My Recent Adventures in Screenplay Writing

I’m a very fortunate newbie to the screenwriting world. A good friend of mine who is sort of a fan of my short stories and novels and a very experienced screenplay writer with credentials to back it up has taken me under his wing. So far we have co-written two and a half screenplays together, one based on a novella I wrote, a comedy, and the current one we are working on.

I’ve been writing short stories and trying to publish them since 1997. I started writing my first novel in 2000 and began sending off query letters to literary agents and publishers for it in 2003. While I was never able to get that first one published I did write four more, one which was published. The other four are in various states of editing/launching limbo right now.

I’ve always loved movies. Longer than I’ve been writing actually, but I never really considered writing a screenplay. In fact, before my friend approached me last year with the idea of turning some of my work into screenplays I had only ever read one screenplay written by an old friend of mine in the late 90’s who knew I was writing and attempting to publish short stories.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough about screenplays to know how to critique it. I approached it the same way I was giving feedback for short stories at the time in college, and sadly I think my critique offended him. Now that I know a little bit about screenplays I realize that what he wrote was excellent and probably would have made a fine movie.

In the last year or so I’ve made an effort to better educate myself about the art of screenplay writing though. Besides my friend and co-writer as well as another very talented newbie to screenwriting like myself my primary guides have been the books Save the Cat by Blake Snyder and Screenwriting for Dummies by Laura Schellhardt and John Logan. Both of these have been extremely useful.

Having a solid background in storytelling (short stories and novels) has made the transition a lot easier for me since in both cases you still have to create a story. But there are some big differences.

Visuals and Dialog

Everything has to be either a visual description or dialog. Sounds can be described as well, but for the most part you always have to think about how the audience is going to see everything on screen. The all five senses rule so common for fiction only matters as far as how it is going to be experienced visually by your audience and to a lesser extent audially . The audio experience for the audience is a slightly different animal since soundtracks and sound effects come into play and will most likely be the concern of the director if the movie gets made, not the screenplay writer.

In other words you might be able to get away with “there was a large and loud explosion.” instead of say, “a large explosion boomed through the area and shook the buildings like blades of grass in a strong wind.” which you would be more likely to use for a short story or novel.

Also, there is a lot more dialog in your average screenplay than your average short story and probably a novel as well. Again, because in most cases when the audience isn’t seeing stuff on the screen they are probably going to be listening to the character’s conversations. Great films like Quest for Fire and All is Lost are the rare exceptions where there is no or very little dialog. Of course the audience will see most of the characters giving them visual clues about who and what the characters are, but dialog is going to be the primary way in which the audience understands the character’s personality.

Length and Format

Short stories, novels, and works of non-fiction deal in word counts. Screenplays deal in number of pages. Why? Well, the simple reason is that one page generally equals one minute of screen time. So, a 90 page screenplay would be a 90 minute movie. Coming from a fiction background this has been a little strange for me. The formatting for screenplays also makes the word count much different. A 15,000 word screenplays comes in at around 85 pages. A 15,000 word double spaced novelette would be about 62 pages.

And when it comes to formatting screenplays are very precise. I’ve learned that even a few minor errors in the format can get your screenplay tossed no matter how well written it is. And where MS Word, Open Office, or Google Docs and quite a few others will do for short stories and novels, Final Draft is the gold standard for screenplays. From what I’ve been told anyone that is worth having read your screenplay will expect it to be as a Final Draft document. Though Movie Magic, Celtix, and a few others are acceptable as well.

Writing Speed

This is the best part for me. Writing a screenplay is a much faster process than writing a novel. At least it has been so far for me. I’m sure the fact that I have co-written both screenplays is part of the reason for this, but even when I’m writing by myself I feel like I can knock 200–400 more words in an hour than I normally could writing a short story or a novel. Part of this might be because with a screenplay I’m always working from a very detailed outline whereas with short stories I pants it or use a fairly bare bones outline for novels.

So, if you have a background in fiction writing it might be worth your time and effort to learn how to write screenplays as well. Learning another style of writing is always worth the effort in my opinion and it is another great way to tell stories.