Writing Teenage Bodyguard - A Screenplay

The Writing Process - After the Third Draft and about Adaptations - Part 12

I’ve pushed hard to get three drafts completed in about two weeks. I was planning on sending it off now. But odd as this sounds, it’s gone so well I thought I’d do another draft and THEN send it off.

I’ve also done some marketing things on Facebook and MovieBytes.com (currently 110 views and 5 clicking to look further at the synopsis views) that has been useful in finding a tagline, a logline, a very synopsis (short summary), and a marketing angle. I’ve changed all that several times on MovieBytes this past week and when I looked at it last night it looked like a five year old had written it up. I’m not sure if I was tired or what but I redid it immediately and it is much better now.  Then I put it on the Facebook page as a milestone.

Oh, and I guess it helps in that I’m working so much on MovieBytes on updating this screenplay. Because every time you update it, it bumps it up to the top. See, when you go to MovieBytes, there is a column on the right that lists all the screenplays posted who have just been put up, or updated. So Slipping The Enterprise (and I decided that the “T” in The needs to be capitalized because it’s “The Enterprise” and not the “Enterprise”), keeps showing up at the top lately and more people see it. 

Currently my editor who is thinking she’d now like to learn screenwriting is reading it and I’m taking time off to let my brain relax. She helped me with some of the obvious editing on a couple of previous screenplays. But I’m thinking now she could actually write her own.

Read a couple of (good) books on screenwriting, read many screenplays, and start writing one, is a pretty good start. Obviously, classes, seminars, videos, etc., are all good as a base or adjunct to your efforts. But I’ve heard of people buying one book, writing a screenplay and selling it.

Damn.

As my editor’s husband is a novelist and a very good one at that, I had considered adapting his novels myself.

But I never wanted to adaptations for anyone. It was a valuable experience that led to some great connections and furthered me in my efforts in many ways. When I was asked a few years ago to do that, I accepted, even though I don’t really do romance stuff. I had decided when I started writing again back in 2010 to accept anything that would further my writing career by connections

etworking, learning, honing my skillset and of course, in producing more and varied things.

I did two, both romance oriented, one a paranormal (Dark of kNight) which led to a spy adaptation (Sealed in Lies). After that last one I thought okay, I’ve done it, no more. When you add in thinking of adapting a friend’s novels, maybe not such a good idea, when you really don’t want to do it anymore anyway. What risk the possible downside?

Adaptations in my view are a good way to learn screenwriting, and perhaps his wife might enjoy doing that and I suspect, might be very good at it. The structure of the story is set. All you do in adapting is extract and format. I usually have asked the novelist for their outline, then read the book, then read it again and followed the outline picking out the major points and using those. You get a feel for what to leave out and what to put in that wasn’t going to be, in order to flesh it out in a new format.

Transliteration is an interesting animal.

As for writing in the screenplay format, it’s a hard thing to refine. Its prose but not. It’s technical, but not. And the reverse, in a way. Especially when you talk about spec screenplays. I believe it’s probably pretty common for screenplays readers to get a spec script writing as a shooting script since that is what most people get their hands on, and books are written on. Like if you buy a book that is a screenplay of a well-known film, it’s typically not the spec script.

Anyway, she read draft three last night and we’re supposed to chat today.

I still have the last few pages that really need to be cleaned up, maybe some moved into the earlier part but really it seems more effective at the end. Currently it is over voice narration and there is a lot of SUPER: on screen print for exposition as you tend to see in docudramas indicating jail terms or where the characters ended up after the story is over. Which, is why I’d like one more draft before sending off.

We’re getting there….