Screenwriting : What do you expect from writing the script? by Stevan Šerban

What do you mean Stevan?

Simply that an audience will eventually see some kind of interpretation visually that I have in my mind. That's what I want anyway. A lot is just to get better at it. Why else do it?

Hi Anthony! The best way to tell your story or to sell your good story, or ...

I want to finish up with a script that captures what I had in my minds eye and connects with someone who can then go onto film it. Like Michael, I'd like to see my writing improve and to feel i'm growing as a writer.

I expect to entertain myself.

To get that monkey off my back so I can move on to the next monkey.

The same as Anthony, convey on the page what was in my head. Hopefully leading to entertainment for an audience, through film.

I don't have any expectations. My life has never followed any of my expectations. I just live in hope that one day I can make a living off of my writing or at least enough to buy a house one day.

Hi Alle! Expectation means vision, vision means goal, goal means that what you do has a purpose, the ultimate outcome. If you do not have a goal or purpose, then why are you doing this? It's okay if you are doing it for the money. Hollywood is an industry like any other industry, there is an art to another level. Write for fun, and that's fine, but it is also a goal. In any case, you have to be conspired to myself: why am I writing a script for a movie? When you give an answer to that question writing the script for the film becomes the best fun ever!

I don't know if expectation is the right word, at least for myself. I have no expectations when I write, but I do have hopes. Sometimes those hopes are around what I personally can accomplish for myself, and sometimes that hope is that someone will read it and be entertained or enlightened or challenged by it. As a business, I hope that my scripts will interest someone to the point that they'll want to put them on the screen and I'll make some money. But hopes are not WHY I write. I write because I need to, as a creative outlet among other creative outlets that I engage in.

The template that tells me what the movie will look like and why it should be made.

Yes I do have hopes. I can't expect anything from my scripts, but I can hope they sell and are produced.

I only expected Marisa Tomei to marry me...

I have just spent a week, locked in a room with a script, a ten minute piece of dance theatre. It has consumed me, filled every thought and moment. Given me the frustration of discovering, at every read, that it was not quite right, and then the joy of allowing me to play with it until it read the way I would be happy to see it. So I guess, somewhere in my brain, I expect that it will be produced and watched by an audience, but in many ways they were there in my head with me, because I am both the audience and the writer. I have seen my work produced by others, who made what I considered to be awful decisions, and this was painful to watch, but I learnt to let it go. Whatever happens to a script, it is important that I know that I got the pleasure I wanted from it, during its creation, and I can send it off into the world with a happy heart to make its own way. This one goes to a fundraiser, so I already know it has a home. It feels like I wrestled a crocodile and won. Go me! Maybe I'll get some sleep now, and I expect I shall start playing with one of the full length crocodiles that have been snapping at me for years.

You sound happy, Yvonne, and that's the best reward. :)

It really is Brian.

Be produced!