I had the contact course for my Massey screenwriting course a few weeks ago, and am now fully ensconced in writing the short script due for the last assignment. It's an interesting exercise, especially in minimising dialogue and concentrating on the visual details to be described. Gone is the luxury of delving into the narrative character's head to describe how they are feeling, as in prose. If you can't see it, you can't write it. So I have to really think about how to convey details visually.
I started the course after hearing Stephanie Laurens at the 2010 RWNZ conference make the point that the style of storytelling used in entertainment fiction, as she describes genre fiction, is closer to that of modern film and TV than it is literary fiction. So it seemed a very good idea to find out how film makers do tell stories.
So far it's been fascinating. A quite different mindset, and it would be good to have more experience of the physical reality of filming, to see what you can and can't do. But it's also a lot of fun. And 6 pages of script can take longer to write than 6 pages of prose, despite having a whole lot less words on them. Also, 'cut' seems to be the operative word when editing. You have to examine every single word, particularly of dialogue, to see if it is really needed. And that is good for the soul, but hard on the heart.
