One of the greatest things about screenplays for me is the premium placed on forward motion; it’s the one form which allows a writer to start and finish a scene without making apologies. In fact, a rapid assault is the whole point. Make something happen and fast. There’s another coup, though.
Screenplays are compact.
End to end, a properly formatted screenplay lands south of 120 pages. 100 pages is very common, a length of 105 pages is my projection for the contest. And given that much of the content is white space, slug lines, and character names, there’s not a tremendous amount of words to manage and edit at all. Which makes spotting and addressing issues easier. And there’s little bothering with my old nemesis, description.
See, coherent scene set ups in a novel are a good idea, and a matter of course. Truly effective ones are hard to write, and I admire authors who pull in the audience with well phrased imagery that evokes sentiment and interest.
But an expertly styled scene dripping with adjectives and similes in a screenplay? Waste of time. EXT. HERO’S FRONT LAWN DAY. The action happens outside, during the day, on the hero’s yard. Boom. Done. Me, I’m drinking a beer while a director paints in the blanks.
Yeah, so far I’m having a blast. Tally in this effort to date: four writing sessions, twenty-seven pages. Three more weeks at this clip leaves two weeks for revisions. Or so.
