Friday Forays In Fiction: Script Frenzy Wrap-up

I was so wrapped up in that crochet project yesterday I forgot to prepare my script for submission to the word-count verifier. Not that I was close to a win or anything but I did want to get an 'official' count. My rough estimate of my page count is 30-40 pages of sceenplay format. The Celtix script program I'm using says it is 64 but I know that over half of that is still untransformed from the plain text that I pasted in straight from the two short stories.

The Celtix ap allows me to highlight a paragraph and then select from a menu of formats: Action, Character, Dialog, Paranthetical, Slugline etc. After I got flummoxed by the sections of my short story that were thoughts and memories in Faye's head, I started picking through the stories for the dialog sections and transforming them to script. It is ninety percent mouse work. A page of dialog from the short story becomes approximately two pages in script. I've completed the dialog for the first story and about a sixth of the dialog from the second story. So I'm fairly sure that the two stories together would have easily made a 100 page script--the quota to win Script Frenzy.

But then there are whole paragraphs of the narrative from the stories that probably need to be cut. I left them in the script because of their info content--info that is important to plot, motive or theme that I need to figure out how to get into the script in proper format. I have to keep reminding myself that a script is not a story but instructions for how to tell a story in sound and image.

Overall I'm pleased with what I accomplished in this my first Script Frenzy. I may not have reached the quota of 100 pages but I reached my main goal which was to begin to learn the script format and get a feel for how scripts differ from narrative fiction.

Will I participate again next year?

Maybe. I still want to learn both TV series and stage play formats. So it might be worth it for that purpose. But I would have to find an alternative to Celtix for that as it is only for screenplays.

That question and answer was off the cuff and I learned as I typed them that my heart isn't really in it. The script format is not where my passion lies. But I'm willing to consider that is mostly because I'm still fumbling around in it and if I were to get fluent as it were, I might feel differently. Right now working with script format turns the editor in me on red alert and she then bullies my muse into a wimpering wolf chewing on its own leg.