I’ve been looking forward to taking Scriptwriting since first semester of freshman year when I first heard it was offered. It’s a 3000-level cinema class, but the only prerequisite was having a certain number of credits. I didn’t have space for it last spring, so I was ecstatic to sign up for it this semester.
Our class on Tuesday, to my heart’s despair, was cancelled due to snow, so our first class was on Thursday. Our professor explained the syllabus, and that we would have to write a 100 page screenplay by the end of the semester. He looked around and asked if any of us were realizing they hadn’t known what they were getting into. He looked at me specifically, and said I was the one person in the class he hadn’t met–I’ve never taken a cinema class in my life. However, it turns out that he’d worked for a literary/talent agency, and as I’m interning for one currently, we already had something in common.
The English department is allowing me to count the course towards my major, thankfully, as I really think that I’ll learn a lot of skills that will be invaluable to me in a career using my English degree. Already, there have been some themes in common with themes from the fiction writing class I took last fall. It’s fascinating to see how the two overlap. And if the screenplay I write has any elements of political science in it, which it might–government dramas and conspiracy themes can be fun–then I’ll be adding a third element in!
It’ll be writing for a new medium with a different audience to think about. While in novels you can see a lot of what goes on in a character’s head and words, in movies, the visuals are the most important part, and a lot of the time the script really needs to be concise because any redundant words will just waste time.
I need to come up with a proposal for the script I’m going to write in the next week, so I’m wracking my brains like crazy. I have the bad habit of not planning what I write, so this is an excellent opportunity for me to hone my writing in a different manner.
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