Screenwriting for Novelists

TODAY BY NUMBERS:

Total word count of The Language of the Unheard: 52,008

Number of form rejections for Finding Innisburg: 0 (not sure if this is good or bad)

Number of books you have to read and review for the Seattle Public Library system to be entered to win a Kindle: 3

Number of free book giveaways entered on GoodReads.com: 15


So now for our main topic.  Screenwriting.  Last summer I decided to attempt to write a screenplay.  Although I'm fairly convinced that I will never be a famous screenwriter (Hollywood has too many politics and rules and cliques.  I prefer good old-fashioned publishing), writing a screenplay may have been the best thing I ever did for my writing abilities.

Screenwriting in much, much different than novel writing.  I didn't even write an original screenplay, I just adapted one of my favorite novels, Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery.  Screenplays are the epitome of SHOW don't TELL.  In a screenplay you can't even write a phrase like "Tom, Joe's brother, enters the room."  Unless Tom is going to be wearing a sign around his neck that says "Joe's brother" you can't put it in the screenplay.  You have to find a way to work it into the dialogue.  This is tricky, let me tell you.

Descriptions of locations have to be kept short and sweet also.  In screenwriting, one page of properly formatted text = one minute of screen time (approximately).  So if a scene is going to be shown for three seconds before the characters start talking, you have to sum up the scene in only a line or two.  No long-winded pages of purple prose here.  The trick is to choose one or two details that "sum up" the scene.  Instead of saying "The farmhouse is old and blue.  There is a flower bed in front but the flowers are dead and brown.  The fence running behind the house is falling down and the barbed wire is rusty.  The grass is long, clearly no animals have grazed here in a while," you cut it down to the essentials: "The paint on the farmhouse is peeling and the rusty barbed wire is sagging into the overgrown grass."

In screenwriting, the specific details (the color of the house, or exactly how many plants are in front) are pointless to put in, because the director is not going to follow your directions that closely.  What you want is to make a point about WHAT KIND of farmhouse this is, and let the director follow through with the details.

In novel writing, the same principle can be applied, not because a director is going to come in and change it, but because leaving some details up to your readers imagination is crucial.  Unless this is a classic Martian farmhouse, a reader will be able to fill in the scene without you spelling out every detail.  Pick a few things that sum up the feel of the scene and leave the rest out.  Over describing can pull a reader out of the scene, while the right choice of details can make them feel like they're right there with you.  Of course, if they were to draw what they pictured the farmhouse looking like, it might not be how you pictured it at all, but that's okay.  When a book is read, the reader brings his or her own experiences to the table and views the story against the backdrop of his or her life. 

So if you've ever been curious about writing a screenplay, even if you have no intention of selling it, I would absolutely recommend it.  Screenplays are short and sweet.  At 90-120 sparsely-filled pages, they are much faster to write than a novel, and you just might learn a thing or two about writing in the process.  I would highly recommend the book How Not to Write a Screenplay by Denny Martin Flinn for anyone thinking of undertaking this project.  The book covers formatting, plotting and everything else you need to know.  Also, every April the NaNoWriMo people have a screenwriting month called Script Frenzy, in which screenwriters attempt to write 100 pages of a screenplay in a month.

Happy Noveling!

P.S. If any of you noveling folks are on GoodReads.com, you should friend me!  My user name is Annakaris

Royal Wedding and Screeplay Progress

Ok, so the Royal wedding is on Friday. That would be two AM on Friday if you're on the west coast of the US like I am. And I am in a dilemma. The wedding will be broadcast live here starting at 2 AM and part of me wants to stay up all night to watch it. I am unemployed with nothing to do the next day so I could sleep all day. This will likely be the biggest wedding in my lifetime except my own of course :P and I LOVE weddings so I would love to be able to say that I watched it live. But on the flip side, I know that Aaron would think it was absolutely ridiculous to stay up just to watch someone else's wedding and in a way he is right. The wedding doesn't concern me at all, I just think it's kind of cool. So I would like to do it but I also feel kind of stupid staying up to watch it. So, I can't decide what to do...

The screenplay is coming along well.  I had a couple of issues which I have more or less worked out.  The book, Rilla of Ingleside, is full of both letters between Rilla and her brothers that are serving overseas, and diary entries by Rilla. In an effort to maintain the feel of the book as well as convey the innermost feelings of Rilla which would be difficult to put in a movie without some voice over, I have put pieces of Rilla's diary entries into the screenplay. The form that they took were visually just Rilla writing in the diary, with her voice reading the entry in a voice over. But I was unsatisfied with this. It seemed boring and lazy but I couldn't think of a way around them. So then a couple of nights ago, I was watching the French film "A Very Long Engagement" which also takes place during and after World War I and in there, she reads letters aloud with voice over but the visuals show clips of what the voice over is talking about. So there is something for the audience to watch as well as listen to. So I've decided to do something similar with Rilla's diary entries and her letters from her brothers.  The voice over is necessary both for the feel of the book and to convey emotions and explanations but this makes it less lazy and boring than without any visuals. The only issue I'm having is that I'm not sure how to format it, whether the descriptions should come before all the voice over, or after or interspersed in where it is relevant. I think that I'm leaning towards interspersed it in. 

The second issue I had was that screenplays are supposed to be written in Courier font. However, Microsoft Word 2010 doesn't have Courier as a font, only Courier New. I did some reading online and found that although it is acceptable, Courier New takes up more space on the page than Courier and since I need all the space I can get out of my 120 page allotment, I downloaded Courier and switched the document over. It saved me about six pages so I'm still at just 100 pages now. But it is nice to have the extra leeway.

Other than that, I'm just enjoying not having to work and just puttering away at the screenplay. I'm also brainstorming for another novel since I want to write one after I finish Rilla, My Rilla (the screenplay) before I go back to work and/or school. I fill you in on some of my thoughts for that later.

Many apologies

So I owe everyone my sincerest apologies for the huge space of time between posts. And now, an update. I finished editing Finding Innisburg and sent it off to a few friends and family for critique. Mostly the feedback has been positive. I was planning for a while to do Script Frenzy (which, for those of you who don't know, is NaNoWriMo's sister program in April for screenwriters) but then a lot of stuff went down at the beginning of the month and I didn't think I'd have time to do it, so I dropped out. But then on the 16th I got laid off from my job so I have loads of free time now. So I decided to join up at the last minute and I just hit 100 pages (the goal for Script Frenzy) yesterday! It took me five days. I pretty much worked on it about eight hours a day. But it's still not done so I need to wrap that up, hopefully by the end of the month.  I'm adapting the L.M. Montgomery novel, Rilla of Ingleside and I think its coming along pretty good, although it will almost undoubtadly be over my maximum page count of 120 pages so I'll need to go back and cut some stuff at the end. But thats pretty what I've been up to! I hope to keep you all posted on a much more regular  basis from now on!

Through the muck and the mire...

So first off, apologies for the down time between posts.  Between Christmas, work and the fact that I've had a terribly bad, weird face headache thing for the past several days that has had me all hopped up on meds and unable to sleep most nights, blogging has been one of the last things on my mind.  But it's almost New Years and then I mean to buckle back down on my somewhat neglected writing and get to work.

So "The Plan" has me finishing my editing of Runaway Train by the end of January but it is very difficult going right now.  I don't really know how to edit and it is much too short so I'm still trying to figure out what to add.  Some of it I have figured out but I'm fighting every step of the way not to get drawn into a shiny new project that would be much more fun than the muck and mire of editing this novel.

But on a slightly brighter note, I found a novel I want to adapt into a screenplay.  I've been hunting for sometime for a novel in the public domain that I could write a screenplay from, and I finally found it.  The book (*shakes a bit with fear at the thought that someone might steal her idea*) is "Rilla of Ingleside", the last of the Anne of Green Gables books.  It follows Rilla Blythe, Anne's youngest teenaged daughter, through life on the home front of World War I Canada.  It was always my favorite of the Anne books and I think it would make a fabulous movie.  I don't know where adapting that will fit into my writing schedule, but we'll see.

Well, I'm off to heat up some leftover green bean casserole for lunch, so fare you well.