I recently finished the screenplay adaptation for my novel Big Easy. Even though I removed several subplots, I still ended up with one-hundred-sixty pages - forty pages too many.
I called my business and writing partner, r.r. bryan and asked him what I should do. My friend just finished adapting his novel, All the Angels and Saints, for the movies and he knows much more than I do about the intricacies of screenwriting.
“Just cut every fourth page,” he advised.
He was just joking and after he quit laughing, he promised to look at my script and see if he could find a way to fix it. Humbled, I realized that penning a novel doesn’t qualify you as a screenwriter. It also made me realize why so many movies are so very different from the book that originally spawned the story.
It’s a cold night in central Oklahoma so I think I’ll go to bed early. Maybe the solution to my writing problem will come to me in a dream.
Fiction South
Monday, October 12, 2009
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