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I attended an unusual meeting a few nights ago. It was a film and film making development group called TRI-FI. Tri-Fi stands For the Tri-Cities Film International. It was a work development group with the mission to help develop the motion picture industry here in Washington State. The organization is quite well developed and hosts an annual international film festival in the Tri-Cities. If I remember correctly, last year there were 140 films submitted from 40 countries. It seems we have quite a burgeoning film industry in our little corner of the Pacific Northwest. It must be our clean air and wide variety of landscapes that makes our area a ‘location of choice.’ I found out that the Washington State Governor’s Economic Development Council actively supports this growing industry.
The group that met the other night was only a small part of the larger membership. The participants included a drone photographer, a sound designer, a production manager (he led the discussion), an independent filmmaker, and a screenwriter (my host for the night.) They topic of discussion was ‘pre-production planning.’ Everything from what food to have during filming to equipment requirements to location and time-of-day requirements. All the planning aimed at making the actual filming days go as smoothly as possible. I had no idea how much time the crew spent on pre-production planning.
While every aspect of the discussion was fascinating to me (the film novice), the discussions centered on the efforts of the screenwriter and the screenplay caught my interest the most. I’m a novelist. I write in a certain style and format. The ‘screenplay’ is an unexplored foreign country to me. First, I got a couple of great ideas to try at my next writer’s guild meeting. I also had an epiphany, of sorts. My idea for the writer’s guild was simple. Our practice at writer’s guild is for each author to read a couple of page of his or her work aloud and then we all comment on everything that we notice from grammar to character developement. At the movie pre-production discussion, they addressed a similar process, the 'Read Through' or 'Table Read.'
In a read through, the actors for a given scene (stand-ins if the real actors are not available) sit at a table and read their respective lines aloud. The readers try to read the lines as they would in the movie. Everyone at the table gets to hear and comment on what the lines sound like in a more live setting. One of the points of interest for the readers was how to pronounce unusual words or names. I've struggled with some name pronunciation and I wrote the names.
My pages for the next meeting contain a large measure of conversation between characters. My plan is to read the filler text myself, but ask a different participant to read each character’s lines. It’s a different point of view. Just like reading text aloud will point out different editing flaws than reading text silently. The screenplay reading process may highlight different aspects of the written piece than I have noticed before.
This brings me to my epiphany. Everyone at my writer’s guild writes for the printed page. The members of the guild all have the same target in mind, the printed page. Listening to the screenwriter discuss the pre-production development of the screenplay, I realized that he focused on the presentation of the lines on the big (visual) screen not on the (quiet time) paper. I saw an extraordinary new way of expressing my written work.
I saw a potential ‘cross training’ opportunity, if you will. Athletes cross train all the time, Football linemen take ballet, and swimmers take boxing. I decided that I was going to ‘cross train.’ I am going to explore ‘writer’s cross training.’ I’m going to learn everything I can about the mindset that governs screenwriting. I don’t ever intend to become a screenwriter. I write novels. I like writing novels. I’ll let the screenwriters write screenplays.
However, I believe that understanding the whole screenwriting experience will make me a better writer of novels. Think of a famous writer who has had his books made into movies. If that writer was involved at any level or even saw the finished movie, the experience must have changed. I have no doubt that the novelist incorporates some new skills into his writing. Maybe they write with an eye for the scene. Maybe they picture the interaction of the characters better. I can’t help but believe that the experience of participating in the conversion of a book to a movie must have made some improvements in the writing process.
I will, of course, write every day. It’s what I love. Writing relaxes me. It absorbs me. However, I will also pursue a better understanding of the screenwriter’s mentality as an exploration into ‘writers cross training.’
My name is Jeff Bailey. I write nuclear thrillers for a reason, I’ve worked in nuclear related industries, from nuclear weapons to nuclear research, for fifty years. Deer Hawk Publications released my first book, The Defect in June of 2016. In The Defect, I tell the story of a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant and why the government covered it up. The Defect is based on true events. Deer Hawk Publications is scheduled to release I’m a Marine in May of 2017. I’m a Marine is about a female aviation firefighter in the U.S. Marines who witnesses the murder of two M.P.s. She decides that it is her duty to stop them. Keep in mind that I write nuclear thrillers. The Chilcoat Project, to be released in spring of 2018, is about the theft of nuclear weapons secrets from a national laboratory. The Chilcoat Project is also based on true events. My current project, Wine Country, is based on the true story of the Radioactive Boy Scout, but with a more sinister twist.
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