Finally back from an utterly pointless trip to Nashville. But hey, if they wanna pay me to drive 8 hours plus mileage, I guess it was worth it. I quickly ran out of music on the way there but at the same time, one of my friends has been trying to get me into audio books, which I just can’t handle for some reason. So I thought, I’ll listen to some Coheed and Cambria. That’s a story in music form, the middle ground between audio books and music. And now I’ve almost certainly got some reading to do. I’m not exactly sure why it’s taken me this long to realize that I need the supplemental material, but that’s beside the point. Listening to them again while I was left to my own devices in another city really made me connect with it a lot more, like I could see and feel it. Visualize it.
Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to be a screenwriter? It’d honestly be really cool to be a singer/songwriter like how Claudio does it but I’m not nearly that musically gifted. I can kinda still play the saxophone and I can kinda sorta sing. Because those go so well together. But no, if I had to choose a writing platform dealing with more artistic liberties and such, it would probably be screenwriting. The only problem with that is all of the guidelines. Everything from the font to the spacing has to absolutely perfect. Which realistically isn’t all that bad, but I had a pretty awful experience with it. At the time of my one and only screenwriting class at university, my Microsoft Word didn’t have the capabilities of remembering my preferences throughout my documents. So I had to fix every single line by hand. To make matters worse, I was so bad about procrastinating that I waited until the day before my screenplay was due to start formatting.
Long story short, it was no fun. More specifically, I felt like it took the fun out of writing. Essentially, you can only write what actually happens in the story, no subtext whatsoever. That’s directing. And my class was reminded all too much that we’re writers not directors. It wasn’t really even the fact that there are a lot of rules to follow that I abandoned wanting to be a screenwriter. It was just that. Not being able to write it the way I wanted. Since then, I’ve realized that I could very easily just write a story and convert it to a screenplay with relative ease, but four-years-ago me wasn’t having any of it.
But that’s just something I’ve been considering for the past few days. I guess I’ve got too much on my plate writing-wise at the moment to make that leap. It’s a leap that I probably want to make a some point in the future though.
mack rogers writes 