I'm always writing screenplays about shit that happened to me earlier in the day, but I can't seem to get a finished film out of it. It always bogs down right about the point in the story where I get home and start writing the screenplay.
Plus, other difficulties, even when I try my hand at my forte - fiction, of course! I'll get a great story rolling, but I keep getting hung up on the fact that I'm just not very good at the form. Screenplays are hard! They require a specialized set of writing skills that I'm too ignorant or incurious to research and develop. Probably all I'd need to do is purchase and read a few really good screenplays, get a feel for the format and the vernacular. But I can't be bothered to do school-work, when I'm too busy writing! Right? What's more important!
The trick I hit upon is this: finally I decided, screw the screenplay. Skip straight to the novelization. Write a damn good novelization of your film, and then hand it off to a qualified screenplay technician to reverse-engineer a shooting script out of it. Pow. See, that's what's called "lateral thinking." I took it from inside the box, to right way the hell out of the box, thinking-wise.
And these novelizations are coming along great! Let me tell you. I've got three main ones going right now. One problem I keep running into is the characters from each novelization keep getting mixed up. Appearing in each others' scenes, and such. I get really deep into it, writing furiously, and temporarily forget which book I'm working on. But all that really matters is the end result, right? And sometimes, something like that is how serendipity knocks. You can't argue with what works, and sometimes a noir bar scene can get punched up nicely, with just the simple introduction of a barbarian wizard.
Plus, other difficulties, even when I try my hand at my forte - fiction, of course! I'll get a great story rolling, but I keep getting hung up on the fact that I'm just not very good at the form. Screenplays are hard! They require a specialized set of writing skills that I'm too ignorant or incurious to research and develop. Probably all I'd need to do is purchase and read a few really good screenplays, get a feel for the format and the vernacular. But I can't be bothered to do school-work, when I'm too busy writing! Right? What's more important!
The trick I hit upon is this: finally I decided, screw the screenplay. Skip straight to the novelization. Write a damn good novelization of your film, and then hand it off to a qualified screenplay technician to reverse-engineer a shooting script out of it. Pow. See, that's what's called "lateral thinking." I took it from inside the box, to right way the hell out of the box, thinking-wise.
And these novelizations are coming along great! Let me tell you. I've got three main ones going right now. One problem I keep running into is the characters from each novelization keep getting mixed up. Appearing in each others' scenes, and such. I get really deep into it, writing furiously, and temporarily forget which book I'm working on. But all that really matters is the end result, right? And sometimes, something like that is how serendipity knocks. You can't argue with what works, and sometimes a noir bar scene can get punched up nicely, with just the simple introduction of a barbarian wizard.
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