Journal, Diary, & Blogging / Baby Steps! Week Three in Scriptwriting

This is really more like week six or seven. I'm such a bad blogger! I blame homework. Mostly art assignments that involve technical drawings of the anatomy of the human body. Very time consuming.

Anyway, I've done some things only kind of related to screenwriting and more related to other kinds of writing over the last few weeks, so I have some other things to write about this time around that.

First up: Heroes! Season four started earlier this month and I am super excited. As I had said previously I was writing a mock script for Heroes as practice, but I never finished it. However, I'm very much tempted to write a whole script now that I'm watching the show again for one very coincidental reason. My script started out with Sylar-turned-Nathan standing in his office, doing up his tie, and hearing Sylar speak. He spins around to face himself in a mirror and doesn't recognize himself. After that it goes back to Claire and Noah Benett making valiant attempts at reconstructing their lives. It wasn't anything terribly specific, but it was the beginnings of an idea meant to take place between the end of Season 3 and the beginning of Season 4.

Lo and behold, Season 4 starts and it opens with Claire and Noah Benett making valiant attempts to reconstruct their lives (a logical next step, after the events of Season 3) and then switches to Sylar-turned-Nathan, who later in the episode sits at his desk and reaches for a coffee cup. When the cup slides across his desk to meet his hand, Nathan panics and flees to his mirror where he pushes at his face as if he doesn't recognize his reflection. It wasn't exactly the same, but it was was creepy to me. I was sitting there, watching, and thought to myself, “Wow, this looks familiar...” I wonder why. My mother tells me that it means I have good instinct as to the flow of the storyline, but this is my mother we're talking about. She's apt to say nice things. Anyway, I think I'll try this whole Heroes thing again when I get more time.

Second of all: Man In The High Castle. A book written by Philip K Dick about what the world would be like if the Nazis and the Japanese had won WWII. Interesting concept, weird to read, and a little bit of a let down as to the ending. This was a class assignment for my Science Fiction as Literature course and after reading the book the question was presented to us “Would this make a good movie?”

Personally, I thought it would be hard to make as a movie. The characters function in small batches, never physically meeting one another, making for a series of subplots to follow rather than one main plot. As well as being highly separate, these batches of characters aren't even on the same time-line! Although written in such a way that the book tricks you into thinking that all of the events happen in a linear fashion, one character's time-line runs for approximately 25 days, another set of characters' runs for 21, and the final character, the one who, somehow, brings the storyline to an end, her time-line only runs for a grand total of 4 days. I think that would be hard to portray properly in a movie. Then again, it may just be beyond my skill level.

Since I'm still on the subject of screenwriting, I'd like to recommend a book to everyone who is trying to learn. Titled The Complete Book of Scriptwriting by J. Michael Straczynski and published in1996, its a little out of date, but its still very, very helpful. The author worked in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s on shows like Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5. He's very witty and his writing is very to the point and he doesn't sugarcoat anything. It makes for an easy, informative, and fun read. He teaches everything from formatting for every type of scriptwriting out there to how to find an agent and even what to do once you've found one and you've found a way into the industry. He covers everything! I very much recommend this book.

And last, but not least, even though I've been swamped by school work, I've taken back to good old prose. Raven Rising is about a set of characters I've been building since I was eleven years old (I'll be turning twenty here in a few days) and I'm finally letting them loose to run rampant in a world of their own. I'm really excited about this piece and the prelude to Raven Rising turned out fantastically, despite some cliche lines and some fantastic typos. So shameless plug here, if you're into fantasy, go read Raven Rising! I'm working on Chapter 1 right now, so I need all the reviews I can get!

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