Friday, January 25, 2013

Sources For Free Screenplays and The Brilliance Of Easy Access

My novel-writing has taken a step back to accommodate my current "literary" fling: screenwriting.

Not only am I taking an online course in that very subject, but I've been perusing the Interwebz for examples and - boy-oh-boy - is that an amazing hunting ground. There are a lot of sites that offer scripts for free: TV Writing and The Internet Movie Script Database being just two of them. 

Having such easy access to my "study material" is very helpful. Writing a screenplay is quite different from literary writing, which I've been doing for many years now, while screenplays are very new to me. They are far more simplistic in style and prose, yet that brings its own challenges and doesn't make them easier to write. The "show don't tell" issue takes on a whole other meaning in screenwriting, since nobody wants to watch a character monologue his way through his emotions. 

But I'm getting off-topic. My point is that having this easy access to all these scripts, to be able to compare them to the finished movie and see how it translated... well, basically it's every student's dream. 

Not to mention: it's fun!

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