A professional screenwriter said to me recently, \u201cIf someone reads my script and says, \u2018Man, I really loved the writing,\u2019 I want to punch them in the face.<\/strong><\/font> What I want them to say is, \u2018I really loved your story.\u2019 There\u2019s a big difference.\u201d He explained that the difference is that we\u2019re primarily storytellers \u2013 and not writers. <\/p>\n

Being a storyteller implies that the emotional content of our story transcends the words on the page and is emotionally engaging in a way that watching the film would be. <\/p>\n

Our primary job is to tell a fantastic story that elicits the emotional response defined by our genre.<\/strong><\/font> If we\u2019re writing a thriller, we should have the reader writhing in suspense. If we\u2019re writing a horror, the reader should be terrified. With a comedy the reader should be laughing out loud, and with a drama the reader should be crying. In each case, it is the reader\u2019s emotional investment in our characters and the situations we put them in that compels him to turn the page. <\/p>\n

Writing prose is as much about the crafting of the language itself as it is also about the content. To this end, the written word can be thoughtful and engaging, but it isn\u2019t limited to or confined by the same restrictions of cinema and audience expectations. <\/p>\n

The example of \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d was used, because it\u2019s always difficult to adapt internal monologue into cinematic action. Dostoevsky\u2019s works are another example \u2013 brilliant writings that don\u2019t translate well to the screen. Wherein fiction can be masterful at getting inside a character\u2019s mind, cinema doesn\u2019t offer us that luxury in quite the same way. Cinema can offer us unreliable narrators, but still it is their actions that tell us who they are and construct the journey. If a prose story is very internal and not acted out in the world, it won\u2019t have the same impact in a film that it would have within the mind of a reader. <\/p>\n

So remember in crafting your scripts that what you\u2019re evoking emotionally within the reader is the primary focus. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A professional screenwriter said to me recently, \u201cIf someone reads my script and says, \u2018Man, I really loved the writing,\u2019 I want to punch them in the face. What I want them to say is, \u2018I really loved your story.\u2019 There\u2019s a big difference.\u201d He explained that the difference is that we\u2019re primarily storytellers \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,81,9,7,62,12,10,11,6,50,42,44,1],"tags":[115],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=895"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":898,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions\/898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}