particular type of exposition. Information is conveyed to the viewer directly, often by an unseen narrator. This method is sometimes used in drama (Shakespeare’s use of the ‘Chorus’ character in Henry V, for example). We are accustomed to this approach in factual television documentaries or in novels, where the presenter or author can speak directly to the audience. However, in modern drama an indirect method is generally preferred, being more natural. (Imagine the use of a narrator in a television soap opera!)

Indirect exposition relies on an audience picking up essential information from characters’ conversations. However, care needs to be taken so that characters do not spend time, unnaturally, giving information that is already known to other characters.

The workshop discovers that it would be more natural and much simpler not to mention the docks dispute:

‘And that’s all the scene is,’ explains McGovern. ‘The very next scene explains it: "Picket Line: ‘Scab! Scab!’" That’s what the previous scene has been about! Mystify the audience for ten seconds. The next scene is richer because of it.’

Minimising the words spoken and juxtaposing scenes can have telling effects. How much of your writing could be safely deleted either because some words are redundant or because the full meaning will become apparent during the following scene?

• a book cover
• the opening sentence, paragraph or page of a novel
• the first few minutes of a film

Character

‘Character is part of story-telling... get into the heart and soul of a character... character is action... merge character and story.’
Jimmy McGovern

McGovern stresses the primary importance of characterisation and its function in helping to provide structure for a story. To tell the story of the hundreds of families affected by the docks dispute, the workshop participants build their narrative around a core family: a sacked docker, his wife and their children. Each character will see life from their own point of view; each will be affected differently by the circumstances. To make characters real and believable, close attention must be paid to what each character says and does and what others think and say about them.

However, when meeting someone for the first time in real life, we do not immediately know everything about them. The more we see someone — at school, socially, or in their own family circle — the more we get to know about them. Our first impressions often change when we get to know someone better. If information about a character is gradually built up scene by scene as the story moves forward, the process will be all the more absorbing.

Both writers and their audiences need to feel and understand the various situations in which characters find themselves. At first, some of the participants in the dockers’ workshop refuse to empathise with scab workers. However, the reality is that scabs played a significant role in the dispute. ‘As dramatists,’ says McGovern provocatively, ‘you’ve got to love this man!’ And the more we meet the scab worker, the more we will discover and understand him. ‘The scab will get stronger as your storyline unfolds’, McGovern insists. The villain in drama needs to be presented plausibly, and perhaps even attractively. He may oppose everything that you hold dear, but, as McGovern points out, ‘if your cause is just, you can attack your cause.’

Dialogue

In a drama, speech should sound natural and realistic. Though characters in films or television dramas may appear to speak as we do in real life, dramatic dialogue is carefully constructed to achieve particular effects.

If you recorded the group discussions in Activity 1, you might have good evidence of how people don’t listen to each other, interrupt, make incomplete statements, change the subject without warning, speak just to hear the sound of their own voice, speak at the same time as someone else, and so on. In real life, language rambles or drifts; it can be repetitive; and lacking in dramatic interest. Dramatic dialogue, however realistic it may seem, is crafted so that it is moving the story forward or revealing something.

Dramatic dialogue expresses a great deal in a few words, and serves to advance the narrative. It is used to inform or to reveal something about the speakers and their attitudes to each other. The fewer characters there are in a scene, the easier it is to construct such dialogue.

Here is an example of how a script is conventionally layed out:

EXT. WALTONS’ HOUSE. DAY __________________________ JEAN pulls up in the car. THOMAS, SARAH and KENNY are with her. She sees TOMMY standing at the open front door. She knows something is wrong. She presses a button, opens the boot, as the children are getting out. JEAN Carry some bags. SARAH tuts. KENNY What about him? KENNY means THOMAS who is making his way into the house. JEAN Never mind him. (She gets out of car. To TOMMY:) What’s up? JEAN and the children are making their way to the boot of the car. THOMAS passes TOMMY on his way in. THOMAS Hiya, Dad. TOMMY Hiya, son. TOMMY, too, makes his way towards the boot. JEAN, picking up carrier bags, can’t take her eyes off him. TOMMY (cont’d) Macca scabbed it. JEAN (disbelief) Macca! TOMMY takes the Liverpool Echo out of one of the bags, starts flicking through it. JEAN (cont’d) Why? TOMMY (engrossed in paper) Don’t know. JEAN Did you ask him? TOMMY Couldn’t stop the car.

Each scene is prefaced with indications of whether it is INTerior or EXTerior; the location; and whether it is DAY or NIGHT.

Characters’ names are indicated in capital letters (unless spoken by another character).

Speeches are centre-aligned on the page (with any necessary explanations in brackets).

Sue Mitchell and Doreen McNally

Conflict

‘A drama is about human beings making choices. It’s about people who want something but there are obstacles in the way, and it’s how the people overcome all these obstacles and attain or, sadly, fail to attain what they want.’
Jimmy McGovern

When obstacles or complications are placed in the way of characters, ‘the plot thickens’. Initially, the dockers all had jobs to go to, but then they were sacked and a struggle for reinstatement began. As their conflict with their employer grows and intensifies, the audience actively shares in the problem and becomes more involved, sympathetic and understanding.

There could be conflict between what a character desires and what is actually possible to achieve. There may be conflict between characters, or within an individual character. Rarely in life does one position appear wholly right and another wholly wrong: life is normally more complex than that. Something valid can usually be said for both sides.

What may be the outcome of a conflict, and what will happen next, is probably the basic reason anyone has for following a story. But more than that, exploring conflicts allows the audience to feel what it is like to be in such a dilemma.

As the workshops progress, the participants identify major industrial, political and personal conflicts. It is when these impinge upon the lives of people they know that they succeed in finding their structure and theme. The strands all come together in Sue Mitchell’s real-life experience of speaking to an assembly of schoolteachers. For Jimmy McGovern, this scene will form the primary ‘vertical’ of the drama’s structure:

‘You can tell a good story immediately: as soon as you hear it you see five or six key scenes... They’re your ‘verticals’ and they’ve all got to support the big ‘horizontal’ which is your entire story.’
Jimmy McGovern