First off, I sort of started my screenplay as a novel but decided to try it as a movie format instead. But in the novel it's of course easy to have the reader see (and read) a journal entry that pretty much is the main thing that really Makes this story. I have no clue how I'm to do this in a screenplay format without getting boring quickly~as I have the beginning character finding this journal and reading it's contents of the feelings of the girl that is to turn into the narrator. I do hope this makes sense, if you need me to put it a different way I can try.
Another thing I'm having trouble with is I try to over-complicate things and I know you don't have to write much in a screenplay other than what the person will be seeing. My question is, how much am I suppose to leave up to the directors? Cause I don't feel myself to have very good judgement in that personally.
Any help would be highly appreciated,
*~Luna
The best advice I could give you, I think, would be to take a deep breath and take a step back, because right now you seem stuck in some odd middle ground between writing something original -- a screenplay -- and adapting something that was never really completed -- your novel.
What you really need to do is to go back to something more basic and that's the underlying story -- the underlying events that you intend to embody in whatever medium -- novel, play, motion picture, opera -- whatever, that you choose to express it in.
But what you're doing is taking a weird detour -- going from the fundamental source -- the initial story form -- to the form of an uncompleted novel and from there to a screenplay.
What you need to do is go back to that initial form, which doesn't involve any particular "manner of telling" -- not people writing in journals, not people singing arias, or doing an opening dance number or a montage sequence.
If you were writing a novel based on a movie you wouldn't start it off with on opening montage, or by writing down the lyrics to a song, if the movie was a musical.
You'd cut yourself off, completely, from that medium's "manner of telling the story" and go back to basics.
What is the *story* -- what happens? Not how is the information being conveyed by somebody to somebody else. That is the structure that relates to a particular medium -- in this case the medium of the novel.
Well, if I was writing an opera, somebody would be singing that stuff to somebody else -- but I wouldn't be putting that in a movie either.
Don't clutter yourself up with thinking about how to "save" stuff that works great in one form when you move into another.
Just go back to first things. Just start with your initial premise. Throw everything else out. Then ask yourself. How do I make a movie based on this premise. What are actions, who are the characters? What do they do? Where do they go? Some things may be similar. Many things may be completely different. And they ought to be different because though you are developing the same premise, you are doing it in a completely different medium -- as different from the novel as theatre or opera is.
Don't ever even look at the novel again.
Just write the movie based on that premise.
NMS
