You can’t easily quote what a character is thinking in a screenplay without looking like an amateur. Aside from the side trips you can take, novelists can also get inside a character’s head a bit more than a film. You can stop for lunch anywhere you like before you get back on the road.” You cannot do that in a screenplay. When you’re writing a book, “you can get off the highway once in a while. You still have the economy, but you also understand that things need to happen which make other things happen. “A screenplay is a document for all the production departments and actors, but it also has to convey a coherent emotional experience.” Transferring your screenwriting skills to a writing a book allows for a much tighter and focused story. Unlike writing a novel, screenplays are a blueprint rather than a finished product.
“You need a poetic grasp of literature because you use as few words as possible to say as much as you can.” However, you have to be lean and think about the plot all the time when writing a screenplay. You still have to tell a story and introduce complete characters into a new world world when writing in both media. Writing novels offers more freedom especially in terms of page count. There’s an industry standard for how those pages are meant to be written and formatted. Screenwriting requires an economy of writing because you can only tell your story in a hundred odd pages. Arch believes that writing a screenplay requires a level of discipline and specificity generally not required in other media. “It’s so much better preparation from going from writing novels to screenplays than the other way around,” he said. Now that you’ve all read our interview with the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jeff Arch, you’re ready to read about his latest book called Attachments.Īlthough the skill sets between screenwriters and novelists are distinctly different and not necessarily interchangeable, Arch has risen to the challenge of becoming a novelist. Attachments is a story of three best friends at a boarding school in 1972 coal-mining country in Pennsylvania who are summoned to their old dean’s deathbed. We asked Arch the relative merits of each format and his preferences. This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Jeff Arch: