Parentheticals aka the Kiss O’ Death

I’ve been reviewing formatting assignments in a beginning screenwriting class and I want to say something to you all (especially the beginners) about parentheticals.

Just.

Don’t.

Seriously. Parentheticals need to be used really sparingly in a script. As in —

Almost not at all.

If multiple characters are in a scene and whom one character is directing dialogue to is not clear, then there needs to be a parenthetical (to Jerry). And if a character’s attitude during delivery is not clear based on action and dialogue content, then there needs to be a parenthetical. For example, if a character says “That’s great!” and is being sarcastic and a reader won’t know the character is being sarcastic there? Then a parenthetical, (sarcastic), might be important there.

On the other hand, if characters are fighting to the death, it’s probably not necessary to tag each line of dialogue with a parenthetical like (angry) or (enraged). Doy. They’re trying to kill each other. They are probably not feeling sanguine or friendly.

So.

Avoid doing that. Avoid inserting too many parentheticals into dialogue to explain dialogue that can, based on scene action and dialogue content, speak for itself.

Also, do not put scene action in dialogue parentheticals. If a character is pointing a gun, smacking another character, or stepping forward, for example, that’s action and you want to put that in action description. There are several reasons for that.

One reason is, if you want to go back during revisions and read action description alone and read dialogue alone? (Which is a really good idea, evaluating action on its own and dialogue for individual characters on its own.) You can’t if a whole lot of action description is stuffed into dialogue parentheticals.

Another reason is, parentheticals are really short, not even as wide as dialogue on the page, whereas action description is a whole script page wide. The physical description can be longer and more visual and dynamic as a sentence in action description. If the action is shoe horned into a dialogue parenthetical? The action is going to need to be really short, or it’s going to start taking up multiple lines there and multiple lines eat page space.

AND.

Parentheticals stand between a reader and dialogue.

If every time a reader goes to read dialogue there’s a parenthetical in front of the dialogue? The reader will stop reading parentheticals. It just slows down reading dialogue too much to keep stopping to read a parenthetical each time the reader tries to read a new line or section of dialogue. And readers read very fast. Readers don’t have all night to marvel over one work of creation (AKA your script) there. Readers have stacks of scripts to read. They won’t do that start/stop reading thing if dialogue has too many parentheticals in the way of getting to the dialogue. They’ll skip the parentheticals instead.

Also, consider the math —

If a 100 page script has 3 parentheticals on every page? That’s 300 parentheticals a reader is going to have to keep stopping to read before flowing on to the dialogue. It kills pacing. It exhausts readers. And it’s taking up 300 line spaces in the script (or more if the parentheticals take up more than one line each because they are long action descriptions shoe horned into short dialogue parentheticals).

Even if a 100 page script has only 1 parenthetical per page. That’s 100 parentheticals a reader has to fight through to get to the dialogue.

Screenwriters don’t get all that much page space in a script. Don’t waste 300 or even 100 lines (or more) on parentheticals.

I promise you, I have written entire scripts that contained no parentheticals, and others than just contained 3 or 4 parentheticals in the whole script — and the scripts read great, better, without them.