caplearing and other useful screenwriting terms

When working with a writing partner or on a writing team, it can be useful to have a shorthand for describing certain types of jokes or plot situations. I've seen a couple of lists lately that cover comedy writing or TV writing jargon, but since the last two things I've written with a partner have been thriller features, I'm more interested in jargon that serves as shorthand for dramatic situations.

One you may have heard of is the term "MacGuffin," which is the thingamajig in a movie that advances the plot or motivates the characters, without itself being important to the story. The term was described by Alfred Hitchcock in an interview:

"It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a MacGuffin.' The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well,' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no MacGuffin!' So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all."

Most James Bond movies have a MacGuffin. I would use an example from The Quantum of Solace, except I'm not sure I followed that movie well enough to know what the MacGuffin was. Maybe it was the quantum, maybe it was the solace. You know it's a real MacGuffin if you could switch out the Thing that Everyone Wants and make it a different Thing that Everyone Wants, and it could still be basically the exact same movie.

Tim the Lawyer and I have developed a few of our own terms that serve as shorthand for us. For your reading pleasure, a brief glossary:

Red Rum Clue: Taken, of course, from the movie The Shining, where the boy Danny keeps saying, "red rum," which later is revealed to be "murder" backwards. We use it to mean a clue that seems to mean one thing but actually means another.

Boo Scare: Fairly self-explanatory, this is when you put in cheap scares that aren't really scary at all, like a cat that jumps out at the hero when he's creeping down a dark hallway.

Smart Audience Member: The Smart Audience Member is the one who's trying to stay ahead of you in the story. The Smart Audience Member knows things like Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, which states that, "Movie budgets make it impossible for any film to contain unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie are necessary to the story—even those who do not seem to be. Sophisticated viewers can use this Law to deduce the identity of a person being kept secret by the movie's plot: This 'mystery' person is always the only character in the movie who seems otherwise extraneous."

In order to attempt to stay ahead of this problem, our theory is you keep the audience busy by giving the Regular Audience Member one set of clues, then lay in a second, more subtle set of clues for the Smart Audience Member, when really the solution to the mystery lies in a third set of clues.

Recently, Tim the Lawyer came up with a brand new, useful term. It happened because I foolishly let him write the outline we were creating on the dry erase board, even though his printing is sometimes terrible.

Days later, we were planning to meet at our friendly downtown IHOP for a quick between-lawyer-meetings outlining lunch. Before I left home I tried to transfer Tim's dry erase board outline into my notebook. I was struggling to make out his writing, but it was coming along pretty well when I hit the point halfway between the end of Act One and the Midpoint. It said this:


Try as I might, the best I could come up with was "Caplearing." So I wrote that down and brought it to IHOP. Tim and I stared at it, but we couldn't figure out what he had written, or even what the plot point was that was supposed to go there.

And so a new screenwriting term was born.

Caplearing: When you have a spot where a plot point needs to go, but you don't know what the plot point is. And you can't read your partner's handwriting to tell you.