while my current playwriting project continues to chip away at my sanity, i have taken on an additional side project: working on a script for a short film with matt patches!
well now i’ve definitely flipped it. not only am i willingly working again with matt patches, but i’m going to be working in a medium that doesn’t come naturally to me at all. i always loved my screenwriting classes at NYU with Joe V (holla), but when it came to screenwriting, i always felt like i was swimming upstream.
so why is that? screenplays are scripts right? with dialogue? and characters? i love characters! so what’s the deal? what makes writing a screenplay so horribly different?
i have a few thoughts:
1. screenwriting is visual
i could go on and on about this. this is probably the fundamental reason why i find writing for the screen so irksome. i’m an audial thinker. i feel a closer kinship to poets and musicians than i do to my screenwriting cousins. when i’m thinking of a play, i’m constantly thinking of how the play will sound to an audience. all that visual stuff? eh… director can handle that.
as lauren has touched on in a post last week, a play need not rely on spectacle to be a great play. the writers that i like best have a great understanding of sound. and even in the most lavish theatrical productions, all those sets, lights, costumes can only suggest a world to an audience, who are left with their imagination to fill in the rest. movies on the other hand? they can transport you to another world. with pretties.
further observations: when i write a play, the arc of the story usually comes through an organic process of doing what feels right, writing, and rewriting. However…
2. screenwriting requires meticulous planning
lookie! for my project with patches, i drew a diagram and everything!
my diagram, so very very proud
of course, upon closer inspection of act II, one might suspect plotting out a story in detail isn’t my strong suit:
"stuff stuff stuff | stuff stuff stuff"
3. screenwriting is a medium in which you can actually make money (in theory)
now, this one is just isn’t fair. even the most successful and famous playwrights tend to have some sort of auxiliary source of income. but i don’t want to be a secretary for the rest of my life. i want to make a living. hey – i’d love to make a killing.
i complain to lauren about this. Hey, Producer. why is it i can’t be a playwright… for a job?
another excellent observation, lauren: screenwriting is nothing like vomiting. if anything, it’s more like a really persistent itch that never feels quite right even if you scratch at it all day.
anyway, here’s to hoping this project has incredible unforseen success. hooray for collaboration. hilarious hijinks are sure to ensue, despite my obvious handicap.
- j.
icbins
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misterpatches
lbferrel
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rmaranoff
Well, speaking as a sometime screenwriter, the itch metaphor is interesting; while accurate to some degree, I’m not sure it’s quite the right one.
That said, I don’t think I have a bodily function metaphor handy to describe the process of screenwriting. Perhaps this will do: screenwriting is like taking an eye exam. You can see the shapes from a distance, but depending on how well you can see, you can only clearly see to a certain point. And if you’re like me and almost completely blind, everything is blurry until a lens pops down in front of your eyes, and you are asked whether one lens is clearer or the other.
One, or two?
Slowly, you are able to see more and more clearly, to a smaller and smaller line, and point. If all goes well, and your prescription is matched, you are able to see the entire chart clearly, and you marvel at how you didn’t see that one squiggle on line three was *obviously* the letter M.
This relates to my feeling that while screenplays often are associated with meticulous planning, my own experience writing screenplays actually feels more organic, and more akin to writing a novel in which you’re vaguely aware of what needs to happen at the end, but you’re not quite sure how to get there. True, a screenplay needs more refinement (and this is the itch we’re talking about here–whittling scenes down, deciding what characters need to say when, what details to exclude), but the actual screenplay writing process, for me, only turns out to have a plan in retrospect.
Good metaphor.
Perhaps it is the NYU-kid in me that makes me feel like all the charts and outlines and beatsheets are imperative to a strong story. Most of my screenwriting classes there wouldn’t even have you start writing until about halfway through the semester. Before that, it’s all planning.
Of course, I can’t really know what works for me until I complete one I’m satisfied with. Which didn’t happen at NYU.
One thing I can say with confidence – this scientific approach to playwriting is one that has not worked for me. I’m still a big fan of structure, and while I do tend to make a lot of notes and outlines when I’m stuck in a play, the more closely I end up following the outlines the more stilted the writing seems to be.
Outlines, story beats, etc. were standard stuff in my screenwriting classes as well. I often write an outline, particularly when I am doing Script Frenzy (http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/) and I know I need to keep moving along even when I get stuck.
But more often than not, all the plans, all the outlines become irrelevant as soon as I start writing, becoming something for me to ignore whilst I’m discovering what the story is *really* about.
Now I realize “plan in retrospect” is not quite the exact phrase. I should say, “The screenwriting process appears to me to move to a plan only found through the actual work, despite all other plans made before. The story has its own plan, one which can only be found in retrospect when one has seen the entire story.”
Leah, you sound like you’re starting a religion.
Join us. Julia. You know you want to.
Interesting. I’m trying to do the reverse, coming from a screenwriting background and move to a play writing, and finding it hard.
Story structure for any medium is tedious, screen, stage, book. Writing IS Hard!