Hello Fellow Writers!
My work on "Snowed in With a Millionaire" is really not going so well. Part of the problem is that I am renovating my bathroom and every free second I have is spent googling info about that! My only consolation is the knowledge that NaNoWriMo is coming up and I have to have my plot outline completed by November 1st or I will be writing by the seat of my pants.
One of my fellow students in my Advanced Writing Workshop suggested that my novel "The Movie Star's Very Personal Assistant" would make a good movie. I told her thanks but I have no desire to write screenplays and be in that whole scene. I used to want to be a screenwriter. I wrote two feature film length scripts, one of which I actually produced myself. It made an awful movie, to be honest.
But at the time I read a book called "Writing Scripts Hollywood Will Love: An Insider's Guide to Film and Television Scripts that Sell" by Katherine Atwell Herbert. I just pulled it off my shelf to review for you, dear reader.
It's brutally honest, which is a good thing. It gives the advice that it's super hard to break into the business - practically impossible - and that you have to know how to market yourself and schmooze to get in. You also have to live in Los Angeles. This is what the book says, and I believe it. When I was into script writing, I too lived in L.A. I guess now that I'm writing novels it's good I live in New York!
It talks a bit about how you should only write prose that is needed to show what the audience will see and let the dialogue do the rest.
I'm so not into screenwriting anymore that the whole concept is foreign to me now. I love how in a novel you can really get into a character's head. Not so much with a script - you have to leave it up to the actor to portray whatever he is thinking.
The book is pretty old (1994), so there are probably newer, better books about screenwriting out there - but I will not be buying them.
Today I am going to get obsessed about renovating my bathroom and probably ignore my own personal writer's challenge to get my plotting done. I'm being honest here. But hopefully I'll feel guilty enough to work on my work-in-progress at least a little bit.
Wish me luck, and good luck to you too!
Yours Truly,
Shoshanna Evers
We may have many challenges in writing. In the case of a script writer, they have to write creatively. In the case of students, they have to write perfectly and professionally. But you loved it and tried to overcome all the barriers.
ReplyDelete