The nose knows

So for first time writers, or newbie writers, they will hear a lot of "it's on the nose" when people read their scripts. And when you're a new writer you're not always sure what that means. Recently, a new writer reached out to me in need of some explanation so I thought it might be a good post to help other new writers in this position.

I asked him to read as many articles on what "writing on the nose" meant. I also asked him to rewrite a scene of his once he thought he knew what it was to see if he had applied what he thought he learned. Even with that, it still turned out he was in the dark.

What I did notice is that he thought to fix writing on the nose meant to write everything shorter. Dialogue. Narration. Descriptions. Now sometimes yes, it can mean writing less. But not always. He cut out so much I no longer could tell what the characters were saying or meaning. So don't cut just to make things shorter. Cut to make things less obvious.

See, people in real life never say what they mean. So our jobs as writers is to not be so obvious. It's to play what is going on underneath what the characters are saying but leave things hidden and to let them come across in other ways. For instance, if a character has a bad day at work and that scene was written on the nose, we'd hear exactly what the writer intended. For instance, the character would come in from work and say it all, "I had a bad day at work! I don't like anyone right now." Wife, "Why do you have to yell at me for having a bad day at work?" Man, "I'm going to go sit at my computer and ignore you because I don't like myself or anyone right now". Yuck! Not a good scene is it? Now if it wasn't on the nose it could be written more like this...

He comes home but doesn't tell her, she kisses him but he just brushes past her, says he's not hungry for dinner and goes to hide at his laptop. Then when the wife asks if he's hungry after she's cleaned up the dishes, then he could snap at her so much that they get into a fight. But maybe he yells at her for the way she parked the car. And how she always parks the car that way and he can't fit in the garage. And then she's annoyed he keeps bringing that up so they fight over the car instead of what really happened at work. Then when going to bed, both ignoring each other it might finally come out, "Sorry I got yelled at by my boss for messing up. I guess I took it out on you." So that scene would be so much more interesting than the first. Don't you think?

If you need to write a scene really obvious the first time you write it, that's okay. But once it's on the page, ask yourself how else can I write this scene? Can I write it with no dialogue? What could I have that person do instead of what I actually intended him to do? Is there another character he could interact with that will show off the scene much better? Is there an object I can introduce to the scene that would make it less on the nose? There's many ways to hide what the character is thinking. But it's up to us, the writers, to figure out the best way it is to do that.