Fade in

So now is the time of writing. Now is the time for testing if I can hold up a full-time job as a communication consultant in a large international IT company, be a loving husband, a caring father and at the same time participate in a bachelor’s party and a following wedding party plus three dinner dates with friends and family that couldn’t be moved.

Oh, and at the same write 4+ pages every day.

Nooooo problem. I’ve got a 8 page outline and around 40+ pages of character info.

Story Trick #1: Eastern Promises

Today I’m going to commence a feature on this weblog called Story Tricks. I don’t know how often I’ll post these Story Tricks but hopefully they’ll become a fixed feature.

The idea came to me after I watched David Cronenberg’s excellent “Eastern Promises” last night. The script is written by Steven Knight and he utilizes a very simple and very subtle trick that, for me at least, was brilliant in keeping the suspense going in the first part of the film.

The protagonist, Anna (Naomi Watts) is a midwife at a hospital in London and one day a young girl dies in her ward while giving birth to a baby girl. The young woman is unknown but she did carry a diary with her. The problem is that the diary is written in Russian.

Although Anna herself is Russian she can’t read the language and therefore she asks her uncle Stepan to translate it for her. He abruptly refuses as he finds it highly immoral and utters “Do you always rob the bodies of the dead?”.

So Anna must find another way to translate the diary in order to find the relatives of the unknown young girl and hand over the baby to them. Inserted into the diary is a card of the restaurant owned by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Going there she meets Kirill and Nikolai and becomes clear that this restaurant is a meeting place for Russian gangsters in London.

Anna don’t know exactly why, but Semyon seems like a bad man. There is just something about him that’s off, maybe it’s because he’s too direct in offering to help Annie. On the other hand he seems like a very likable grandpa-kind-of-person and is very polite and forthcoming toward Anna and her request for a translation.

And here comes the trick. We as the viewer know that Semyon is bad and that the diary very likely contains information that he normally would have people killed for. The issue is then if Anna can trust Semyon to do a real translation or if he’s going to lie to her.

Parallel to this Anna keeps pushing her uncle to do the translation and he keeps refusing.

This subtle trick creates an enormous tension and suspense in the story, and we sit watching this part of the film on the edge of our seats hoping that uncle Stepan will come to his senses and help Anna so that she can get far away from Semyon. Even though this conflict is resolved in another way it moves the story forward in a very effective way.

I could easily imagine an entire movie centered on this; someone finds a book or scripture and has to get it translated. Unfortunately the person(s) he approaches with this task is someone whom stands to lose a lot if the knowledge in this book is to become publicly known. It’s simple trick and used many times before but it works very well.

I also highly recommend reading Steven Knight’s entire screenplay that Focus Features have so kindly made available online in this award season.

Movie Magic in da house

As mentioned I’ve bought Movie Magic Screenwriter, and uh man is that as sweet program.

It’s way above all the other screenwriting programs I’ve tried (yes, all of them, I looking at you Final Draft).

The included outlining feature is really really nice, as in super nice. And on top of that you can customize almost anything in the program you can dream of.

I know that the program doesn’t make the writer, but this program just takes the hassle out of writing, and really lets you consentrate on imagining stuff instead.

Fade out

I have just finished the first draft of my first screenplay.

Yes, I am indeed very proud of myself. It is very satisfying to finally to write FADE OUT. THE END.

It has been a rather long process and it have taking me around 8 weeks to write the 49 pages that the script ended up on. But I take it as much as a learning experience and it has never been the aim to produce a full-length script in the first try.

This last week or two, I have had some serious writer’s block and I tried many different approaches to battle this. The only one that seems to be working is; writing. Just writing. Writing crap and then some more crap. It is extremely difficult, but I really found that writing is the only medicine. It actually helped me to read the crap I have written and then say “man that’s bad. I can do a lot better than that!” It might sound strange but this last day I wrote almost 10 pages in one sitting and I believe that was only possible because I have kept writing the whole time.

Another great tip I found very useful was Hemmingway’s (at least I think it was Hemmingway) way of ending your day of writing in the middle of a sentence or a scene. You do it even though you know perfectly well how it ends. That way when you sit down that the computer or typewriter the next day you know what to write. You just finish that sentence or that scene and then continue. That way you always “hit the ground running” and never have to face the dreaded Blank Page.

Oh, the story. Yes, I am getting a bit ahead of myself here. It is actually an adaptation of one of Bram Stoker‘s short stories called The Judge’s House. It is a 12-page (give or take) short story and I have taken many liberties with the source material. It started out as being very close to the original. The outline process also produced a script that was very close to Stoker’s original text, but as the writing progressed, I took more and more liberties with the story. Both because I have moved the story to present day but also because there are many fundamental differences between a short story and a screenplay. I have introduced some other characters and removed others. Overall, it, at least in my view, plays better as a screenplay this way.

I will not publish the screenplay yet, as I fell that it clearly needs at least one or two thorough rewrites before anyone else than myself will be able to understand and appreciate the story. There are many scenes that I am very proud of and a lot of the dialog that is very good, but there are most certainly also some that is very close to the worst writing I have ever produced.

The next draft of the script will also be more in the agreed length of a feature film: 90-120 pages.

I have use the great open source editor Celtx to write the script. However, even though it is great, and free, it has some bugs and missing features that are rather annoying. And in one of my attempts to battle the before mentioned writer’s block I downloaded a trial version of Movie Magic Screenwriter and was very impressed. Therefore, I promised myself that when I finished this first draft I would shell out for the full version as a reward.