Okay, I've just submitted to the final round of the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. I'm not happy with the edit of my submission (an extra hour to proof read and implement minor changes would have been ideal). But it's been a great experience I've learnt that I can write short fiction. I feel I understand the medium and what it is good at doing. BUT I realise that I don't understand screenplays the same way. So, in two sentences or less, explain what writing an effective screenplay is al about.
Screenwriting : I know nothing about screenwriting. by Steven Fussell
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if you read screenplays you will learn a lot about just that.
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Scenes that keep the audience going and story that keeps them wanting.
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An effective screenplay is exactly the same as an effective short fiction. A compelling story with interesting characters.
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A story in novel form is intended for the mind and favors the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks and create the completed image. The format is pretty much up to the writer. A story in screenplay form is intended for the screen. It is meant to paint a complete picture so the reader, through to the production crew, will work to achieve the same image and it needs to follow rather strict formatting rules.
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It's visual storytelling.
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When, despite the dastardly attempts by the dark knights, and despite the main character’s own frailties and weaknesses, the allusive Holy Grail is stunningly and gloriously reached. And the writer, so exquisitely skilled in science and art, crafts a compelling tale lovingly devoted to the essential plot points of screenwriting structure, and can profoundly display the inner souls of those characters through the necessary actions and dialogues that brim with the story line’s logic and that evoke all kinds of nerve-tingling feelings, and which would thwart any credible actor or skilled director from sinking into a cold and oily oblivion that warm and wondrous tale. Give me ten writers like that, enough food for a couple months, and a wheelbarrow full of gold, and I could take over the world.
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Crikey--2 sentences? It's about the who/what/when/where/why of a terrific story combined with rich visual imagery and skilled characterization.
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A page turner is everything. Whatever the genre, keep the reader engaged from beginning to end...
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It's about writing a visual intepretation of a truly compelling story in the 'right' format so that a Producer reads it and wants to spend their money on making it into a film.
If I'm not mistaken, the Movie Production Companies are paying for your script, and not necessarily turns it into a movie. The producers are just EXTENDED HAND of that same Companies.
Anthony and Chris, I am just learning that. As a novelist, short story writer, I tend to put in the prose, the glamour, but the nice thing is I am in a screenwriters group and they tend to tell me the same thing. Thanks