Was working on a scene, mostly dialogue, and wondering how to increase the tension. Changed the pace by changing the order of the character’s speeches, so that Character A starts out uncompromising, thereby putting Character B on the defensive. Also added some exclamation points.
Did that make any sense?
Sure. In a temporal world, ordinality is everything.
Maybe you can answer me this. I have written a lot of tiny inconsequential things, but I have no disicipline so I never really get past the first draft, if that.
How can it be that it takes people weeks, months, even years of constant writing to create a 2 hour screenplay? Surely it shouldn’t take more than a few days, a month at the most, but people seem to labour over individual sentences for hours.
I’d love the opportunity and time and discipline to try it myself to see why, but as I can’t, I ask here.
GuanoLad:
You start with an outline. That’s the “few days”: getting the idea and basic structure down on paper.
Then you start to flesh out the scenes. That can take any amount of time, depending on how long your story is, whether it’s a screenplay or a novel, and how complex your writing style is. Although it didn’t take Hemingway as little time as you might think to write his stuff, which brings us to stage three: revising.
At first glance, Hemingway’s works look like the bare bones of a story, with no subtext. But when you examine them, you find that they’re actually very powerful stories, with only as many words as he needed to get the point across. He accomplished this by first writing everything that seemed to be relevant, then revising by cutting all the extraneous bits. Others start by writing in general terms, and then add details later. My way is usually to start with a conversation and then make the characters “move” around it. But one way or another, you have to revise. You have to look twice, and three times, and then again, making sure you’re really saying what you want to say, and in a way that gets the reader’s attention (or that will play well on screen). You may write the whole thing straight through, and then revise, or you may focus on one scene and rework it as many times as necessary before moving on. But that’s what takes all the time: making sure everything works.
Heck, check the time stamp on this post. I don’t think your post was more than five minutes old before I started responding.
An English teacher advised me once always to review your work “cold”. That is, let it set for at least a day or two because often we forget to write what’s in our heads, and we don’t realize that core concepts are failing to make it onto paper. You need to let the context of the story fade so that when you read it again, you’ll notice, “Hey, I forgot to let people know this guy’s father is dead.”
You’ll also notice spelling and grammar errors better that way because when the work is too “warm”, you aren’t really reading what’s on the paper but rather what’s still in your head.
Thanks for the answer, Rilch! I’m tempted to link to a Star Wars fanfilm script I wrote, and see what you think, but this probably isn’t the place for something so self indulgent.
I tend to write everything straight in my first draft, revising small things as I go, and rarely will I ever write an official second draft. However, one of teh fanfilm scripts I wrote I started with, as you described, a barebones version, and each subsequent draft I expanded on scenes. I still haven’t finished it, but I know what is yet to be done, and once it is, I tend to be very happy with things. I don’t overwork my writing. Perhaps that’s a bad thing?
Don’t mind me. I’ll just sit here in the corner and festate. 