If you follow me on Instagram (which you should be because I'm cool...) you'll have seen that my last project was to write a screenplay.
I wrote one before Christmas based off of the first novel I've ever written (and no you can't read the novel, it's an embarrassment that lives at the bottom of my drawer (read: hard drive)). I then embarked on an original idea that I had for a novel but never really knew how to write it.
This is what I've learnt from the process:
Focuses the main strain of the storyline
With so few pages and scenes available it really makes you think hard about the plot and how the story develops. Sub plots are of course important but the main meat of the story comes from that main storyline. Writing a screenplay forced me to focus on that and cut out the noise around it. I think this will definitely be helpful for when I write my next novel too. I'm a chronic "lets add scenes and noise to fill out the word count" type of writer, something I am working on.
Cuts out unnecessary characters
When I rewrote my novel into a screenplay I realised how many unnecessary characters I had in there and how little they brought to the storyline. They were buffer to make the "group" seem big or to help the dramatic action along without their actually being any character development behind them. It really taught me to think more about my character and how each can add to the story rather than distract.
Scenes that don't add to the dramatic flow
As I mentioned earlier, I love to add extra scenes to fill a word count (I realise how bad this is!) but cutting the story right down to bare bones showed me that actually the need for hundreds of different scenes isn't actually necessary to bring the story to life. I've definitely already put this into practice when outlining my next novel.
Three acts and character development
Despite having done a whole university course in creative writing, doing the online screen writing course was the first time I'd heard of the three acts (that I can remember). Maybe they did teach this to me at University but honestly I don't remember it at all. It obviously makes complete sense and I have a better story for it. I love structure and organisation so this works really well for me. Again I have put this into practice when outline my next project.
With very few pages and words, dialogue being some of the most important of them, it really forces you to think like the character and put actions in that are most fitting to the character. The question "would he/she really do that?" was something I asked myself a lot during the process.
Dialogue
I very vividly remember being told in Creative Writing seminars that my dialogue was rubbish (these things stick with you don't they?). Over the year's I've worked hard to develop this aspect of my writing and to make it more believable and helpful to the storyline but there's nothing quite like dialogue being one of the core elements of a project to make you hyper focus on getting it right.
Overall, I absolutely loved writing these screenplays and have a number of other ideas to keep at it. I'm focusing on novel work for now, but I will definitely be throwing in some more screenwriting project throughout the year.
Would you ever try writing a screenplay?
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