Friday Forays In Fiction: Script Frenzy Week 4

As I discussed last week, I pasted the text of another of my short stories into Celtix the script writing application I'm using and am working at converting all the dialog sections into script. Doing dialog in script format is becoming almost as easy as doing it in novel narrative format. So whatever else comes of this experience, I have that.

I'm still struggling with translating all the interior monologue, thoughts and memories of the primary character of these two stories into script without compromising the integrity of the character and of the story.

The second story features many of the same characters of the first and takes place a couple months later. Or rather one time stream of the story does. There is a second time-stream woven in that takes place ten years earlier. In my short story, Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes, there are eleven sections that alternate between the THEN and the NOW. It is even possible to put the odd numbered sections and the even numbered sections into separate piles and read them as two separate short stories.

I have plans to add a THEN stream to the first story, Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities. as well. Not for this month's script project, no. I'm speaking of the novel for which Of Cats is chapter one and Making Rag Doll Babies is chapter three. I decided some time ago that some of the major secondary characters introduced in Making Rag Doll Babies need to be introduced much sooner than approximately one third of the way into the projected novel.

So I developed an idea for having the three main characters, Faye and her twin Julia and sister-in-law Wilma, all high-school teachers, put on a high-school production of Macbeth some twelve or thirteen years preceding the opening of Of Cats. The students playing the roles are the same characters in both time strands of Making Rag Doll Babies--three and thirteen years after the play.

I suppose that is all mind-wiping to read if you don't know the stories. I went to the trouble of trying to describe the situation just so I could make this comment: If I'd already written the second time stream for Of Cats before I started adapting it to screenplay format, what new twists would that give to the task to have a stage play inside a screenplay? My mind is turning itself into a pretzel trying to imagine it.

I think before I would attempt to try that I would have to read the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. Can anyone suggest other screenplays that would give me guidance? On how to do a play inside a play? On how to adapt a novel's essential interior monologue and memory/thoughts?

As I did last week, I'm going to append the links to the snippets of these two stories that I posted previously:

Chapter One: Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities:
~ Part One ~ Part Two ~ Part Three ~ Part Four

Chapter Three: Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes:
~ Part One ~ Part Two ~ Part Three ~Part Four ~ Part Five ~ Part Six
~ Part Seven ~ Part Eight ~ Part Nine ~Part Ten ~ Part Eleven