I think something that influenced how I will approach my future screenwriting tasks was something that was covered in week one of this course. When writing, my mind is always focused on the conventions we have been taught regarding screenwriting. Don’t use adjectives for example, or ensure that every description in the text can be represented visually, or try not to include any cinematography related notes etc
Reading through various screenplays and picking out what worked and what didn’t was largely helpful in terms of getting me to just write and leave conforming to the conventions later. I saw the texts such as Toy Story, Trainwreck, Thelma & Louise and others and each text had mistakes or clumsy writing occasionally. Or perhaps they used the wrong tense or too many adjectives. This showed me that its not such a stringent set of rules when screenwriting, but more a set of guidelines to best help you get your stories onto the paper.
These films were all hugely successful and the fact that they incorrectly used a tense in a scene description or used an adjective when they could have used a verb proves that the most important part of the writing is just that, the writing itself. Are you crafting a good story? Does it captivate your audience? Can the imagine the world you are creating? I know that this sounds easy to grasp and honestly self evident but one thing that was putting up somewhat of a mental roadblock was the act of making sure that every single word I used was precise and necessary. Making sure every single verb was in the right tense, making sure adjectives where used sparingly, if at all. And while its good practice for screenwriting, its also incredibly tedious and time consuming and it was getting in the way of me actually wanting to write. Now I just write and let it flow, and later on I can go back and edit and change things if they are completely out of line with the conventions.
Conversely, it also showed me what to look out for, and what pitfalls there could be. For example, how to pin point when you have written something as an inactive action, or how to write freely but ensure that while you do so, you aren’t writing anything that cannot be represented visually on film (probably the hardest one for me, since most of my prior writing is in book form). One example of this is from Frozen River. The description “Ray Hears it” doesn’t strictly work within the conventions of a screenplay because it draws the audience out of the screenplay. How do we know Ray hears it? How do you visually represent that? If the audience has to start thinking those things, then that means they are actively adding to the text and are very aware of what they are reading. And since, as we’ve discussed several times in class, the big task of screenwriting is to immerse the audience fully into the text and to get them to explore the text as an audio-visual experience, anything that draws them out of that immersion should be cut or re-written.