Some words give you more bang for your buck than others.  A character can ‘walk’ across a room.  But they can also ‘glide’, ‘creep’, or ’skulk’.  It’s like you get a free adjective with the verb.  Nouns can work in a similar way.  ‘Car’ gets across one broad concept, while ’sedan’, ‘dragster’ and ‘pick-up’ convey more precise nuances.

All of this is useful in the condensed world of the screenplay.  The opening paragraph of my script for the pilot episode of The Sharp End features a character who ‘prowls’ from his car to a house.  It says things about Leon, the character in question, captures something of his physicality and attitude that hopefully a director and actor would find useful in turning the script into something that can be filmed.

You can have a lot of fun with paired words too.  I’ve been conducting informal experiments on the reactions that people have to the nonsense phrase ‘monkey saloon’.  Typically, they tell me it conjures up images of a Wild West style honkytonk where monkeys hang from chandeliers, taking hats from cowboys and being fed bananas by the dancing girls. 

There’s a fine line between semantics, which is concerned with meaning, and semiotics, which is the study of signals.  And they overlap in contexts like this, when the richness and density of words and phrases is under consideration.  For instance, the use of the words ‘New Order’ captures both the band of that name, the orginal use of the term which the members of the band alluded to (either a reference to a Guardian headline about Kampuchea or a quote from Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’, depending who you listen to), and it implicitly refers to Joy Division, the band who New Order emerged from.  In turn, that further hooks the phrase to unsavoury WW2 episodes.  Oh, and it’s a term you can use in any situation where an old order of some kind has changed.

The same concept applies to images.  Picture a woman standing over a grille in the street, warm air from below blowing her skirts up, and you’ll inevitably bring to mind a picture of Marilyn Monroe in that precise pose.  Even if you came up with the image freshly, not having seen the classic photo, other people will assume that’s what you’re referencing.

All of which is to say, be aware of how much juice the words and images you use in your writing contain.  Use language that conveys as much information as possible in as few syllables as you can.  Feel free to plunder the image bank of popular culture that we’ve all grown up with, and pay homage to images that resonate for you.  Just do so with your own sense of style. 

Frank Zappa, who knew how to mutate the doo wop he loved into weird new forms, and who had a hell of a knack for musical satire using American themes, as well as a powerful imagination for new musical forms, had a wonderful term for the process of going from the basic notes you’d play to performing them in a distinctive way.  In his language, this was the business of ‘putting the eyebrows on’.  Maybe that brings Groucho Marx to mind, or the graffiti that people do in cartoons to paintings like the Mona Lisa, or even the Gallagher brothers’ shared forehead plumage.  But whichever it it, remember the key point here: without attitude, what impact will your writing ever have on anyone?