Screenwriting for Prose Writers

I have never written a screenplay! But I would like to. So I’ve researched the topic. Here are the highlights:

1. Screenwriting is collaborative.

Prose writers have control over what happens to what they’ve written. An editor can make suggestions—even _strong_ suggestions—about what they’d like to see changed, but (depending on the contract you’ve sighed!) the writer usually has final say. (Although, of course, the publisher gets to decide whether they’ll publish your book!)

Screenwriters, on the other hand, have their work changed on a regular basis. Why the difference? The following is from screenwriting.info:

“... film is a highly collaborative medium and the director, cast, editor, and production crew will, based on your ‘outline,’ interpret your story their way when it is filmed. They may consult you, or they may not. Other writers may be brought in or you may be asked to re-write the entire thing. That's life, in the world of screenwriting. But because so many people are involved in the making of a film, a script must conform to standards that all involved parties understand and thus has a specific format or layout, margins, notation, and other conventions.”

So let’s take a look at screenwriting conventions:

Screenwriting Conventions

Much of what I say below has been taken from “How to Format a Screenplay - 5 Basic Elements: FRIDAY 101” by Indy Mogul over at YouTube. In what follows I go over each of his points but, in case you’re interested, I’ve embedded his video below.



In what follows I’ll draw from the following:

(Click Image to Enlarge)

This image is from a draft of the script for Raiders of the Lost Ark.[1]

1. The Slug Line

Example:
EXT. PERU - HIGH JUNGLE - DAY[1]

Let’s step through this example.

1.i) EXT.

Possible values here are exterior (EXT.) or interior (INT.) depending on whether the scene takes place inside or outside.

1.ii) PERU - HIGH JUNGLE

This names or describes the location. It can be, as here, the name of a place or it could be a description such as TEMPLE or THE SANCTUARY.

1.iii) DAY

This describes when the scene takes place. Examples of possible values are DAY, NIGHT, DUSK, CONTINUOUS, LATER, etc.

2. ACTION

Example:
The dense, lush rain forests of the eastern slopes of the Andes, the place known as “The Eyebrow of the Jungle.” Ragged, jutting canyon walls are half-hidden by the thick mists.[1]

The ACTION is a description of what happens in a particular scene.

2.i) Present tense. Always write the action in the present tense.

2.ii) Capitalization. Capitalize a character’s name the first time it comes up. Also, capitalize words you intend to call attention to. A sound for instance, or a sound effect. Something that helps set a scene.

2.iii) Leave a space. Always leave a space between the slug line and the dialogue.

3. Character Name

3.i) Character names are always capitalized and centered.

3.ii) If the character is speaking from offscreen add (O.S.) after the name.

Example: JEEP GERMAN (O.S.)

3.iii) If the character is not physically in the scene, if it’s just a voice over all (V.O.) after the character name.

Example: SHERYL (V.O.)

4. DIALOGUE.

Example:

INDY

We don’t need them.

Dialogue goes under the name. No quotation marks.

5. PARENTHETICALS

Between the name and the dialogue. Parentheticals add detail to whatever it is the character is doing while speaking.

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Every post I pick a book or audiobook I love and recommend it to my readers. This serves two purposes. I want to share what I’ve loved with you, and, if you click the link and buy anything over at Amazon within the next 24 hours, Amazon puts a few cents in my tip jar at no cost to you. So, if you click the link, thank you! If not, that’s okay too. I’m thrilled and honored you’ve visited my blog and read my post. :-)

Today I’m going to recommend a book I’ve gotten a LOT of use from. 642 Things to Write About by San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Originally I bought it to use for writing prompts, but I ended up it for my own warm-up writing exercises! From the blurb: “This collection of 642 outrageous and witty writing prompts will get the creative juices flowing in no time. From crafting your own obituary to penning an ode to an onion, each page of this playful journal invites inspiration and provides plenty of space to write.”

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That’s it! Well, almost. I’ve found a couple of sites that let folks download screenplays for free! The selection is a wee bit limited, but they have many classic screenplays (e.g., The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc.) and even a few that are new.

IMSDb.com - Movie screenplays.
SimplyScripts.com - Movie and TV screenplays.
TheFilmStage.com - Screenplays of movies up for an award in 2016. (Thanks to Naomi for the link!)

I’ll talk to you again on Wednesday. Till then, good writing!

Notes:

1. From the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

6 Ways to Squeeze More Hours Into Your Day

Lately I’ve been especially pressed for time. I want to publish the non-fiction book I blogged during NaNoWriMo and I’d like to do this by January 1st. I think that’s completely doable if I can find enough time to put in the hours needed.

Since I’m sure many of you are in the same boat—perhaps you want to turn your NaNoWriMo treasures into an awesome first draft—I thought I’d share some of the time management tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the years.

1. Focus

What is the one thing you want to accomplish today? Not the three things or even the two things, but the one thing.

Ask yourself, what would, could, you do today that will get you closer to your goal? What is the one thing that, even if you didn’t get anything else done, you would have a sense of accomplishment if you completed it?

What I do is make a to-do list at the beginning of each day. Each task is something that can be done in less than 4 hours. Then I go through the list and make one item on that list a priority.

How does one choose the one task? I like to mark all my tasks as being either important (for accomplishing my goal) or urgent (there’s a ticking clock). Any task that is both important and urgent I star. If only one task is both important and urgent then I’ve got my one task! If there are more than one I decide between them. But, as with Highlander, (think Sean Connery) “There can be only one!” (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

I picked up this tip from The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

2. Be specific

If the one thing you want to accomplish today is to publish your next book then, if it’s written, edited, proofed, you’ve obtained cover art, and so on, great! That’s doable. However if your next book isn’t written yet then that’s a goal that can’t be accomplished in four hours or less! So it needs to be broken up into bits that can be accomplished in a reasonable about of time. (The amount of time that works for me is four hours or less, but you may well be different.)

Generally speaking, the more specific a detail is the clearer it is what is required to complete the task. When it’s obvious how to complete a task then, more often than not, it can be accomplished quickly.

Let me give you an example. Say that you want to write one short story a week. That’s your goal. Now let’s break down the task into manageable bits.

Task 01: Determine how many words your short story will be. 

Before I begin a writing project I like to know approximately how many words long I want it to be. To determine this ...

Task 02: Choose 5 short stories that are in the genre you want to write in and that you personally love.

Task 03: Determine the length of each of these five short stories.

I let the length of these stories guide me in deciding how long I want my short story to be.

Task 04: Divide the number of words you want to write by the number of words you can write in an hour to yield the number of hours it will take you to write your Zero Draft.

Task 05: Determine how many hours a day you can set aside for writing. Compare this number to the number of hours per day you’d have to write if you wanted to publish one short story a week and adjust the number of words in the short story until you have a fit. Now all that’s left to do is to mark off a block of time in your favorite scheduling program (I use the MacOS Calendar app).

That’s it! Don’t give up if you fall behind. Over time you’ll get a better feel for the number of words you can write per hour.

It’s the same process for anything. Say you want to sell your car. Break the task down. Where are you going to list it? Craigslist? Your local newspaper? How much should you charge? Look up how much similar cards are being sold for. And so on. By breaking the large task up into small manageable bits, each of which can realistically be done in a day, even tasks that seem impossible get done.

3. Be realistic.

Avoid setting unrealistic goals. If you don’t meet a goal then it becomes much easier to let the next one fly on by.

4. Don’t let failure stop you.

Someone one said, the only way you can fail is if you stop trying. Your first attempt might fail, as might your second, third, fourth, and so on, but as long as you don’t give up, as long as you keep trying, you haven’t failed. You’ve just learnt a lot about what doesn’t work!

Never give up trying to accomplish your goal. Instead change how you’re trying to accomplish it. Approach it from another path, another direction. Or perhaps make the goal more specific or perhaps more general.

The only way to ensure failure is to give up.

5. Don’t multitask.

Do one task at a time giving your full attention to that task. I like to set a timer. I’ll give myself 50 minutes to work on one task, take a 10 minute break, then go back to work. After two work periods like this I’ll take a 30 minute break. Rinse and repeat.

6. Know thyself

Start recording the amount of time it takes to complete each task. Before I did this I really didn’t know how long it would take me to do various things. This made scheduling must more difficult than it needed to be!

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Every post I pick a book or audiobook I love and recommend it to my readers. This serves two purposes. I want to share what I’ve loved with you, and, if you click the link and buy anything over at Amazon within the next 24 hours, Amazon puts a few cents in my tip jar at no cost to you. So, if you click the link, thank you! If not, that’s okay too. I’m thrilled and honored you’ve visited my blog and read my post. :-)

Today I want to recommend one of my favorite books in the world, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, by Dr. Seuss. From the blurb: “Like mistletoe, candy canes, and caroling, the Grinch is a mainstay of the holidays, and his story is the perfect gift for young and old.”

If you’d rather watch the movie—watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas was a Christmas tradition in my family for many years!—here’s the link: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the movie.

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That’s it! I would love it if you shared your time saving tips and tricks. :-)

I’ll talk to you again on Monday. Until next time, good writing!

How to Begin Writing Your First Screenplay

I’ve never written a screenplay so I’ve decided—even though I don’t plan on branching out into screenwriting—to rewrite one of my stories as one. Just for practice because I think that stretching myself, my abilities, is a good thing!

Writing a Screenplay: First Things

1. The Logline or One-Line

I’ve written an article about this (See: Creating A Logline). Basically, a logline is a sentence that spells out in dramatic fashion the central conflict of a story.

The central conflict is composed of three things:

1) The protagonist’s goal.
2) The person or force that opposes the protagonist’s goal.
3) The stakes of the conflict.

Here is a formula:

[Protagonist name] is a [description of protagonist] living in [setting]. But when [complicating incident], [protagonist’s name] must [protagonist’s quest] and [verb] [villain] in order to [protagonist’s goal].

An example logline for Die Hard:

Headstrong NYPD detective John McClane wants to save his estranged wife and her colleagues from certain death at the hands of Hans Gruber, a mercenary willing to sacrifice anything to get his hands on $640 million in bearer bonds.

Joe Bunting over at The Write Practice wrote an article about how to write a screenplay. He gives the following tip on how to craft your logline:

“It’s also helpful to put a summarizing adjective in front of your characters to give a sense of their personalities.”[1]

Here’s his example: “A headlong orphan and his Vulcan nemesis must save the Federation (and themselves) from revenge-seeking Romulan from the future.”[1]

2. Write a Screenplay: Beat Sheet

After the logline it’s time to hammer out the beats in the beat sheet.

First, a few terms:

Thesis world: The Ordinary World of Act One.
Antithesis world: The world of Act Two, a world that is the opposite of the thesis world.
Synthesis world: The world of Act Three. A Synthesis of the Thesis and Antithesis.

Example:

Thesis world -> protagonist trusts his peer group.
Antithesis world -> protagonist doesn’t trust his peer group.
Synthesis world -> protagonist trusts himself.

Example of a beat sheet: The Winter Soldier.

Description of what should be in a beat sheet:

1. Opening Image. Give a brief description of who the protagonist is before his world changes.

2. Inciting Incident/Catalyst. Protagonist is thrown out of her familiar world—the Ordinary World—and she begins her quest.

3. Start of Act Two. Protagonist is first challenged by new things. There must be drama. It must be clear whether the protagonist succeeded or failed.

4. Midpoint. If things are good for the protagonist early on this is where they go bad. If things are horrible for the protagonist early on then this is where they begin to go his/her way.

5. Bad guys close in. Often there is a ticking clock involved.

6. All is lost/Dark moment. Lowest part of your characters’s story.
The dark moment or dark turn does against what hero believed in the thesis world. Act Three is the synthesis world.
Finally reaching the tower where the princess is being kept, the hero finds… she’s not there! And not only that, it’s a trap! It looks like the Bad Guy has won.

7. Break into Act Three. Protagonist has an epiphany. Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis.

8. Epiphany. Things turn around. “Step 4: The hero now has to come up with a new plan. And it’s all part and parcel of the overall transformation of the hero and his need to “dig deep down” to find that last ounce of strength (i.e., faith in an unseen power) to win the day.”

9. Race to the finish. A plan is formulated.
“Thinking on the fly, and discovering his best self, the hero executes the new plan.”

10. The Climax. The protagonist and antagonst square off. This is the final confrontation between them. It must be clear that the outcome of this context will be final. No do-overs.

11. Wrap Up: Cash out the stakes. Tie up any loose threads.

Synopsis

A synopsis doesn’t include subplots or minor characters. It is only about the main character and his/her plotline.

Capitalize the names of characters the first time they appear. Also, the synopsis should we written in the third person, present tense.

Rather than create an example of my own, I’ve found an article that includes a wonderful example so head on over to Publishing Crawl and read How To Write a 1-Page Synopsis.

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Every post I pick a book or audiobook I love and recommend it to my readers. This serves two purposes. I want to share what I’ve loved with you, and, if you click the link and buy anything over at Amazon within the next 24 hours, Amazon puts a few cents in my tip jar at no cost to you. So, if you click the link, thank you! If not, that’s okay too. I’m thrilled and honored you’ve visited my blog and read my post. :-)

Today I would like to recommend a book I’ve read through many times, I’m talking about 1,000 Awesome Writing Prompts by Ryan Andrew Kinder. I’ve used many of his prompts as writing exercises to begin my writing day.

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I haven’t talked about how to write a screenplay per se, this post is already long enough. I’ll save that for next time.

That’s it for today! I’ll talk to you on Friday. Till then, good writing!

Notes:

1. How to Write a Screenplay: The 5 Step Process.

Be a Book Doctor: How to Evaluate Your Own Story

Book doctors are wonderful. A book doctor is someone who isn’t your husband/wife/parent/friend, someone who can be objective toward your manuscript, someone who can dispassionately evaluate the content and structure of your story. And this can be an enormous help, especially at the beginning of your manuscript when you’re working on your story’s overall structure and shape.

But you don’t have to send your story off to someone else. You can be your own book doctor. How? The first step is to put your manuscript in a drawer and try to forget about it for a week or two. When you take the manuscript out of the drawer you’ll be able to see it more objectively.

There are a few stories I wrote so long ago that I no longer remember them. Reading them again was like reading the work of a stranger. It was painful but rewarding! At the time I wrote it I felt that something was off but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly needed to be fixed. When I reread the story after a period of years I realized that the story had no midpoint, no crisis, no moment of revelation. The good news: as soon as I saw the structural defect it was surprisingly easy to fix.

So, if you don’t want to send your work off to a book doctor then put it in a drawer for a couple of weeks. Reread the manuscript through from top to bottom and ask yourself the following questions:[1]

Scenes:

• Does each scene have a goal and stakes? Does the main character want something in every scene, even if it is only a glass of water?
• Do you include sequels after the scenes? Or even mini-sequels between scenes (this works especially well if you have one scene per chapter).

Acts:

• Does each act have a main overriding goal and are the stakes spelled out?

Overall Structure:

• Is there a major turn/twist of the plot at the 25, 50 and 75 percent marks?
• Is there a clear Call to Adventure?
• Around the middle of the book—the midpoint crisis—the protagonist needs to understand the story world in a different light. Sometimes this information is about one of the characters—the love interest, the protagonist, the mentor, the protagonist’s helper—or about the Special World of the Adventure.
• Is the Special World of the Adventure strikingly different from the Ordinary World of  the protagonist’s ordinary life?
• Is the protagonist locked into the quest by the 25 percent mark.
• Does the protagonist have an All Is Lost moment at around the 75 percent mark?
• Is there a race to the finish after the All Is Lost point and before the climax?
• Is it clear that the climax is a final test, one that at most one character can win?
• Are the stakes cashed out and all loose ends tied up before the story ends?

Protagonist:

• What state of affairs would make the protagonist happy?
• What danger/obstacle prevents the protagonist from achieving this happy state of affairs?
• Does the protagonist have a moral compass? Does the climax hinge on a moral issue? That is, does it hinge on a point of selflessness vs unselfishness? (Selfishness: Abandonment of conviction for the sake of personal advantage. Unselfishness: Adherence to principle despite the temptation of self-interest.)
• This is just something to think about, it’s not a hard and fast rule: Is the protagonist good but not the brightest penny in the jar or are they brilliant but morally flexible? It doesn’t always happen that the protagonist is one or the other, but there does seem to be a bit of a tradeoff between these two characteristics.

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Every post I pick a book or audiobook I love and recommend it to my readers. This serves two purposes. I want to share what I’ve loved with you, and, if you click the link and buy anything over at Amazon within the next 24 hours, Amazon puts a few cents in my tip jar at no cost to you. So, if you click the link, thank you! If not, that’s okay too. I’m thrilled and honored you’ve visited my blog and read my post. :-)

A few months ago I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. He is a master of telling folks how to make the most of their time. He helped me! In time for the holidays he's come out with another book: Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. I haven't read it yet, but it's at the top of my to-be-read list.

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Notes:

1. Many of these questions I’ve taken from Janice Hardy’s wonderful article: How to Be Your Own Book Doctor.