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.<\/p>\n
Screenplays are compact.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}