The movie in your head
I’m working on a screenplay right now, and it’s both pleasure and pain.
Pleasure, because it’s always fun to try to bring to life the action and dialogue playing in your head. I don’t know about other authors, but whenever I write a novel I can see the story like a movie in front of me, and I just try to type fast enough to keep up with it. So converting one of my novels into a screenplay feels like the perfect next step.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Writing a screenplay uses an entirely different set of brain muscles. Now you don’t have the luxury of long paragraphs describing your characters’ inner turmoil and private satisfactions. It has to all be up on the screen. You have to think like a camera, not a reader. A camera can’t tell if this is the best or worst day of your character’s life unless you give it some action to prove it. You have to think like an actor who has to deal with all your obscure descriptions like “she gazes at him with both love and disgust.” You have to think like the director and producer, who aren’t going to want to spend their entire budget on exterior scenes in Paris or on training a horse to gallop backwards.
I keep thinking about that deadly look Meryl Streep gives Kevin Bacon after he shoots her childhood friend Johnny in River Wild. What did the script say there? “She looks at him like she wants to shove her fist down his throat and pull his instestines out through his mouth”? Or was it simply, “She is as angry as she’s ever been,” and Meryl filled in the rest?
For now, picture this: INT. A WRITER’S OFFICE–DAY. The WRITER sits at her computer, typing frantically to meet her deadline. She is wearing shorts, a T-shirt, white socks that aren’t so white anymore. Her DOG snores on the rug beside her. We hear the unmistakable sound of a long, drawn-out kibble fart. WRITER gazes at her DOG with both love and disgust.
Technorati Tags: Movies, Film, Films, Screenwriting, Writing, Publishing, River Wild, Meryl Streep
“We hear the unmistakable sound of a long, drawn-out kibble fart.”
LMAO. You’re killing me.
One of my kids favorite books is Walter The Farting Dog.
I kid you not.