Minor screenwriting pet peeve

Be careful with unnecessarily obvious exposition in your screenplay dialogue. Rather than have one of your characters just flat out tell us a crucial piece of information, I like to see writers get a little more creative about letting crucial information slip out naturally so that the exposition is as unobtrusive as possible.

It's pretty common, for instance, for action heroes to have a background as "a former something or other." It's gotten to be a pretty serious cliche. Now that's not to say you shouldn't use it, ever... because it almost always makes sense for a guy who's going to spend two hours kicking ass to have at least some training in the fine art of ass-kicking. But you have to be clever about it. Nothing makes me cringe more than when I'm watching a movie and some character or another describes the hero by saying... "oh that's Bob Jones... he's a former Navy SEAL who fought in Kuwait during Gulf War I and got kicked out of the Navy for punching out his commanding officer."

I mean come on...

It goes back to one of my earlier posts where I cautioned you to be sure you write dialogue that sounds like people actually talking. It's hard to imagine an actual human being introducing someone by spelling out his entire resume.

Find a way for that information to flow naturally. Maybe instead when that character introduces the hero, the person he's meeting could say something like "yeah we know each other from the Navy."

Rare will be the times when you'll hear the Commander cite Steven Seagal movies as examples of great writing, but I have to give UNDER SIEGE credit for coming up with a clever riff on the "former etc. etc." cliche... Even though Steven spends the first half of the movie performing ridiculous feats of derring-do, he continues to insist through out that he's "just a cook." But he does it with a smile on his face and the claim rings SO hollow that by the time his former Commanding Officer ends the suspense by listing off his seemingly endless list of military accomplishments, we're ready for it, and the result is more comic than annoyingly cliched.

Just be smart about it. Lazy writing is boring writing, and the quickest path I've found to get your script passed on by everybody in town.