One of my Profs always suggested we describe something around us as the first paragraph and expect to edit it out later. Like seeing a coin on the edge of a table or a bird hopping in the grass or uneven mini blinds. Of course he also suggested we write the last page first if we were really stuck, that sometimes knowing how we wanted something to end helped us know how it should start. Yeah right.... I love to write, but it's a LOT of work and I guess I don't love to write that much! Do you ever get 40 pages into a book and realize it's so dull or poorly written or both that you have no idea whats going on? Do you (would you) set it aside and pick up something else? My personal motto lately has been that life is too short for cheap chocolate and boring books. mm
Not at all. The more feedback from experienced writers here, the better. Whew - you're so *organized* -! But I'd guess you'd have to be, because of the constraints of the script format. I wouldn't recognize a three-minute scene if I fell over one. Not that I haven't read scripts and, intellectually, understood what a three-minute scene is - but write one? My style isn't nearly as disciplined. For me the most difficult thing is hacking out an outline to pitch to an editor. How the hell do I know where I'll be by page 311? Novel format allows for a lot of sprawl, and I'll sometimes be anticipating a Great Big Scene and manage to say what I need to say in a couple of paragraphs, or the other way around. So, different strokes. And for screenwriters, yours is very sound advice. Kind of essential to use Final Draft these days, though, isn't it? I don't think any producer under age 30 (and so damn many of them *are* under age 30) knows how to open a Word doc. Wasn't aware of the Hollywood Standard book, though (nor that Final Draft made errors). Good information. Absolutely, and they're all equally legit. It's a matter of finding what you're good at. What's difficult is trying to explain to the layman why you don't "just" switch media anytime you feel like it.
Two more excellent suggestions! And if you want to write, you will (the three examples you give above may seem very Zen, but I bet you could pull a lot more out of them if you wanted to). But if it's not fun, don't do it. Few things drive me crazier than listening to other writers bitch about how *hard* they work. Sorry, honey. Driving a truck or working on an assembly line is *hard work*. What you do may challenge your skills and your self-discipline, but if all it is for you is *work*, then do us all a favor and go prune the roses or some damn thing. It's gotta be fun first and foremost, because the time invested vs. the monetary expectation is not what it's about. All the g-damn time. Once you write, you lose patience with other writers very quickly. I'll seldom even last 40 pages. Can't draw me in in 10-20 pages? Buh-bye. The other thing that drives me bonkers is typos and errors. The more pricey books get, it seems, the less likely they are to be properly copy editing or even proofed. If there's one error on the page, I'll find it, and it immediately breaks the mood. A dozen or more errors in a book, and I'm reading to hunt the editor down and do him serious bodily harm...
Maybe saying I'm lazy and lack the discipline would be a better choice of words than "hard work". And that I realized no matter what I write, there is a little too much of me showing up that I'd rather others didn't see. I wonder if WP spell checkers are spoiling everyone? No one really needs to learn how to spell anymore. mm
I've often imagined how wonderful it must be to have hundreds of pages to tell a story, even when some page or word count issues are involved. I have maybe 90-120 pages to do the same thing and include all the directions and dialog, camera angles, whatnot to do it in. It's probably a grass is greener over the fence thing, but I do feel very constrained at times trying to tells a good story and rapidly running out of space to do it in. When I was in one of my screenwriting classes in college, one assignment was to turn a novel into a screenplay. I chose Herman Wouk's Don't Stop the Carnival, which is a fairly short novel of around 300 pages. About a day into the project I found I was tearing my hair out trying to fit everyhting in and when I knew I couldn't I was tearing my hair out trying to decide which plotlines to ditch, which characters to combine or eliminate outright, which dialog I had to change and what to keep. What I ended up with had only a passing resemblance to the original book. The thing is, FinalDraft doesn't make big mistakes, and if I didn't know exactly what I was doing, I wouldn't even notice them. Stuff like putting (con't) after a character discription broken up by an action. But if I'm asking someone to like my screenplay enough to spend several million dollars to produce it, it needs to be right and look professional. Believe me, producers will notice formatting mistakes. When I'm William Golding, I can submit a half formatted screenplay and get away with it. LUckily for me, I learned my craft in the days of Word 3.0 when I had to do all the formatting by hand and my professors would tear it apart looking for minor mistakes in margins and the like. The software makes it so easy to do, but it still makes minor mistakes, not unlike MSWord does with some grammar tenses and sentence fragments and alternate spellings. Not enough that it would make a huge difference, but enough that you need to keep on top of it and trust yourself instead of the software. Exactly. I had someone who read a screenplay of mine ask me why I don't just write a novel. Well, I can't. They aren't the same beasts any more than painting a house is akin to paining a watercolor. Same basic tools and principles, but totally different methods and skill sets.
I don't mind slow-starting, if it's well written. To me, Clancy is the Hemingway of his generation. And, as Faulkner said of Hemingway, "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary." Clancy's a good, pedestrian writer. Not to my taste. Of course, he's not a functional illiterate like Grisham, but I digress...
And my problem's just the reverse. I need 100 pages or so to build character and momentum and then open the throttle for the next 200-300. And, yeah, I get that "Well, if it's so hard to sell a novel why dontcha just write scripts?" Yeahright.
garamet: Please give some background as to why the eternally angry KIRK1ADM dislikes you so much, that he spills sorely hackneyed bile onto various BBS every once in a while.
Probably a better topic for the RR, although the "eternally angry" part is all you really need to know. To keep this a Workshop topic, I'll refer you to Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Whoa, there. Hold on. What anthology? Coming out when? Is this what you "teased" about a few weeks back?
You'll post in accord with the rules. I'll consider any of your future neg-reps on my moderating comments to be a rejection on your part of my friendly advice and, therefore, an invitation to a formal warning.
If you feel you have been threatened, you should immediately take the matter up with the management. If a threat was PM'd to you, it should be very easy to prove. However, I doubt what you received from me will qualify, especially when it is compared to post #228. Contact me via PM for any further discussion or open a new thread in the Help Desk. This thread is not the place for it.
^Excellent, excellent post. IMO, it should be split off into its own thread, maybe even pinned as "Ask Wilbury" or "Ask the Screenwriters," since we've got several here. [action=garamet]heads for the Help Desk...[/action]
How long does it take you write a full novel? Does the length of time change from each novel? Do you have a specific schedule that you use when writing or do you just write on the fly as it were? What's the fastest amount of time that you written a book in?
As I've probably said before, I'm a very slow writer. Standard novel deadlines are a year, and it takes me that year to write a full-length (100,000-125,000-word) novel. Wrote some YA novels under a pseudonym (six authors in the series, but the publisher wanted us all writing under one made-up name) once. They averaged 30,000 words and took about 3-4 months each (some required more research than others). The shorter the format, the more difficult it is for me. Took me two months to write a 10,000 short story, because I kept overwriting and having to cut back. I did knock out a novel from someone else's screenplay in under six months, but that was a little different. I started writing when my kids were infants, so my writing schedule was "whenever they finally go to bed." Nowadays it's "whenever I have the time." Some writers can only work on a set schedule. I actually find that defeating.
Historically, as I understand it, some Young Adult series are created by one or two writers writing under a pseudonym and remain the sole property of that writer or writers, whereas others are the result of a sort of group-mind of several writers, each of whom would only earn royalties from the individual books they wrote. This was my one and only venture into the arena, and it was pretty much of a disaster. The series was called The Young Astronauts. It was conceived by the late columnist Jack Anderson, who hired a writer to develop the concept of a group of teenagers colonizing Mars. Now, never mind that the basic premise was flawed. You can't send growing kids on a six-month zero-gee flight to settle on a planet with less than Earth gravity unless you want to turn them into cripples. Never mind that the "research materials" we were given to work with consisted solely of an article someone had cut out of an issue of Scientific American. There were, IIRC, five or six writers involved, and we maintained a correspondence (some of us sans Internet access) and helped each other with research and continuity. This was meant to be an open-ended series that Anderson, as founder of the Young Astronauts Council, promised he would flak to the YA clubs and at every public appearance he made, and use his celebrity status to guarantee placement in every bookstore chain in the country, as well as at the Smithsonian and various NASA venues. By the time the first mss. were delivered, Mr. Anderson had gotten bored and moved on to other things. The series ended at nine books, with only the first six ever actually reaching publication (I wrote #4 and #6, though we all used the pseudonym "Rick North"), and nary a one of us ever saw a dime beyond the advance. Not that that's unusual, but it's usually the publisher that drops the ball, not some Big Ego who motivates the publisher toward huge outlays of revenue and then says "Fuck you all, I need a nap." That doesn't even begin to tell the story of the poor shlub who ghosted Anderson's novel Millennium...
Not to mention handing over such responsibility to a bunch of teenagers . . . but I guess you write for your audience. Now that's just wrong.
How often do you rewrite your original manuscripts? Do you rewrite the who manuscript or just portions of it?
