If you just can’t wait another six months for your fix, try its sceenwriting cousin, starting April Fool’s Day. What? You never wrote a screenplay? Then I highly recommend the experience for two reasons:
1) Screenplays (unless they have a voice-over narration) do their work entirely by “showing.” There is no narration to “tell” anything. Think about it: there can be nothing in a screenplay that isn’t photographable or recordable. It’s all image, behavior, gesture, and act–including dialogue, by the way, which is behavior. Narrator interpretation, the “village explainer” summaries that mar otherwise good scenes CAN’T BE SHOT. What would it look like on screen..? See what I mean? For this reason, screenwriting is a good workout for fiction writers: it forces them to show by tying their “telling hands” behind their backs.
2) These days, if you publish a novel, some form of movie interest is likely to follow….
The opening chip in any serious movie action is a screenplay. If you know how to write one, you have a legitimate chance of being hired by the producer to adapt your own book. Otherwise, you’re effectively out of the picture as a creative factor. It’s your one shot at maintaining a say in how your story may look and feel on the screen.
It’s also, I should add, an opportunity to pick up a nice piece of change.
Script Frenzy’s goal is 100 pages of script in April. Thirty days, 1-plus pages of script per day. It’s similar to NaNoWriMo’s 50,000 words goal, in that ScriptFrenzy is totally open to what those pages might be. Here’s ScriptFrenzy’s description of the kinds of “script” that fit. “…screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, comic book and graphic novel scripts, adaptations of novels, or any other type of script your heart desires.”
“But I can’t afford Final Draft!” Yes, I know. Who can? But you know, I used to write screenplays on a clunky old Smith Corona. And…oh, never mind.
Fortunately there are some new and excellent (I mean REALLY excellent) screenwriting resources: Plotbot, Celtx, and Scripped. I just tested them this morning and may review them for you in a later post. Trust me, they’re good–and FREE.
