A scripted life
Life has a way of working in circles. I’m not sure if it’s just because I live a life of hyper-focus cycles or if that’s how life is for everyone else too, but sooner or later I end up doing all of the things I did in a past life. Perhaps it further exemplifies who I truly am as a person. Or perhaps it’s just the tug of my ever-expanding list of hobbies, much to the dismay of my wife.
I spent this evening hammering out a script for a promo video for new venture of mine. As I was working it brought memories rushing back of every exciting moment I spent on a stage, on camera, or writing scripts. I’ve never been much of an actor. but I did spend a decent bit of time in the drama department of my high school and college. And before that I made a few videos for school projects. It was never anything super serious, and I never got any accolades, but it sure was a blast. I’m sure it was extra exciting for my scene partners as I struggled to remember lines.
There’s something different about how you much can capture physicality and energy in a script as compared to in poetry and fiction. With literary art where the end goal is the literature, I get sucked into words. At times I marvel at the language. “Boy that’s a clever sentence,” I think to myself. This is of course before I delete It for being distracting or not moving the story forward. Which makes sense. I do have a degree in Linguistics, and the way I got there was falling love with the beauty of language. But script writing doesn’t have any of that. The goal is not for it to be beautiful on the page, but in front of your eyes. It also doesn’t require the writer to think of clever ways to convey information that would be obvious to someone viewing the situation. This is a critical difference
One of my favorite examples of this difference between the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson and the Movie. You may be familiar with the scene towards the end of the movie where Hunter is pulled over for drunk driving. When you watch the movie (which I saw first), you can see how Hunter is acting and that as he is spinning a wild story of why he was driving the way he was and that he is clearly holding a beer can in his hand. In the book, this information is only revealed at the end of Hunter’s story. The tension created by the situation and then the explosive release as you find out that it was all for not is incredible. I can’t say I’ve ever read another writer that achieved such a setup and delivery.
Ryan
