The life of a screen writer involves a lot of staring at a blank page on Celtx or Final Draft, coming up with silly things for characters that I have conceivably come up, to say. Now that is not the only thing, but the fact remains that the actual idea of writing a full screenplay is so very daunting because of flow and how the story should unfold that it becomes a tough balancing act of, inspired writing and staring at your keyboard attempting to remember the definition of “what.”
It’s not all bad though, even though the thought of never really breaking into an industry where the best writers and directors are honored for their works on a yearly basis, can seem disheartening, that’s not why we do it anymore. Because if it was, we’d have a significant chunk of our society just giving up on themselves, and becoming, lawyers and doctors and novelists, and that just seems like a sad world to live in. We write screenplays, because they are stories we want to tell, and the way we see fit to tell them are with actions and words that anyone reading can see instead of interpret.
Like most novels our works have to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. What makes screenplays so different isn’t that they have less room to elaborate on backstory (though in some cases they don’t) but that there is a time constraint consistently attached to whatever we choose to write, that the words on the page are not just there to add to the pile of ideas, but rather to progress something forward, to see a story unfold over a specific period of time.
So I suppose we are glorified novelists, but hey, the stories are fun to write and sometimes we’re really good at telling stories that way, there’s a reason people like Alexander Payne and Jim Rash are nominated for The Descendants, because it human and well thought out, it doesn’t happen as often as we’d like to think. For people like them we have the Winter Film Awards, being held from the 9th-12th of February.
Contributing Writer, Faisal Qureshi
