The Screenplay: For Non-Screenwriters

Even talesmen who don’t want to write for the movies can use and learn from screenplays

The movies have lured talented writers for many decades. There is a lot of money that can be made, and fame from having your name attached to a movie that is sold with tens of millions of dollars, and celebrity, and glamour, and sex (never underestimate the lure of sex to lonely writers). Many writers show open contempt for Hollywood, producers, directors, and the movie-goer; all the same they work in the industry and cash the checks.

And many a talesman has all the same managed to resist these sirens, and for one cause or another has held fast to his own corner of the talespinning world, and left Hollywood alone.

And yet even such as we who dwell apart could use screenplays, and write them, and learn from them.

For the good in the screenplay form has some meaning for all forms of talespinning, as indeed other forms have meaning for the screenplay. But what I here would point out to you, is that you can tell your tale in screenplay form as a sort of advanced outline or prototype of a first draft.

Where a screenplay bests the draft is in letting us flesh out our heroes, by telling of some scenes in sharp detail, with actions and dialogue, and yet without the need to form and shape our descriptions. The setting is given in briefest form, the actions merely summed up, but the dialogue is fleshed out, and this makes us attend to our cast and their characters, and gives us a better view into their hearts, both why they do what they do, and the style in which they do it.

Now you may answer, that a screenplay is short, and a novel is long, and if you were to make a screenplay draft of your novel, it would run almost as long as the novel itself. This may be true, and the solution is to do what screenwriters have always done when they adapted novels: skip over scenes. In our case, we indicate, with a paragraph or two, the scenes we don’t flesh out in screenplay form; these would then be more ‘outlinish’ if you will, and would be those scenes of long processes where little change of character is demanded, where ‘things go on of their own momentum’ until the next crossroads in the plot.

Childe Rowland

Joseph Jacobs retold the tale of Childe Rowland, a variant of the Tam Lin tale, in his famous collection of English Fairy Tales. I excerpt the start to indicate how the thing can be done. Here Jacobs filled in exposition and backstory with the prose. (I use the version as posted online by Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org version 7eftl10.txt.)

The Start of Childe Rowland as told by Joseph Jacobs

  Childe Rowland and his brothers twain
    Were playing at the ball,
  And there was their sister Burd Ellen
    In the midst, among them all.

  Childe Rowland kicked it with his foot
    And caught it with his knee;
  At last as he plunged among them all
    O’er the church he made it flee.

  Burd Ellen round about the aisle
    To seek the ball is gone,
  But long they waited, and longer still,
    And she came not back again.

  They sought her east, they sought her west,
    They sought her up and down,
  And woe were the hearts of those brethren,
    For she was not to be found.

So at last her eldest brother went to the Warlock Merlin and told him all the case, and asked him if he knew where Burd Ellen was. “The fair Burd Ellen,” said the Warlock Merlin, “must have been carried off by the fairies, because she went round the church ‘wider shins’--the opposite way to the sun. She is now in the Dark Tower of the King of Elfland; it would take the boldest knight in Christendom to bring her back.”

“If it is possible to bring her back,” said her brother, “I’ll do it, or perish in the attempt.”

“Possible it is,” said the Warlock Merlin, “but woe to the man or mother’s son that attempts it, if he is not well taught beforehand what he is to do.”

The eldest brother of Burd Ellen was not to be put off, by any fear of danger, from attempting to get her back, so he begged the Warlock Merlin to tell him what he should do, and what he should not do, in going to seek his sister. And after he had been taught, and had repeated his lesson, he set out for Elfland.

  But long they waited, and longer still,
    With doubt and muckle pain,
  But woe were the hearts of his brethren,
    For he came not back again.

Then the second brother got tired and sick of waiting, and he went to the Warlock Merlin and asked him the same as his brother. So he set out to find Burd Ellen.

  But long they waited, and longer still,
    With muckle doubt and pain,
  And woe were his mother’s and brother’s heart,
    For he came not back again.

And when they had waited and waited a good long time, Childe Rowland, the youngest of Burd Ellen’s brothers, wished to go, and went to his mother, the good queen, to ask her to let him go. But she would not at first, for he was the last of her children she now had, and if he was lost, all would be lost. But he begged, and he begged, till at last the good queen let him go, and gave him his father’s good brand that never struck in vain. And as she girt it round his waist, she said the spell that would give it victory.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 31, 2008)