Following the Script

Source: pixabay

This Sunday, I decided that I needed to do something more active, more engaging, more creative than what I'd been doing in previous weeks. I needed to create something. So, I decided that I was going to write all day.

Of course, I'd already written all day at many points in my life. Research papers, application essays, you name it, I procrastinated and then crammed the writing. So I needed to do something different this past Sunday. Something more creative. I'm not amazing at creative writing, but hey, this is stuff that probably under 20 people will see, so might as well throw care into the wind.

I decided to write a screenplay.

That's right. I'm one of those assholes who thinks they can write a screenplay.

It's nowhere near done, of course. A day isn't enough time for something like this. But it might be finished, someday. Maybe I'll even post it on this blog, as an addendum to a future post.

This is actually something I've been thinking about doing for a while now. Not so much because I have any aspirations to be a screenwriter, but just to see what tackling a large, creative project like this entails. It turns out, it's really freaking hard.

Getting ideas was the easy part. I've been jotting down ideas for movies on paper scraps, post-it notes, and Google Docs for years now; I just had to choose one. I settled on a time travel story, a la Primer or Time Lapse. The initial idea hinged on a group of people who go back in time to steal items from the present that would end up being rare and valuable in the future. It was a little half-baked, and I ended up making a lot of changes to the initial idea, but it gave me something to start with.

Then I needed some characters. Luckily, I already had these, as well; I had come up with them when I first wrote the idea down. There are three main characters: two are a rather unhappy husband and wife, and the other is their roommate (money's rather tight in the future).

The husband and wife are both researchers, and they used to live a comfortable life, but a massive recession (again, the future) took their livelihood away, and they had to turn to the world of crime to make ends meet. The husband despises this decision, refusing to acknowledge his wife's work, but has no qualms about using this ill-gotten money to purchase new scientific equipment. He's pretty shitty. His wife is much more practical, and she is at the end of her rope with his behavior. Both of them are vying for influence over their younger roommate, who they view as almost a child of theirs, but he/she (I haven't decided on the gender here yet) wants nothing to do with either of them.

Of course, this is all before they discover time travel. After they discover time travel, the plot starts. I won't share the plot yet; it's not entirely finalized yet, and my blog has a very strict spoiler policy.

And then I had to start writing the thing. This part went quite a bit more smoothly than I expected; I actually ended up cranking out a good 10 pages of screenplay (note: this is not equal to a 10-page essay). Of course, I started with the easier scenes, those which I had already thought through. If I continue this, I suspect that it will get far, far harder as I go on.

So do I recommend writing a screenplay? Yeah. Go for it. Unless you've actually studied film extensively, it probably won't be good; it'll be poorly paced and full of cliches. But it's also pretty fun, and it can be a nice break from the more formal writing that we do in class.