When the kid picked up the gun it was heavy and hot. It smelled like sweat and steal. It was much heavier than he had imagined. His little fingers could barely grasp the knurled grip. Because of the weight, he wrapped it in the bottom of his sweatshirt and rode his bicycle home to show his brother.
Screenwriting : A good start.... by James David Harris
A good start....
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Is it a criminals gun? A cops gun? Why was it laying there? Where was this kid? Was he down underneath Bridge Street Bridge? Or maybe down by the place where they dip the telephone poles in that muck? The one with the pit of tar or what ever that stuff is that smells like dads jar of yellow liquid for taking the gunk off stuff.
This is really the start of a novel, not a screenplay. Most of the paragraph is stuff an audience would not be able to experience. "Movies are a visual art form." In a movie the audience cant feel that the gun is heavy or hot, nor smell the sweat and steel. They could see that the gun is too big for his hands and that he wraps it in his sweatshirt, then rides away. Later scenes would show that he rode home and shows his brother, if the family connection is somehow made through visuals or dialog. There's a definite difference in writing fiction and writing a screenplay. Many elements in fiction cannot be translated to the screen.
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When the child picked up the gun, it was heavy and hot in his grasp. Much heavier than he had imagined. The metallic smell of sweat greased his palm as his little fingers barely wrapped around the grip. Because of the weight, he wrapped it in the bottom of his sweatshirt and rode his bicycle home to show his brother.
Yeah, but I cant write straight screenplay.
A picture is worth a thousand words and in film a word is worth a thousand pictures - Paraphrase by memory from listening to John Sayles at a Q.&A. at a book signing about 1987 or so.
Why do you think you can't write in screenplay format?
Looking for a good screenwriter - see my post.
Well, its too robotic to write with a flow.
Ext/Day/Sunny We start off with a wide shot of a forest of trees in 30mm Panaflex in all its Panaflex glory!
LOL
Thanks.
No need to denigrate one medium (screenplays) from another (novels). I've toiled in both as well as stage plays and TV, and have thus far only seen success in stage plays, but I love all four disciplines for their respective challenges, and how each can express the same story in a slightly different or a profoundly different manner. The example of a screenplay you portrayed I'm sure is just a parody of some sort. But to be clear, some SPs are written with an attention to detail in storytelling and character development that raises the discipline to an art form, while other screenplays, both produced and will-never-be-produced-till-hell-freezes-over are boring, cliche, mundane, and/or antiseptically plain. But, same can be said for novels, both published and unpublished. All this to say, though we appreciate the fact that squeezing a good SP from a good novel is trying, no need to make it sound trivial or hack or below the level of a novel. And it's no more robotic than some novels can be... depends on who does the writing and how s/he does it.