Andrew Norriss
Andrew Norriss: 5. Spicing it up
Some of the best lines in a book or a script don’t get added until the end. When I’ve been through four or five drafts, got the balance right, shortened it, know I’ve got a good story - then I read it through looking for the areas where it maybe drags a little and could do with… spicing up.
If I have a conversation which I know is fine and necessary to the story but a little… ordinary, I might add in what the characters are doing at the same time, to flesh out the picture. It can add another dimension. The silver haired granny who absent-mindedly scoops up a spider as she speaks, for instance, and gently places it out of the window, is clearly a different sort of person from the one who sprays it with a cloud of insecticide.
Spicing up works particularly well with comedy. A decent gag can take anything from ten minutes to an hour of thought and you don’t put in that much time on a line until you’re absolutely sure it’s not going to be cut out of drafts two or three. This is the technique that P G Wodehouse famously used. He planned the content, not only of each chapter in his book, but of each paragraph, pinning the pages up on the wall around his office. Then, when he was satisfied with the story, he went back and ‘wrote’ it properly. In this line from The Inimitable Jeeves, the base line is the information that Aunt Agatha looks surprised, but what he finally comes up with is…
‘...Aunt Agatha’s demeanour was now rather like one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.’
Genius. Pure genius. But put in near the end, not the beginning.
Andrew Norriss
