by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I really love movies and I can come up with movie concepts really, really easy. I’m of the opinion that if you have a pulse, you can come up with a movie concept. The issue is simply hard work. The internal logic of a movie is such that you can get away with some pretty astonishing things that you could never get away with in a novel for no other reason than you have to, like, uh, explain shit in a novel in a way you simply aren’t required to in a screenplay.
Alas, while I can come up with movie concepts really easily, I don’t have the money to buy Final Draft, so I’m stuck writing novels. Or at least trying to write novels. I have a few solid novel concepts floating around in my mind and it’s just a matter of doing the hard work of developing them to actually get anything done.
I really love the culture of screenwriting from what I can tell about it from the outside and I have the skillset needed to be successful — at least in my own fevered imagination. I love to write, tell stories and socialize. That’s pretty much what you need to have, at least in my opinion, to be a successful screenwriter.
Anyway, I’m getting better at the structure of stories. If I could find someone to be a writing partner with, I would probably be more interested in screenwriting. But no matter what, I have to put in the hard work. That’s the thing about it all — nothing happens without a lot of work.
