In 2009 and 2013, John looked in detail at why screenplays use the present tense.
One sentence in a previous screencast drew a number of questions in the comments section:
Seated at a laptop computer, Phil is watching live video from a tiny camera in Mike’s headset.
First off, that’s not passive voice, as some readers suggested. Passive voice would reverse subject and object, so the clause would be…
...live video from a tiny camera in Mike’s headset is being watched by Phil.
…which is truly awful. Rather, “Phil is watching” is called present continuous, or present progressive. You can almost always substitute the simple present tense.
Seated at a laptop computer, Phil watches live video from a tiny camera in Mike’s headset.
And that’s fine.
But what I like about present progressive in this case is that it implies that he’s been doing this for a while, and that he’s not completing the action in this moment. Consider the difference between these two sentences:
Mary is cutting coupons.
Mary cuts coupons.
With the second one, you get the sense she might have put the scissors back in the drawer and moved on to something else. Or that her coupon-cutting is something she routinely does, perhaps as a character trait. (“Well, you know Mary. She cuts coupons.”)
Remember, screenwriting is about what is happening at exactly this moment. Traditional fiction is rarely written in this super-present tense, which may be why some readers find screenplays weird.1
For screenwriting, the most useful thing about the present progressive is that it’s interruptible:
Bob is scrubbing the ketchup out of his hair when he hears a SCREAM.
That’s handy.
Here’s the thing: No screenwriter is ever going to talk about the present progressive tense. It’s not a movie thing; it’s grammar esoterica. In fact, I had to look it up to make sure I was using the right term.
Rather, writers use the words and forms that best suit what they’re trying to do. In screenwriting, you’re always looking for the shortest, most elegant way to get the point across — which is usually the simplest. Focus on getting the words to flow together naturally, rather than proscriptive rules.
While most fiction is written in the past tense, not all prose fiction is written that way. Robert Jackson Bennett looks at the benefits and drawbacks of writing in the present tense:2
The past tense actually separates the audience from what’s happening in the work they’re reading by making it so that the story has already happened. While you might not think about it, the past tense actually sets works in the past – there is a division of time between the audience and the work, in the same manner that there is a division in time between me and World War II. If I read about World War II, I am not experiencing World War II, I am merely hearing about it. I will never experience World War II: I will only have someone tell me what it was like.
The present tense, to a certain extent, bypasses this division, or it simulates the feeling of bypassing it: you are witnessing something happening right now. Everything is immediate.
[…] It bypasses the fixed, static feeling of an event that has already happened, being told from a fixed narrator’s voice, and instead feeds you an experience that is currently ongoing.
That’s exactly why screenplays are written in the present tense. It’s not about what did happen; it’s what’s right in front of the audience.
Still, for traditional fiction, the present tense often feels wrong — too insistent, to in-your-face.
Bennett compares it to shaky-cam, but to me closer analogies would include the 48 frames version of The Hobbit or the sniffily live-sung close-ups of Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables. The hyper-reality either works for you or it doesn’t.
Turn back the clock with these TV scripts
ICYMI, this past Featured Friday in Weekend Read was all about Period Television series! You’ll find Dickinson, Mad Men, Pose and more in the Discover tab.
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Also worth noting: Many languages don’t have the same plethora of pseudo-tenses as English, or use them differently. A non-native speaker will find they don’t match up particularly well. Q: “Did she have dinner?” A: “She does.”
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