Guest post written by author Suzanne Allain
Suzanne Allain is a novelist and screenwriter who lived in New York and Beijing before returning to her hometown of Tallahassee, Florida, where she lives with her husband. Her script MR. MALCOLM’S LIST is currently in post-production. Miss Lattimore’s Letter is her latest novel. For more information, please visit www.suzanneallain.com
There are some people who seem to know that they want to be a screenwriter almost from the time they come out of the womb. Theatre concession food is like mother’s milk to them, and they can list a dizzying array of director’s names most of us have never heard of. That was not me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved a good movie, but whenever the lights were turned off I was most often to be found reading a book by flashlight under the covers.
So while I’ve been writing since childhood, I fell into screenwriting much later, after I’d already written two novels. I adapted one of them, Mr. Malcolm’s List, into a screenplay, uploaded it onto a script hosting/reviewing site called “The Black List” where it was “discovered” by Hollywood execs, and found myself taking a new career path.
I am often asked which format I enjoy more and the answer is easy: I vastly prefer screenwriting. At least, I prefer the actual writing part. For one reason, there are a lot less words. Even a short novel requires around three times the number of words as a screenplay. And writing a script is like a fun challenge: you can tell the story only through things an audience can see and hear while using prescribed formatting and language. While some films use voice-over to great dramatic effect (THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, for example) typically the audience is not given access to any of the characters’ inner thoughts or feelings. And really, writing a script in the same manner you write a novel is the quickest way to get a “Pass” from a script reader. A screenplay is the blueprint for the film, not the end product. Nothing exposes you as an amateur faster than an “unfilmable,” which is when in the action/description of the script you write something like: “She felt the same ambivalence toward him that she’d had for her 11th grade Science teacher, who she’d thought was really hot until he gave her her first ‘C’.” How do you film that?
However, while I find writing a script more enjoyable, there are reasons I prefer having written a novel. If the film is never produced, it will never be read by more than a handful of people. And, unless you also want to take up directing, you have very little creative control over your screenplay. It can be completely rewritten by any number of people, and frequently is. There’s a special kind of agony when your script, which you labored over so intensely and loved so much, is wrenched from you and given a hatchet job. (At least in your opinion, which, believe me, no longer matters.) Whereas the author of a novel, though the recipient of editorial suggestions, does retain control over their work. And when the novel is published it is in its final form and can (hopefully) be read by more than your mother and best friend.
The absolutely hardest part of both, however, is not the writing, but getting someone in the industry to read it and, miracles of miracles, pay you for your labor.
But that’s a whole ‘nother story.
