Senior Thesis- Part Four

Its been a bit of an adjustment, writing a screenplay after I’ve been writing short stories for so long. So much of my highschool writing has been geared towards writing in what now seems like a very specific style. With stories and other creative writing endeavors, I prided myself on the fact that I could describe so many scenes using fancy words and descriptions, but in a movie, people cant see words or descriptions, they can only see the character himself. In a book or a short story, I can actually write what the character is thinking. I don’t have that same liberty with a screenplay.

Another new facet that I’m getting used to is using juxtaposition in my characters dialog. In a book, I can tell you everything you need to know about a character whenever I want to. In a movie, the only information you’ll ever get is going to come from the characters themselves within their dialog. Viki King gives a good example in her book:

Frank:
Hows your wife? You haven’t brought her around lately.

Ralph:

She’s fine. Did you hear Jack’s getting a divorce?

She shows that just from this short exchange, you can guess the relationship between Ralph and his wife. I knew about the power of subtly a long time ago, but the experience of writing a screenplay has really taken it to a whole new level. Its much harder than I thought it would be from that aspect. I’ve had to adapt myself to the style, and nothing I’ve ever written before has really prepared me for this.

Aside from that, I’ve actually been having a progressively easier time writing my screenplay. At first, I really overanalyzed everything. When I sat down to write, I thought, “every line has to be perfect, cause then this baby is gonna win me an Oscar”. I sat down, and after 2 ½ hours, I only had about 6 pages (to get an idea, each page is about a minute in ‘screen time’) so I only squeezed out 6 minutes of a movie after 150 minutes of effort. And then I thought back to the lessons I picked up in the books I read.

I already have a basic structure of the movie written out. I have the story itself, and I have an idea what is going to be on screen for pages 1, 3, 10, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, and 120 (arbitrary mile stones that are spread out through the movie). The dialog doesn't have to be golden, it just has to move the story along. I figure, I’ll let a consultant hammer out the rough parts and refine it once I hit it big time, or worst comes to worst, I’ll get Mr. Huber fix it up when he reads it. Either way, I’ll be leaving the nitty gritty to the experts.

Senior Thesis- Part Three

This week I started reading books that were more oriented towards the “how to” of screenwriting. As recommended by my mentor, I picked up two books in particular; How to Write a Movie in 21 Days by Viki King, and Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. So far, I’m just about finished with King’s book, and it’s really taught me a lot about starting a screenplay that I didn’t really know beforehand. More importantly, it’s taught me a lot about how I can “get the juices flowing” and approach any creative task. After reading her book and looking back, the way I used to write my movies actually seems shortsighted now. I used to just start the screenplay itself, with some vague idea of a story floating around my head, and make it up as I went along. This would lead to a lot of bumps along the way. I would write until I reached a point where I would say, “what happens next?” and I’d be completely lost. I would “take a break” from the writing to try and figure out the rest of the story in my head, and I’d lose interest in the project completely.

King’s book actually managed to break the process of screenwriting into a series of steps that are pretty easy to follow. She spends as much time preparing to write the screenplay as she does actually writing the screenplay itself. She suggests that you need to be able to visualize the story in its entirety before you ever begin writing it. King also forces the writer to ask himself a lot of questions in the process, like “How can you tell if your idea is a movie, a novel, a play, or a song?” and she actually goes through ways to identify each one. She also asks questions like, “Who is it about? Does your age play any role in the subject you chose? Etc.” Aside from the story itself, she also insists that the writer “get acquainted” with the characters themselves by putting them in different situations and asking “what would he/she do?”

As brilliant and fresh as the book is, however, it does have its shortcomings. First off, the style of writing gets a bit obnoxious at certain points, and it feels like it’s written as more of a self-help book than a guide to writing. King tries to keep things fresh by adding little jokes or puns, but it makes the book sound way too corny. And considering she’s a writer, she falls into a basic trap and makes a rookie mistake in the beginning, where she spends the first 15 pages of the book telling you what the book is about. It’s sort of like self-hype. Most of all, the premise of the book itself is pretty arrogant if you think about it. The book claims to have the secrets to writing a successful screenplay. The first sentence of the book is, “So you want to write a movie? You’ve come to the write place!” I asked myself, if it is this easy, why isn’t everyone a successful screenwriter? It’s not like this book a secret, after all. And 21 days? Purists of the art will tell you that a great idea takes months, even years, to sharpen into a screenplay worthy of production.

I guess I’m just being a stickler, but all I can say for certain is that this book has given me some perspective as far as writing. It’s really essential that I ask myself all these questions while I’m writing because, after all, who knows better than I do about what I want to write. Plus I have to be able to defend my ideas from other sticklers out there like me.