I’ve recently gone from unsuccessful novelist to unsuccessful screenwriter.

I found out why so many novelists complain about screen adaptations of their work. A full-length feature film should be written in a maximum of 130 pages. Try cutting a 350-page novel down to that. I did. I tried to take a lousy novel and turn it into a better screenplay. I took out everything but dialog. That only cut it down to 200 pages – so I slashed and carved some more. I think I’ve ended up with what some people might call an “art film”.

Now I’m writing another – a work that is intended to be a script from the start. It’s a horror story and I’m about halfway through. Tonight, I realize that the only way I can hope to save this thing is if I make it into a musical. 

The scriptwriting market operates a little differently than publishing. You still need an agent, but there are several new scriptwriting contests every month that promise the winners, not only cash, but also a chance for a meeting with Hollywood producers and studio execs. Wow. Wouldn’t that be something?

Many of these contests will send you a short critique of your work – which is pretty nice. I never got anything back from the 50 or so agents that rejected my novels – other than some faint, gray, meaningless note reproduced on cheap paper, or a pitch to buy their book. So, I entered my art film in four contests. We’ll see.

There’s a precise format that has to be followed when writing a script – special column widths and indentations for camera angles, setting and action. You have to type dialog right in the center of the page and the lines must be only 3 1/4” wide. So I bought computer software that formats the script as you write it. It has an amazing feature – the software allows you to program digitized voices to read the script back to you. I call it “Robot Theater” because the voices are flat – absolutely no emotion. There are about ten different voices to choose from. “Old Woman” is my favorite. She sounds like your mother on an overdose of Valium. It’s fantastic. I’ve made an audiotape of these robots reading my first script and play it in the car on long trips. It annoys my wife, and our dogs whine and hold their paws against their ears as we travel.

This special voice feature has other benefits. If you’re lonely or sad, you just have to write a little dialog and have the robot read it back to you to cheer you up. Now, whenever I’m blue, I just open script #3, select the Old Woman voice, hit Enter and she says:

“Gee, I wish I could write as well as you. You’re gonna win that screenplay contest, Tom. You’re going to Hollywood.”

You don’t get that when you write novels.

(Originally written July 24, 2003)