Monday, February 20, 2006

Shortest Feature Length Ever

My most recent feature, after five months of work, came in as a 101 page second draft. Either I have learned to write a tighter script in the past two years, learned to speak in shorthand, or something vital is missing from this screenplay.

I am hopeful that it is the former and that I have become a much better writer over the past twenty four months, but my penchant, predilection, predisposition, proclivity, and propensity for alliteration and taking a simple concept, such as a greeting, lamentation, compliment, criticism, or observation, and dragging it out into a compound sentence so complex, circuitous, composite, conglomerate, and convoluted that it takes no fewer than three breaths to read the sentence out loud, provided of course that you need not stop and research a word such as penchant, predilection, predisposition, proclivity, or propensity, causes me grave and somewhat perplexing concern that I may have neglected scene description, character development, or (gasp) misaligned my margins!

Maybe I just deleted all sentences over 100 words.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just had one come in at 92... ugh

Robert Hogan said...

Wait till you write one that tops out at 85 and you realize it doesn't really need anything else.

Rob

MaryAn Batchellor said...

I'm relatively sure this one needs nothing. It astonishes me. I'm long winded. Or were you too polite to notice?

MaryAn Batchellor said...

This one started out at 129 pages before my first edit. By page ten, I was thinking "who put this crap in here?"