What Tried and True Screenwriting Rule Do You Break?

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The genesis of becoming a screenwriter has to start somewhere, right?

1. You inhale a home-made concoction of nitrous oxide, model glue and fresh squeezed juice of the cacao plant, and exclaim to the semi-conscious freeloading pals gathered around your 27" TV "hey, I can write a movie better that that piece of garbage, and just as soon as I figure out how to get the remote freeze-frame off that B-movie starlet's boobies, I will."

2. You go into a neighborhood bookstore emporium, spend way too much time trying to peel the plastic off the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, and eventually wander over to the Arts & Entertainment section. Invest 8.2 seconds and discover that the screenwriting books are over with the other scholastic tomes and flip through everything from Field to McKee. The first questions is "what the hell do I buy?" the second is "how the hell can an out of work writer, who hasn't written a screenplay before, afford to buy it?" So, off to the library and soak one's head with everything there is available.

3. After reading, memorizing, re-reading the better ones, burning most of them (do not try this at home: Note Library Fine Balance $416.85) you feel you have fairly good knowledge of the lingo and the format, heck you even attempt to write a few ideas down and see how it looks. You copy, emulate and honor your favorite screenwriters with your tributes, making sure to adhere to every one of Mr. Trottier's rules until you come up with something that looks, acts and sounds like the proverbial duck.

4. You rent all of your fave screenwriter's films and genres similar to what you like (let's say Tarantino) and after driving everyone in the house batshit from watching, stopping, writing stuff down... watching, stopping the movie, write stuff down... you get a fuckin' shitassed crotchlovin' flying fuck at a rolling donut feel for the writer (oops, sorry, I was having a Quentin there for a sec) and attempt a script.

5. You sell your body to science, rent tattoo space on your ass for a cellphone company and collect returnable bottles to get enough cash to enter contests, buy pro writing software, mail out scripts, photocopy screenplays you borrow, drink a coffee one per hour so they don't toss you out of the free wi-fi enabled coffee shop, subscribe to magazines, join writing groups, start a blog...

6. Your new screenwriting brain suddenly skips a few electrical beats, you suffer a mild case of vuja de (this has never friggin happened before) and come to the conclusion that you need to be an individual amongst the vast quantities of lemming flavored sheep. In order to get ahead, you need to give head... sorry, we're not at the prodco meeting stage yet... but you need to separate yourself from the pack, self-cull the herd, baby and show them you have a unique voice to scream into their faces!

Which brings me to the point of the blog post.

What tried and true screenwriting "rule" that you may have used at the beginning or read that was a "must do" somewhere, do you BREAK the most?

It can be anything like: use italics to emphasize a word vs underlining, toss in camera shots like dissolve and cut, don't capitalize sounds, overuse ellipsis... and dashes, run past the standard 105 average page count, shove flashbacks everywhere... whatever, just try and think about something that maybe you do that is against the grain..

For me, I think it is using sluglines with no INT/EXT to increase the smoothness of the flow such as:

INT. MANSION - DAY
Fred skips through the kitchen into the --

GAMESROOM

Where he snatches a snooker ball off a table and runs to the --

DEN

And whips the snooker ball at his babysitter, MISS HELGA VON BABESKI as he collapses into the plaid beanbag chair.

LATER

Fred stands, pulls his pants up and reaches for his wallet as Miss Helga wipes off the snooker ball.

Something along those lines.

So, what rules are you cats breaking out there?

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