It isn’t very often that writers get to play with writing in formats they’re not familiar with. As a young writer who has only just started his Creative Writing course, I have the privilege of discovering what it means to write in these new formats. I’m sure when I’m older I’ll miss this sensation.
Having to adapt is not a bad thing. There have been times when I’ve been writing a short story and have wished that I could just skip the descriptive writing and focus entirely on the dialogue; there have been times when I’ve felt the opposite. This isn’t a major problem as I’ll typically just write a dialogue heavy or overly descriptive story, but now I’ll stop to wonder if I shouldn’t simply write a screenplay instead.
I had to write a script for either stage or screen for my latest piece of coursework. Having only written a stage play once and never having seen a screenplay in my life, this prospect was both alarming and exciting. To begin with I decided to write a stage play, as I already have a small bit of experience in it. After writing two pages, however, I quickly discovered that this particular plot – a quick encounter between a beggar and two politicians rather conspicuously named David and George – had no substance. It was only after I’d written two pages of the play that my brain informed me that there was nowhere to go from here. Being eight pages away from a finished piece of coursework, I turned to screen.
The first thing I did was download Celtx. That program is simply benign. As I mentioned earlier, I’d never even read a screenplay, let alone written one, so I had no idea how to lay one out on paper. After grappling with the UI for about half an hour, I’d gotten the hang of Celtx, and from then on the pages went by a little too fast. When I printed it off, it actually looked like a real screenplay. It was fantastic. Hopefully the content was up to par too.
Perhaps this is just my experience, but writing a screenplay allowed me to focus more on characterisation than in a standard piece of prose. I felt like the text automatically focused on the characters and their nuances within conversation more than any short story ever could. It was an interesting experience to play with stage directions and pay close attention to how a character should say something and what their body language would be like when saying it. I focused on an argument between two characters who had met for the first time in four years, so naturally I had a playground of emotions to explore. We had to include a monologue too, which I naturally turned into a hate-fuelled rant. I loved it. It was liberating, in a way. I do worry that I was a little bit of a control freak with all the stage direction, though.
Maybe it’s just been a little too long since I wrote any good characters in a short story.
Anyway, that’s my take on writing in a different format for the first time. I can’t remember my first time writing short stories as I was too young; I believe I started at the age of six. (I would love to go back and read my first few, but sadly, those are forever lost. What does a six year old even write about? I vaguely remember floating islands.) I was barely a teenager when I began my first attempts at poetry, which I blundered my way through for years until I found a foothold in the climb to not being awful. I suppose this is the first real writing format that I’d been taught about before I even began to attempt it. Maybe that’s what started this entire experience.
The next time I write a new format will probably be the first time I truly throw everything I have into writing a novel. I’ve written chaptered stories before, but I hesitate to call them novels. Minimal effort went into them with no thinking ahead. Let’s call them something different. I’m going to go with… abominations.
Perpetually Perturbed 