{"id":2599,"date":"2020-03-06T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T14:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?p=2599"},"modified":"2021-09-03T11:47:39","modified_gmt":"2021-09-03T15:47:39","slug":"screenwriting-versus-novel-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/screenwriting-versus-novel-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Screenwriting Versus Novel-Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"610\" height=\"324\" src=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/screenwriter.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2600\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/screenwriter.png 610w, http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/screenwriter-300x159.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px\" \/><figcaption>Don&#8217;t we all wanna be this asshole? Look how in the zone he is!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Throughout my blog posts, I often use examples from novels, TV shows, and movies. Some of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/writing-advice-good-books-to-read-if-you-wanna-be-a-better-writer\/\">resources<\/a> I cite for aspiring authors are actually screenwriting guides. Yet this website is supposed to be offering advice on writing <em>books,<\/em> not screenplays or teleplays. So why do I use non-book examples? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>A\ncouple reasons: 1) readers are more likely to be familiar with a TV show or\nmovie than a book, mostly due to volume and pop culture saturation\u2014there are a\nlot fewer TV shows and movies than books (a total of thousands vs millions),\nand TV shows and movies are easier to consume than a book, hence more people\nshare a common understanding of something they\u2019ve seen over something they\u2019ve\nread; 2) TV shows, movies, and books are very similar with their story beats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However,\na screenplay and a novel are <em>not <\/em>the\nsame. Something that works on the page will not always work on the screen, and\nvice versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So\nwhat\u2019s the difference between screenwriting and novel-writing, and why is it\nimportant? Let me lay it out for you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><em>Similarities:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Basics\nof storytelling (narrative structure, plot points, meaningful choices, etc.)<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The\nstorytelling basics I describe throughout this blog have been around for\nliterally thousands of years, or ever since the first cavemen told the first\nstories. How those stories are told, and what the focus of those stories are,\nchanges over time, though. Ancient stories focused a lot on morality tales and\ncreation myths, for instance, while modern stories focus more on a\nprotagonist\u2019s internal journey\u2026by that I mean the <em>need<\/em> is a fairly new concept, though when I say \u201cnew\u201d I mean at\nleast since Shakespearian times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As far as the history of storytelling medium goes, it all began with cave drawings. Cave drawings moved aside for oral storytelling, oral storytelling was replaced by stage plays, universal literacy and the printing press enable the novel to supersede plays, then movies came along, then TV, then video games\/interactive entertainment, then the internet and streaming content, and now here we are. I suppose one day soon we&#8217;ll have stories directly beamed into our brains, and that&#8217;ll be a whole new thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\ndon\u2019t have a degree in literature or English, so I can\u2019t go super-deep into literary\ntheory and all that jazz (everything I know is info I\u2019ve absorbed from\nself-study; I actually have a master\u2019s degree in aerospace engineering, for\nwhat it\u2019s worth). But I can say a story is a story no matter what medium it\u2019s\ntold in. Though new novels are cranked out all the time, for better or worse it\u2019s\nthe screenplay medium of storytelling most people are familiar with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Character\narcs<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>A character <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?p=2149\">goes through something<\/a> in pursuit of what they want, and either they change or don\u2019t change along the way. Characters who don\u2019t change are frankly pretty boring, so in those cases the people or the world changes around them. Like storytelling basics, character arcs are universal across mediums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Dialogue\nefficiency<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>You\u2019ve\nprobably been lectured at some point about the importance of making your\ndialogue realistic. But here\u2019s the thing\u2014realistic dialogue is terrible. If\nyou\u2019ve ever read a transcript of a conversation, you\u2019ll see it\u2019s packed with\nfillers like \u201cum\u2019s\u201d and \u201chuh\u2019s,\u201d it\u2019s repetitive, it\u2019s grammatically incorrect,\nit\u2019s stilted, people often talk over each other, and it\u2019s filled with pointless\nchitchat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If\nyou don\u2019t believe me, try this: find a video of a police interrogation on\nYouTube (there are tons, just search for \u201ctrue crime\u201d), and write down\neverything everyone says, word-for-word. Then read it back to yourself. It\u2019ll\nbe painful. Then pull up a movie or TV show with a police interrogation, ala <em>The Usual Suspects <\/em>or <em>Blue Bloods <\/em>or whatever. Notice the\ndifference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What\nthey really mean is your dialogue needs to be <em>believable. <\/em>Something that\u2019s <em>believable\n<\/em>is not necessarily <em>realistic, <\/em>and\nvice versa. Good dialogue conveys the <em>essence<\/em>\nof speech; specifically, it cuts out the useless stuff and goes straight to the\nmeat, or the purpose of the dialogue. This is why (in good manuscripts)\ncharacters never talk about the weather if it\u2019s not important to the plot or\ncharacterization, even though in real life people talk about the weather all\nthe time. Not coincidentally, this is also why bathrooms are exciting places in\nfiction. In real life, people spend a lot of time in the bathroom, but it\u2019s\nusually pretty boring. In fiction, if someone\u2019s going to the bathroom, it means\nsome shit\u2019s about to go down in there (pun intended!). This is true of both\nnovels and screenplays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\nshould probably write a whole post on just dialogue, since this is often\nsomething a lot of writers get stuck on\u2026I\u2019ll add it to my TBW pile (\u201cto be\nwritten\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Themes\n&amp; subtext<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Another\nsubgroup of storytelling basics, themes and subtext refers to what\u2019s going on\nwhen you read between the lines, or what people mean even if they don\u2019t say it.\nNailing the subtext of a story and rolling it into the theme is what elevates a\nstory from good to great, or great to classic. Both novels and screenplays have\nthemes and subtext, and both use it in the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Scene\nstructure<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>In an earlier blog post, I went into excruciating detail about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/9-steps-to-constructing-a-good-scene-or-chapter\/\">how to write a scene<\/a>. The process is the same for all fiction, whether written or filmed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Genre\ntropes are generally the same<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I wrote extensively about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/all-about-genres-and-which-is-right-for-you\/\">genre tropes<\/a> in an earlier blog post, too. They\u2019re generally the same for both movies and novels. Case in point\u2014when the hero of the new Star Wars movies was revealed to be a woman, a small but vocal cadre of science fiction fans lost their shit\u2014<em>a male hero is the default, goddammit! <\/em>A plucky female <em>sidekick<\/em> (Leia) was copacetic; a female <em>lead<\/em> was beyond the pale. To a lot of people (i.e. assholes), that\u2019s a universal trope that Star Wars violated. Sexism and misogyny crosses all cultural mediums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are some exceptions, however. Romance novel tropes don\u2019t always cross over well into movies and TV due to the fact <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/why-popular-romance-novels-arent-made-into-movies\/\">many romances aren\u2019t coherent stories<\/a>; ditto for literary fiction. This is why many big-screen adaptions of popular literary novels like <em>The Goldfinch<\/em> and <em>Where\u2019d You Go, Bernadette<\/em> end up bombing at the box office. Stuff that works on the page won\u2019t work on the screen if there\u2019s a trope mismatch.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><em>Differences:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Books\nrely on the written word medium; screenplays must be translated into the video\n&amp; audio medium<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Books\nare composed of words that one must read (with some exceptions that usually\nstill include words to read, like graphic novels and children\u2019s books). This means\nthe reader is expected to use their imagination to fill in the details of the\nworld, for better or worse. If I write that a character walks into their living\nroom and finds a pig on the couch, every reader will imagine a different pig, a\ndifferent couch, a different living room, etc. Sometimes this ambiguity is what\nthe writer is going for; sometimes it\u2019s not. But it\u2019s always there when you\ndescribe an image with words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Words\nalso let a reader get deep into a character\u2019s head; you know what they\u2019re\nthinking and feeling even if they don\u2019t say or do anything. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Novels\ncan also flesh out details about people, places, and motivations that would be\ndifficult or impossible to dramatize in a movie or TV show. My favorite example\nis when Humbert Humbert, the anti-hero of <em>Lolita,\n<\/em>describes his mother\u2019s death with the simple phrase, \u201cPicnic, lightning.\u201d\nIn the context of the book, the description has a <em>ton<\/em> of subtext, but you don\u2019t get any of that in the movie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Words\ncan also describe events or images that might be impossible to create on a\nscreen, though that\u2019s becoming less and less the case with CGI tech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Screenplays,\non the other hand, start out as words on a page and then become exclusively\nimages and sounds on a screen. In a movie, if a character walks into their\nliving room and sees a pig on a couch, you know exactly what everything looks\nlike. There\u2019s no ambiguity about the details. However, the reality might not be\nas good as someone\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The\nlook a character gives another can speak volumes in a fraction of a second\nabout their thoughts and feelings, which might take pages to describe in a\nbook. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. But the tradeoff is you\ndon\u2019t know what anyone is thinking or feeling unless they show it somehow\u2014if it\ndoesn\u2019t happen on the screen, it doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Books can meander &amp; experiment;\nscreenplays must be tight<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>So\nI go on and on about the \u201crules\u201d of writing, but the truth is this: in a novel\nyou can break the rules at any time if you know what you\u2019re doing\u2026and even if\nyou don\u2019t. Hell, your novel doesn\u2019t even need to tell a coherent story\u2014most literary\nfiction doesn\u2019t! You can get away with writing a one-paragraph chapter, or even\na one-sentence chapter, if you can somehow justify it. Your book can be as\nshort or as long as you like, though there is a standard range which is still\npretty wide (60K \u2013 90K words or so). Books are cheap and plentiful, so\npublishers can afford to take chances. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also,\nsince books tell much longer stories and go into greater detail than a movie\n(though TV tells long stories, too), readers are fairly forgiving of a book\u2019s\nflaws\u2026depending on the flaw, but this is generally true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Movies and TV shows, on the other hand, have <em>very<\/em> tight standards. Movies are two hours long and TV shows are 30 minutes <em>or<\/em> one hour long, give or take a few minutes. Screenplay formatting is standardized and never changes (with some very rare exceptions &#8211; <em>Mad Max: Fury Road<\/em> is one). Movies and TV shows are also extremely expensive and labor intensive, so making just one\u2014especially a movie\u2014is a major endeavor. As such, producers are a lot less willing to take risks on screenplays that deviate in any way from the norm\u2026with the exception of an artsy-fartsy passion project from a well-known director, ala a Terrence Malick joint. This is why studios only buy a fraction of available screenplays, and of those only a fraction get produced. As such, screenplays must tell a full, coherent story in the time given, with few to no (obvious) flaws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The\nfact Hollywood <em>still<\/em> cranks out shitty movies tells you how hard this is\u2014those\nshitty movies came from the best of the best screenplays!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Both literary &amp; Hollywood\nworlds have gatekeepers, but Hollywood is ~1,000 times worse<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019ll\nbe brutally honest here\u2014there\u2019s something a little bit ridiculous about people\noffering their services to help others write screenplays. If you\u2019re a Joe Schmo\nwho wants to try your hand at writing and selling a screenplay, and you don\u2019t\nhave any connections to Hollywood, you will get nowhere, period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Having connections in the literary world will help you immensely if you want to traditionally publish a novel, but it\u2019s not mandatory. You can still find an agent via cold-querying, and that agent will find you a publisher to buy and publish your book. It\u2019s still <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/5-reasons-why-you-probably-shouldnt-query-literary-agents-and-what-you-should-do-instead\/\">super hard<\/a>, but not impossible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Selling\na screenplay via cold-querying (i.e. a spec-script), on the other hand, is\nnearly impossible. Hollywood is <em>very <\/em>incestuous\u2014everybody is somebody\u2019s\ngood friend or daughter or son or cousin or wife or mistress or whatever. If\nyou\u2019re not in the circle, no one\u2019s going to look at your screenplay no matter\nhow good it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if you\u2019re trying to break into Hollywood by writing a killer script for a movie or a TV show you <em>just know<\/em> will be a hit\u2026it\u2019s not going to happen, sorry. Go to film school, join the Writers Guild of America, make some connections, then write that screenplay. Otherwise you\u2019re wasting your time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>What\u2019s hot and what\u2019s not is\ndifferent for books, TV, &amp; movies\u2014though one can influence the other,\nusually books -&gt; TV\/movies<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Superheroes are hot right now\u2026at the movies. They\u2019re dead on the page. Domestic thrillers are also hot right now\u2026on the bookshelves. A few have had a decent run on the screen\u2014mainly on TV, and mainly as adaptions of bestselling novels\u2014but they\u2019re lukewarm at best off the page (&#8230;though the recent success of <em>Knives Out<\/em> might be the start of a trend). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>People who enjoy reading and people who enjoy movies and TV shows don\u2019t completely overlap, so what\u2019s hot and what\u2019s not differs for those two demographics. In my previous post about genres, I list the hot and dead literary genres. It\u2019s easy enough to turn on the television or scroll through Netflix to see what genres are hot and cold for screenplays. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A massively bestselling book will almost certainly become a movie no matter the genre, but don\u2019t mistake that for a hot movie or TV trend. <em>50 Shades of Grey<\/em> might\u2019ve done gangbusters at the box office, but erotic romantic thrillers are definitely not in vogue in Hollywood. Vice versa for superhero stories outside the Marvel\/DC universe. You get the picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The moral of the story is this: movies and TV shows can teach you a lot about the basics of storytelling, especially character development and narrative structure. However, you still need to read books if you wanna write an actual book. Watching a bunch of movies is not an adequate substitute. If it were, everybody would be writing bestsellers right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Throughout my blog posts, I often use examples from novels, TV shows, and movies. Some of the resources I cite for aspiring authors are actually screenwriting guides. Yet this website is supposed to be offering advice on writing books, not screenplays or teleplays. So why do I use non-book examples?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[494,526],"tags":[619,621,622,620,630,626,628,629,627,618,617,624,623],"class_list":["post-2599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-resources","tag-basics-of-storytelling","tag-bathrooms-are-exciting-places-in-fiction","tag-dialogue-efficiency","tag-history-of-storytelling","tag-literary-and-hollywood-gatekeepers","tag-literary-novel-movie-adaptions","tag-novel-vs-screenplay-medium","tag-pig-on-a-couch","tag-romance-novel-movie-adaptions","tag-script-vs-novel-differences","tag-script-vs-novel-similarities","tag-the-goldfinch","tag-themes-and-subtext"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Vyi8-FV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2599"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2979,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599\/revisions\/2979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}