And I begin with something I just discovered that I wish I knew years ago. Think of this as advice to screenwriters who travel a lot.
Here is a way to do your screenwriting no matter where you are and what access you have, as long as you can write a text file somewhere. In your smart phone, on a tablet. It doesn't matter. You don't have to have a format program loaded. Here is a great trick.
Write a text file keeping the horizontal spacing and the cap rules intact. A scene might look like this:
EXT. FIELD - DAY
blah blah description.
MARY
blah blah dialogue
TOM
blah blah dialogue
more description.
INT. HOUSE - ROOM - DAY
and so on ...
Not that the horizontal space rules and the element cap rules for screenplay format are respected. You are just writing your script with everything flush left as a text file.
When you get a chance, import the file into Celtx, the best free program around. You get it at celtx.com
Celtx will format the file perfectly! In other words, you can write your screenplay and automatically get it formatted later in Celtx. Is this liberating or what?
June 14, 2013
Today I begin a bold experiment: recycling screenplay stories. There are probably more invisible stories in abandoned screenplays than anywhere else. It occurred to me about five years ago, watching my students on their smart phones, that the vertical writing style of screenwriting was perfect for the small screen of the phone or tablet. All my screenplay stories could be recast as ... well, as vertical novellas.
I am not talking about a "novelization" here. I'm talking about a new narrative form, the minimalist, vertically written novella. For several years I tried to turn my brighter students on to this idea, which I considered a good one. No takers.
Finally, a few months ago, I decided to tackle it myself. This goes hand in hand with retiring from teaching. I wanted to start now to see if I could get it off the ground before I lose my teaching income and make a little bit back.
I call the project Stories In Overdrive. With "search and replace" engines used with a certain brilliance, if I say so myself, I can eliminate a lot of the grunt work of transforming the screenplay format into a minimalist vertical prose writing style. And today I launched the first in a project seriese of 15 novellas. Yes, I have 15 unattended screenplays with stories I still like.
Curious about this? Check out the website I created: Stories In Overdrive.