Only My Scriptwriting

No Major Rewriting Yet

No Major Rewriting Yet

Don’t panic I’m not going to be doing any rewriting for either my SpaceHorrors scriptwriting/novel/short stories project or my Water Wars scriptwriting project. I will do it shortly for my Water Wars project soon, though. After all, it’s in the script phases of this project.

My scripts are my problem now. I have been writing my scripts with a sixty-line-per-page structure because each page equals a minute of airtime for movies and television shows. It’s fifty-five lines now. So, I need to adjust them to fit into the new Standard in Formatting.

I also need to do some rewriting with the number of pages in my scripts to the number of scenes. What I’m trying to write is that up until now I have been writing the scenes with either thirteen lines, fifteen lines, or nineteen lines. The four lines for the Scene Headings were an addition to these lines. It’s making my scenes too long.

As a result, my final page count is too long. The only way I can do that is to combine my Scene Heading with the scene itself. So, instead of thirteen, fifteen, or nineteen, it will be nine, eleven, and fifteen. That isn’t going to be easy to do. Especially for the nines, but it can be done. That will be the hardest part of this major rewrite.

It may not be as hard as I think it will be, though. I do a lot of repetition in my short stories. It looks like I’m doing that with my scripts too. All I need to do is stop doing that, and I will be able to cut down those four lines without too many problems. At least I hope I can.

My Action Descriptions are where most of my repetition problem happens. If I remove that repetition, I shouldn’t have any problems cutting my scene numbers down by four. Of course, my Action Descriptions aren’t the only problem when it comes to cutting down my Line Count by four.

I can also cut down my Line Count with my Dialogue. It’s like my short stories, novels, etc. I have got a bad habit of wanting at least two sentences in my Dialogue. I’m not sure about short stories, novels, etc., but with scripts, there is a lot of one-sentence Dialogue. Sometimes, it’s just a word or two within Dialogue.

It's kind of the same with Character Descriptions. Character Name and the Character Description under it, I can’t do too much about, but I can with my (Beat)s. I have a lot of them too. Taking them out most of the time will be one less line right there. Sometimes, it’s just one (Beat) and sometimes there are two or three (Beat)s.

Another reason for the rewrite is that I write in Word, and the standard nowadays is PDF. I can convert my Word scripts to PDF or save them as PDFs, but I don’t know how they will turn out. The few times I have converted a PDF to Word it hasn’t gone too well. I’m afraid that will happen now.

Of course, converting Word to PDF doesn’t mean it will still work out in my favor. I can only hope that it does. If it does, my scripts should be about one hundred and four pages for a movie and about fifty-eight pages for an hour-long TV script. After all, I have Page Breaks in TV scripts.