Looks like this year’s Script Frenzy is going to be a bust, at least for me. I have two script ideas I’m playing with, but can’t seem to make progress on either one. And I think part of the problem is that I’m trying to do this the same way I did NaNoWriMo, writing sans outline, just letting the story hit the page.
Writing Homeworld was an interesting experience but with all due respect to Stephen King and other authors that see stories as “found things, like fossils in the ground,” I need an ultrasound snapshot of what the fossil looks like before I start digging. I’m a lot more comfortable writing from an outline.
And when I say outline, I’m not talking about the Roman numeralled hierarcical monstrosity we’re all taught to loathe in school. My “outlines” are little more than sparse bulleted lists, maybe broken out by act (Aristotle was right, humans gravitate to a three act structure in storytelling, beginning, middle and end; there’s no escaping it, we’re hardwired). For each chapter in a novel, I’ll have maybe four to seven bullets of sentence fragments that just barely capture my intent for a scene or some key moments I want to hit. For a screenplay, I’ll break it down to three defined acts, each with a bullet point for each scene.
As I said, I’m working on two projects. One, a romantic comedy I’m writing with Josh, we outlined beforehand and I write the even numbered scenes, he the odd. The problem here is that Josh’s real life keeps getting in the way and he’s just not getting time to write his half. So we’ll do it later, no biggie.
Since I have time to work on something else, I thought I’d work on a thriller concept I’ve had in the back of my mind for a few years, kind of “Jurassic Park” meets “Medicine Man”. And I’ve tried to write this (working title is “Dragons”) the way they recommend on Script Frenzy, starting with FADE IN: and going from there, just writing serially from opening shot to closing credits.
I can’t do it.
Part of it, I think, is that screenwriting is by nature a more structured medium than prose. Not a lot, not as structured as playwriting where you have to really work within the practical limitations of the stage, or haiku, with all that syllable counting, but it doesn’t work as well with stream of consciousness writing as prose. You still have defined scene breaks, more visual and deliberate dialogue breaks, it’s just more precise.
And I can’t go into a precise medium with muddy ideas. I just can’t do it.
I think this is why the idea of a treatment is so popular in Hollywood. If you’ve never seen a film treatment, it’s a prose summary of the movie, told in present tense like a screenplay. It can be just a scene by scene breakdown and summarize the dialogue or it can have bits of conversation throughout. I’ve seen treatments for two hour movies that were five pages long, thirty pages long or 100 pages long (the average actual script runs about a page per minute, so 120 pages for a two hour movie, making a 100 page treatment probably more detailed than it needs to be).
So running the risk of losing “spontaneity” (a goofy concept given how many times the average screenplay is rewritten anyway) I’m going to write up a treatment for “Dragons” and make sure it works in my head as a film before I start the script. In fact, I’m thinking I might adapt the treatment to a scene by scene outline and only then start working on the actual script.
Or am I overthinking this?
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