by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It is slowly beginning to dawn on me that now that I know how *I* handle a huge creative storytelling project, that it’s easy for me to piviot from developing and writing four thriller novels to working on screenplays.
I don’t intend to stop working on these novels, but I definitely have my eye watching a lot of YouTube videos in the near future so I can figure out how to use Final Draft (even though, according to the way the guys on ScriptNotes talk, that’s now passe.)
The biggest thing I’ve learned about telling a great story is how important development is before you even write a single word. So, once I get to a point with the four novels I’m working on that I feel comfortable shaving off some attention from them, I’m going to begin to do development on a few screenplays to see what I come up with.
Screenplays are different from novels because by definition if it’s on the screen, people are nearly forced to accept it’s real. You don’t have to spend 20 pages explaining why this or that thing happened — you see it on the screen, it exists. As such, I feel like I can engage in more elaborate flights of fancy because I don’t have to spend on this time researching things. Also, with a screenplay I have a very strict number of scenes to work with — NO MORE THAN 120!
I know the general structure of good storytelling to the point now that it is at least possible that writing screenplays — after doing development — will be much, much faster than working on novels. There are certain beats that you have to hit during the course of your 120 scenes and as a trained journalists, I love, love, love tight structure.
It makes things a lot easier, at least in my mind.
You can be as creative as you like, you just have to stay within the established conventional wisdom of structure.
But this is all very speculative. I continue to be very hard at work on four novels. And I idly think about writing some short stories when I need to take a short break from working on the main project. And, yet, I’m so absolutely consumed with these four thrillers that I doubt anything will come of that.
We’ll see, I guess.
