In the Wednesday class of week 2, we were tasked with rewriting an excerpt from a script into a more physically descriptive version. Since the past few weeks have been mostly about being more physically descriptive of the picture, and avoiding adverbs and such, the paragraphs we were given, although they made sense, were very much exactly the opposite of what we’ve been learning not to do. The original paragraph went as such:

“Rinaldo’s so tired of his children’s bickering. He can’t bear to be a single dad and is the end of his tether. He feels guilty and angry with himself”

The issue with this is that, even though the screenplay has described that Rinaldo is tired, and can’t bear to be a single dad, it doesn’t describe what physically portrays this. In class, we had to rewrite the script so that it portrayed his tiredness and his guilt:

“Rinaldo can’t take it anymore. With dirty facial hair, and a tired look in his cold dead eyes, he stands in the doorway behind his bickering children holding bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a Glock 19 in the other. He holds the gun up to his children before hesitating and pointing the gun to the side of his head. He pulls the trigger”

In my rewrite, I have made sure to add various descriptions of the visuals, such as Rinaldo’s dirty facial hair, and a tired look in his cold dead eyes. There were still a couple of minor issues that were pointed out to me, however. The first issue, (apparently not even being as much of an issue), is about the way that I open the paragraph. There isn’t really a physical way that the actor portraying Rinaldo can’t take it anymore. The statement is a lot more open to interpretation than in should be, which sometimes isn’t an issue, but one of the points of the exercise was to practice not doing that. The reason it isn’t exactly an issue is because the rest of the paragraph describes Rinaldo’s struggle, rendering the opening statement more of a context establisher. But since this is probably an excerpt from a bigger text, there really isn’t any reason for it to be there.

The second issue was that I didn’t describe the layout beforehand, but instead, described it throughout. Although the intention was to emphasise on the dramatic reveal that he’s staring at his children in front of him, it adds a difficulty for the person reading the script to understand the layout of the room, the fact that there are children, and where they are positioned in respect to him.

Overall, I guess the main thing that I need to watch out for is to constantly stay aware that I’m writing a script, and not a novel. Even though, nowadays, storytelling through script and storytelling through novel have their similarities, there are still some formats we need to confer with each.