How to Write a Screenplay
“You can build an entire narrative out of what you don’t have.”
– Maya Stein, Narrative
Neat and tidy scenes, lined up in a row, with nothing confusing or obscuring popping up in between.
You can give yourself the just-right words you wish you’d had in your mouth.
A three-act story arc that makes the ending feel like a good one, like a victory, like the inevitable place to arrive.
You can write yourself the heroine instead of the anti-hero or villain (however well-intentioned).
You can weave in larger themes in your thirst to understand, in your hunger for meaning.
You can usher us through long months and years with a montage set to music conjuring just the right mood.
Are we patient now? Or rising to a place of courage and personal power?
You can squeeze events into a digestible timeline like an accordion.
All the months spent thinking, like a child sitting in a corner, long and hard about how you got here,
and a new vision, one without your old blinders, emerges now.
Oh, this is probably what they meant, and, That is probably how I sounded when I said that.
You have years of this material.
Life does not let us rewind and try again
but the page will believe anything we tell it.
We can start over at the beginning and try again, in this narrative if not elsewhere.
This is what I can see now, the pages murmur when you fan them with your thumb.
This is the braver path, the enlightened journey, tidier than real life for timely consumption.
A years-long epic reshaped to fit into an evening, accompanied by popcorn.