3 posts tagged “screenwriting”
A bit of advice to writers I found on IMDB's "Ask a Writer" feature, written by John August, which I found useful:
My advice to you is .... write like the kind of writer you wish you were: bold, courageous, unafraid to piss people off. Think Hemingway, but with marketable good-looks.
In summary: Pretend you're confident. Eventually, you will be.
Up to page 102 in reading/revising the screenplay. I've scribbled notes in the margins, and put a red tape flag next to scenes that needed to be moved or massively altered or created from scratch. (More better living through office supplies -- I should get Office Despot or Staples to be my corporate sponsor for this blog, or I could go upscale and ask Levengers.)
One hundred and two pages later, there are ten tape flags. When I first looked it seemed like twice or three times that number, so I'm actually relieved.
After those revisions are actually accomplished (this weekend and next week), I'll begin allowing other eyes to see it....
Like many writers I know, I have an almost totemic regard for the physical objects of writing -- paper, pens, note cards, et cetera -- which I discovered today extends to brads. Paper fasteners. One and a quarter inch brass-plated brads, to be precise. They are the exact kind that many people who handle movie scripts on a regular basis insist upon. It seems the inch-long are too short to properly fasten the pages, and the inch and a half are too long and stab the reader (not the thing to do to someone you are hoping will recommend your script, or at least read it without hostile intent). It's the classic Goldilocks problem.
Anyway, I had purchased a box of brads from Office Despot, got them home, and then learned of the inch and a quarter deal. The ones I bought were, naturlich, the reader-stabbing inch and a half variety. So they languished a long time in a drawer.
Now that I'm within a month of printing out a draft of a screenplay and inflicting it on my friends to give me a dramatic reading of it (so I can hear the dialogue and tell whether it's completely wooden or somewhat tolerable), I'm feeling the need to have the non-stabbing variety on hand. Back to the Despot, where they only had inch or inch and a half. I got my money back (even without a receipt -- good thing they were Office Despot brand, so they couldn't claim I'd bought them somewhere else), and went to the office supply store downtown, which had five or six different sizes, including the desired inch and a quarter. Ah. Bought a box of 100, so I'm good for 50 copies of scripts.
When I got the box home I kept taking one out and looking at it, then putting it back in the box. Now I've just left one out of the box that I can pick up and twirl around from time to time as I write this. Totemic, I tell you.
And now on to actually writing that screenplay.
