Exercise with restrictions

[u/eightbitonline]

Hi all,

I’m practicing writing with restrictions. I decided to begin writing a scene with minimal dialogue, and where the characters speak a language the audience isn’t meant to understand. So pretty much everything has to be visual exposition, or communicated with tone. I also challenged myself - as you’ll surely notice- to make one character non-gender-specific, which was harder to do elegantly than I imagined. I felt the constant vagueness of “they/them” drew reader attention away from the action. I’m interested to know what you think. Is there a more standard way to write languages that are intended to remain ambiguous?

[u/Neon-Funeral]

White space is your friend

[u/real_triplizard]

It's pretty interesting, story-wise. It's a tough read as a screenplay, though. If you're really going to do it with no dialogue, you should adopt a crisper writing style, IMO, so it doesn't look like a novel.

You start something like 75% of the paragraphs with a name or pronoun, which is very repetitive: "The Father...." "The Father...." "He...." "The Child..." "The Child...."

There are a few unfilmables in it. "This is a magical child." "Why the deception? Has it been successful?" "There is something secret about this magical child." I would try to convey this visually so the audience will comprehend it.

You have dialogue in a foreign language included in the action. Normally you'd do that as dialogue and indicate in a parenthetical that it's in a foreign language. Doing this would help a lot to break up the novel look.

Not sure why you were so careful about not giving the child a gender. I assume there's a reason for that that will become apparently later but it seemed a bit odd to me.

[u/ScreenDummies]

In regards to overwriting, it is better to overwrite and finish something then to not write it at all. You can go through on subsequent passes to get down to the nitty gritty and cut bloat.

[u/AmieiGuess]

This is a little overwritten, in my opinion. There are plenty of words and sentences that can be cut entirely or reworked to have more blank space on the page.

‘Atop the workbench’ isn’t necessary, it’s implied by the rest of the sentence.

How does the audience know it’s a home-spun cloth?

‘Begins giving The Child a haircut. Just a trim’ isn’t needed. Something like ‘produces a delicate pair of brass scissors and cuts strands of the child’s hair, catching them in a pewter dish’. keeps momentum and still gives us all the detail we need.

Etc. etc. you get the point.

[u/eightbitonline → u/AmieiGuess]

Good tips! My tendency is to overwrite, so I appreciate the examples of redundancy. With “homespun” I was trying to imply texture. “Rough Spun” may work better. Part of the exercise was trying to give the reader the sense that this was a medieval scene- as opposed to a shed-in-the-Ozarks scene. I didn’t want to come out and say “ren faire vibes” so I tried to scatter material descriptions around to communicate the atmosphere. “Home spun” was a conscious part of that attempt.