A.R. Van Halleorg

What do I do on my vacation?

Not a whole lot, to be honest. Right now I’m battling Big Fish Games to be able to even type this post. This game is bloody heavy to download for some reason.

So far, during the first half of my vacation, I’ve done some writing. Didn’t have the cash to get FinalDraft, so I’m using CeltX and glaring at it a lot. It’s pretty cool either way. I just wish I could get it to stop taking the character/dialog in one spot and making it 1 characters name…it’s really weird. And how do we fake the margins on purpose to save a line!?

I’ve got a little further in my reading materials. The last one I read, Your Screenplay SUCKS!: 100 Ways to Make it Great, mentioned that only a beginner would be reading the books…that’s a little bit lame to say. I’ve been writing scripts for ages, some things have changed, while others haven’t. So, for being politically correct, it’s for beginners and anyone wanting to brush up on their rusty unused scriptwriting skills.

Next up on my pile of books to read: Writing the TV Drama Series and Crafty Screenwriting (thank you Alex Epstein for referencing it 1,000 times in Crafty TV Writing so I had NO CHOICE to buy it. Pfft.)

I’ve learned how to play poker in the last 2 days. Now I’m on Full Tilt Poker and rocking it hardcore! Beginner’s luck, no doubt. Did a tournament earlier today, 501^th position out of 10,000 registered players.

All in all, my vacation has been nice and quiet. I’ll post more later, this was just a random update, cause I’m really bored at the moment. Next up…fixing the lag of these keystrokes.

Have a great day!

I’ve been reading this excellent book, written by Alex Epstein, called Crafty TV Writing : Thinking Inside the Box. It’s a really fantastic book for screen-writing, and I’m sure most of you who do screen-writing probably already know of it, but on the off-chance that you don’t. You need to get it. I’ve never looked at television like I do now. I keep going back on all the shows I’ve watched, searching for the patterns described, the templates, the consistency in successful shows. The way they pull the stories through the acts and come up with that final scene. The way they frustrate the hell out of you, but you can’t help going back. I wonder if we’re gluttons for punishment or just overly curious.

Perhaps both.

One part of the book makes mention of a beatsheet.

“A beat is the smallest unit of storytelling. It is a piece of the story in which something happens.”

So basically, it’s beats of pauses, not like a rhythm or anything.

Rambling…anyways…so I thought I’d give it a go. I have this habit of wanting to obtain perfection on a first attempt, and like I’ve discovered, while reading this book, it’s just not obtainable on the first try unless you’re someone uber and even then most of the time isn’t the FIRST draft, only the official first draft. Rewrites are the way!

So keeping that in mind, I embarked on the mass short-cut scene writing, so that I would have something to work with and fine-tune.

And it’s working. I’ve never had a screenplay flow so easily on to the paper. Knowing that quite a few of these will probably be written out and others will be further pushed into additional scenes, doesn’t feel like such a daunting situation anymore.

Instead I look forward to seeing where the characters are taking me, which characters have decided that they want to be core cast and which want to be regulars, and others…that are just for fluff and character. It’s interesting.

What am I learning from this beatsheet? You quickly see how fast/slow the scenes are in your Episode. I’m also noticing the places where I used to add fluff and why it’s not important to have them in the Episode at all. What I thought was important, ended up being explained away in another scene without even needing to outright explain it to the viewers and that’s something I never had visible before.

It’s like it gives you a fresh perspective on the true timeline and a clear goal. My next challenge, will probably be finding the scenes that separate the acts in an interesting way so that viewers stay hooked through the commercial and don’t change the channel.

This is quite a liberating experience for me right now. I’ve been writing amateurish scripts since I was 11, so 14 years now and only now am I truly trying to work on a technique and come up with something to present to the world. If this works out really well, maybe I’ll attempt a spec script! *crosses fingers in hope*

That would be cool.

Have a good day!

Where’s an Epic Fail badge when you need it? No really, I failed at NaNoWriMo this year. It was my first year trying and I’m used to writing in my own timelines. I generally tend to veer off course and end up somewhere in the middle of a quiet field standing on the edge of a desert wondering how I got this far off track.

I made a fatal error approximately halfway through the month of November when I introduced a character that managed to write her way into my story. I know the logical advice would have been to just not write her in, but any writer knows that you don’t get to decide who is in your story. Characters will always find their way in, situations will arise that you hadn’t initially thought would happen. Your story outline for the most part is just a guideline. I tried my best to stick to that guideline, however, this character was so important to the story that I had to go back to the beginning to introduce her and explain why she was important to begin with. However it destroyed the entire 6,000 words I’d written for the beginning and made them entirely moot. I found myself facing 3,000 words instead of the 12,000-13,000 that I had hoped to be at by the end of that day.

Normally I would agree that I should have pressed on, but I’d lost the entire story I had and nothing I could have done could have salvaged it for this year. I didn’t want to end up with a pitiful excuse of a book. It’s nice to say that NaNoWriMo has no rules; just that you have to write until you hit 50,000 words, but I have my standards and I didn’t want to reach the end with a bunch of gibberish. So sadly this story is being redefined and I’ll start over from the beginning in next year’s competition.

On the plus side, there’s another competition this year and it’s called Script Frenzy. Script is actually my preferred way of writing. It requires a lack of description and thrives mainly on the dialogue with bits of description in between. After all, you’re only giving lines to the actors and giving an idea to the director, not telling him/her how to do their job. It’s up to them to make it look great; they just need a good basis.

Anyways! So here’s the challenge.

During the month of April!

100 pages of original scripted material in 30 days.

You may write the following types of scripts:

-       Screenplays

-       Stage plays

-       TV shows

-       Short films

-       Graphic novels

Find out more about Script Frenzy?

Register for Script Frenzy