Caffeine Addiction by Nick Le - Short, Comedy, Dark Comedy - A caffeine-fueled screenwriter clashes with his concerned wife and a surreal awakening to the consequences of his own over-reliance.  - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Open for comments, 24/7.
Have a good read

Nick Le

While I couldn’t relate to the story, I’ve known people who would. It was still funny until it got overly violent. Then it got dark but not too funny. Throwing his wife out the window was rather extreme but could still be considered funny if she got right up and screamed in his face and continued her lecture about caffeine addiction. Instead she called for help and then was shot. For me, that crossed the line out of comedy.

I see that you are used Arc Studio to write this. I have a few comments about your writing style:

In your first action line, I think you have an extra comma and the “up” is in the wrong place. I think it would read better as, “… lighting up the dark and messy room slowly.”

The next action line should have a period after “typewriter”. End that sentence there and start the next sentence with “There’s”.

In the first action line after the dialog: “Andy sighs. He takes up his cup…” Either combine these two  actions with conjunctions like: as, and, while, etc. or take out the “he” as in Andy sighs, takes up his cup of coffee. The second “he” in the same sentence reads weird like a double subject or something.

The bottom of page 2 is a little messy. In the action text after Laura screams that it’s for his own good, I would write it as:

She stands, takes her jacket and leaves for the front door.

Andy is angry now. He slams THE MUG onto the floor and it shatters.

The reason is that I like to stay away from verbs that end in “ing” if I can, and “Andy is angered now.” Just reads weird.

After that we have, “then we…” which I would take out. I know why you have it and its in relation to the “CUT TO” scene transition that follows it. I would ditch the scene transitions also. This link will explain why. While I don’t believe in rules per se, it’s listed as rule number 9.

https://thescriptlab.com/featu.....tle%20Pages%20Simple

Now the very next scene heading is a little unorthodox: EXT. ANDY’S HOUSE – MORNING. Instead of MORNING you should use DAY and tell us that it’s morning in the immediate action text like you do. You don’t need the duplicate information and I would eliminate it from the slug line.

You do this in the very next scene heading. You can kind of do it here but I still wouldn’t. I would find a different way to say it’s morning in the following action text.

Another suggestion I can give is that I would not put a space between punctuation and the end of a sentence. It can (and did) cause the punctuation to show up on the next line.

I liked the story but I think I would have found it funnier if after flying out the window she got right back up , furious. If she then pulled the mailbox out of the ground and attacked him with it, because she was going through a caffeine withdrawal herself, that would also be funny.

As it is, it was still a fun story.

Hi Banaszak, interesting ideas about how it should have ended here. I love it, and the thing about the transitions, yeah it kinda feels useless, like just end this scene with the next scene heading already. Anyway, thank you for reading my screenplay, have a good one.

Nick Le