Fellows Report on Fellowship
So You Want to Write a Screenplay?
By Nancy Nall Derringer
Nancy Nall Derringer
Mention you’re writing a screenplay to someone with experience in showbiz, and sooner or later she makes some version of this speech: “What a horrible idea. If you want to write fiction, do a novel. As soon as you turn a screenplay in, it’s not yours anymore. Idiots tear it apart, and after a while, it bears no resemblance to what you worked so hard on.”
In other words, it sounds exactly like the newspaper business.
Maybe that’s why so many journalists are drawn to screenwriting—the potential to suffer the same editorial abuse we’re used to, only at a much higher salary.
I signed up for Terry Lawson’s Screenwriting 310 on something of a lark; my friend Ron French, ’03, had taken the class and encouraged me to do the same, so we could someday do a project together, one we’d been discussing for a while. (There’s a man, an execution, and a media circus. Discretion prohibits me from saying more.) Lawson spent much of the first class channeling the “Amityville Horror” house (Get OUT!), telling us this would be the “most challenging class we’d ever take at the University of Michigan.” I thought it was just show, to drive out the dilettante undergrads. A screenplay is, what, 100 pages? Most of it white space? How hard could it be?
Plenty hard, it turns out.
Like lots of things that look easy but aren’t, screenwriting has its own immutable grammar, a set of rules that at first seem enormously restrictive. There must be three acts, a key decision made between pages 20 and 30, building to a climax around page 80, raising the stakes to dizzying heights, after which you have about another 20 pages to wrap everything up. That white space is not your friend; it requires you to keep things as lean as an actress on Oscar night. You must fall out of love with your own prose, your fancy vocabulary—it sounds stupid coming out of the mouths of your characters, who must talk the way regular people do. And you must remember, always, that the best stories come from great characters.
Hmm. Stories about people, no wasted words, and the quotes have to be right. This does sound familiar, doesn’t it?
There were many days when I felt like Barton Fink, staring at his false start, unable to go further. Lawson, whip in hand, was no respecter of anything so wussy as writer’s block. We turned in pages weekly, with a rigidly enforced completion deadline at term’s end. And so, little by little and with a few 20-page spurts, my own story, about Amish teenagers in a coming-of-age crisis, took form on the armature of screenplay structure. I could scarcely believe it and was delighted when Lawson, in his comments, said it was “very sellable.”
That lasted only a few days, until I read a story about a new reality TV series planned for this summer on UPN—“Amish in the City,” a ghastly-sounding take on my very own topic, which leads me to believe that while my idea may well have been sellable, someone else sold it first.
I hope, after all this, I’ve earned the right to say: That’s showbiz.
—Nancy Nall Derringer is a columnist and reporter for The News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Ind.).
Photo by Vince Patton
