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

Country music and "A Town like Alice"

Alright, well I got two more rejection letters. Three so far have been form letters and a fourth agent wrote, "This has an intriguing premise, but I'm afraid I didn't connect with the narrative strongly enough to feel I'd be the advocate the book deserves." I am not discouraged and I'm still keeping my fingers crossed! Thank you all for the nice comments and encouragement.

So I have a confession to make. I am a country music junkie. I grew up in the boondocks of Lewis County on a little farm and country music was the only thing around and now, even though I live in the "big city" of Seattle, I still can't get enough of country music. I still enjoy some other music but country is and always will be my first love. I love the realism of it and the fact that I can identify with the lyrics. Contrary to common belief, country music is not all about losing your truck or being a hillbilly. Its about life and love and situations that everyday people face. Its about having pride in what you do, about respecting people around you and appreciating the little things in life. A lot of country songs are stories about people and many of them have heartwarming or funny endings. I think a lot more people would enjoy country music if they took the time to listen to it and didn't just go into it with a negative attitude.

So anyway, on that premise, I had to tell you all about my new favorite country song that I just can't get enough of. It's called "Colder Weather" by the Zac Brown Band. Now the Zac Brown Band is one of my favorite country groups. They never come out with a bad song. They've only been around a couple of years but in that time they have had at least three songs that would be on my top 100 country songs of all time. And this new one just about tops them all. I encourage you all to check it out. It has a pretty good music video too, which is on YouTube

On a more writing related note, I've been pondering my next writing project. I was planning to write another novel, "St. Dorothy's School for Girls" but I feel like the idea hasn't fleshed itself out in my head enough to be properly written. So I was thinking of doing another screenplay before I go back and edit "Rilla, my Rilla." Originally for Script Frenzy I wanted to do an adaptation of my all-time favorite novel, "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute. But my dad told me that he thought the copyright had been renewed which would mean that it wasn't in public domain and I would have to obtain rights for it. But a couple of days ago I was doing some Internet searches about it and I couldn't find anything about the copyright being renewed so I wrote a letter to the publisher, who had initially copyrighted it in 1950 and asked them if they could tell me what the deal was. I'm just waiting on a reply from them but I'm really hoping it is in the public domain so that I can write that screenplay.

"A Town Like Alice" is a fabulous novel that tells the story of a young British lady, Jean Paget, just following World War II (I love historical romances, in case you didn't notice!). During the war, she was involved in a Japanese prisoner march through Burma with a number of other women. While they were marching, low on food and medicine, they meet a young Australian soldier named Joe Harmon. He helps them out by stealing food for them but Jean is caught by the Japanese with the stolen food. They demand to know where she got it and are torturing her for the information when Joe steps in and admits to it and demands that they leave her alone. He is then nailed to a tree and beaten to death.

In the years following the war, Jean comes into a large inheritance from a wealthy uncle of hers. She returns to Burma to build a well for the local people and there she finds out that Joe was not killed but actually survived his injuries at the hands of the Japanese. During the same time, Joe, who thought that she was married at the time, finds out that she was not, and on a whim, decides to go to England to find her. She goes to Australia to see him and eventually they end up meeting after a bit of a run around. Joe is a cattle rancher in central Australia and Jean is a proper English girl and they fall in love. They want to get married but Joe doesnt' feel like he can ask her to move to the middle of nowhere with him and she can't ask him to leave his cattle station so they have a bit of a dilemma. Finally they come up with a plan to transform the little town that he lives in, into "a town like Alice" referring to the larger town of Alice Springs.  They open a number of businesses, many catering to women in an effort to keep all the women from moving away. Then they get married and live happily ever after. :P

Anyway, its a fabulous book and I would love to make it into a movie so hopefully the publisher gets back to me soon.

Well, this is a mile long so I'm going to sign off!

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!

Some thoughts...

First off, an apology for the lack of creativity in the title. No excuse.

So the novel has been sitting on my hard drive for almost two days without any love from me, its beloved author.  Generally my only problem in writing comes from not knowing what to write next, but these days I know what to write, I know how to write it, I just don't want to.  Someone smack me upside the head, please.

As a slight excuse to the writing gods, I offer up the fact that I have worked 17 of the last 24 hours with three hours of sleep in there somewhere.  It's been pretty hectic.

On a different creative front, however, I have finished reading two books on screenwriting, and am slowly coming up with a plot to let me try my hand at screenwriting.  I think it will be a challenge for me in the sense that I write from a very emotional place, and screenwriting is a much more visual art form.  I am looking forward to how this new medium will challenge me and improve or change my novel-writing skills.  One of the books I have is entitled How Not to Write a Screenplay and the author points out some obvious mistakes that apparently novice screenwriters make.  Several of them are eye-opening to me regarding writing in general, particularly those dealing with overwriting and not leaving things to the readers imagination.  In a screenplay, obviously, this is derived from the fact that the director and actors will be interpreting the descriptions in their own way, but I think it has some correlations in standard prose writing as well.  It has been a fascinating and eye-opening journey through that book.

Often times I have wondered or pondered the difference between a thriller and a mystery.  Obviously some works fall distinctly on one side or the other of this line but often I've noticed some middle ground that seems a bit ambiguous.  The author of How Not to Write a Screenplay (forgive me, I'm too lazy right now to get up and grab the book to find out  his name) defines the difference as follows.  He says that in a thriller, the audience (or reader) knows what the hero or heroine is trying to find out.  Thus, they know who the bad guy is, where the bomb is, or who has the child before the protagonist finds out for him or herself.  In a mystery, the main character solves the problem or mystery before the reader does, and then reveals it to the reader or audience in some way.  I don't know how much this difference is accepted in literary circles, but it made a lot of sense to me and drew an interesting line between the way an audience or reader connects with the main character.  Given this definition, the audience would be protective or worried for the main character in a thriller, but in a mystery, they would identify with him or her more along the journey, and come out with more respect perhaps.  Just an interesting thought for me.

Other than that, I am discovering reading over this entry that I am highly contemplative on no sleep and too much caffeine.  And so, adieu. Parting is such sweet sorrow.