Screenwriting : Beginnings by Tony McFadden

Mine is in my Bio or on my webpage. I thought once about taking a campfire story I used to tell and turn it in to a novel. It's just screenwriting seemed to have more appeal and my whole goal was and is to try to affect the masses in a positive way. I respect authors and not sure if I'm going to take and screen write that old campfire story or author it as a book some day. Funny my background wasn't exactly a focus in writing although I did a heck of a lot of in college. Anyway you can read my webpage under Bio tab. I will say it is a work in progress much as I am.

I wrote my first screenplay and didn't know how to move forward promoting it. So I rewrote that as a novella and uploaded to a bunch of free book websites. Then I wrote another screenplay and turned that into a full size novel. Upon completion it dawned on me I knew nothing about writing novels, had very poor prose and didn't want to actually go into the book business. So I scrapped that, listened to a lot of Scriptnotes Podcasts, read the Save The Cat books, revisited my first two screenplays and wrote a third. That was my first year of writing in 2012; it was intense, dark and confused but I think I needed to put myself through that writing bootcamp.

my experience was thus: i wrote a script and decided to put it up on amazon as a screenplay ebook. within a few weeks it went up to #14 in it's catagory (out of about 25,000). but as soon as people realized that it was a script vs. a novel it dropped like a stone. (i put on the bookcover that it was in screenplay format but that was ignored). most book/novel readers cannot handle reading a script... it's not in the format they are comfortable, too reader-intensive, not nearly as fun or easy to read as a novel. this was my mistake... i should have written the story as a novella/novel and THEN wrote the script and promoted it. i do not know if it would have helped but it certainly could not have hurt.

I started out writing fiction as a hobby while also being interested in Hong Kong films... This lead to writing for a magazine about the films where in 2004 I was able to interview and become friends with Jackie Chan stunt team member/double, Andy Cheng. Five years later he challenged me to try my hand at writing screenplays by giving me one to rewrite to see how I'd do. He saw potential and became my mentor and partner.

Very cool, Lisa :)

I started with my own Game Design company at 15, came up with video game script ideas and than when that didn't work out took my ideas and decided to make them movies. Thus learning to write screenplays

That's got to be taxing, Steven, with the interactive nature of video games. I assume movie scripts would be much easier to write...

I wanted to be a novelist when I was younger but never completed a novel, someone said they got 30 pages in I don't think I even managed that. I was also interested in plays, journalism and short stories. I just always loved movies and am a very visual person so film scripts seemed the way to go.

Tony, they are relatively in the same area. The difference being video game writing can be technical. You have to not only write the story, but your also thinking of how to incorporate the story with game play and you have to write out the game play and different options for different choices within the game. That game idea I had would of been extremely controversial and hopefully one day it will get made or turned into a new HBO Mini-Series.