White space is a break. It's like eating. Can you swallow whole chocolate at once? I know people than can do that ;) but it tastes better when you take a small bite and enjoy it. It's how you can really feel it. It's how human brain works. It takes an amount of information and "eats" it. Long paragraphs, long sentences make them harder to read and understand. I also think that well formatted text, separated paragraphs, not many long dialogues make your screenplay more beautiful - every page is different, every page has its own structure. Take a random page of your screenplay. Look at it just for 1 second. Can you recognize which scene does it describe?

Maybe white space controls the speed at which the reader reads, and so gives them some sense of how the movie scene is going to play? Slightly denser paragraphs, lots of dialogue = slower scene; one or two line paragraphs with lots of white space = faster to read, so a faster scene...?

Good point! So with whitespacing you can manipulate pace and rhythm? In this case longer/less white space doesn't mean worse. It depends on what you want to achieve.

Your image of taking small bites reminds me of something Chekhov said about writing, Piotr: "Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. It is comprehensible when I write: “The man sat on the grass,” because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: “The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously." -- ANTON CHEKHOV Sounds to me like he was advocating for "brain-sized bites", too. In screenwritering, whitespace results from writing both in brain-sized bites and camera shots (or camera-sized bites).

There are schools of poetry that engage with whitespace in the way you're both describing, in a way that is so much more conscious and deliberate than (most of) the world of screenwriting. I wish there were more dialogue between screenwriting and other writing disciplines.

Well, I guess there would be a cut-off point - a point where the text becomes so dense that it's just too much hard work to read. But, in theory, yes.

Good point, Debbie. Pity the poor script reader who opens a script and sees a page black with ink: there's a good reason to be generous with white space right there.

I think there are a number of issues with white space on the page, and I agree wholeheartedly with the above comments. In addition, I believe it indicates a capacity to write visually. The text of the page is a visual object, it needs to look attractive in order for a reader to be attracted to it, therefore a sense of proportion has to prevail. But it also provides the reader with the ability to 'chunk' the read; it makes the page easily scanned, which means the reader can take chunks of the text, scan ahead to see what potential of development lies in the mythological woods ... but reading in chunks, the gist of the story should still be quite accessible and if it plays in chunks, it's more likely to get a closer read. On the other hand, a page that looks uniformly grey is likely to get a somewhat grey reader response. The contrast between white and black on the page needs to indicate that there's some contrast in the pages -- between the characters, in the central conflict, within the story world ... As somebody once said (Truby or McKee or Egri perhaps) the first thing an audience gets to know about your story is from the title ... I'd venture that the first thing a reader gets to know about you as a writer is from your personal style. If you're an unknown and you hit a reader with a script that breaks rules because you don't know the rules, it will show ... to me that's also part of managing white space.