Tuesday, September 23, 2014


A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

I’m sure everyone has heard the phrase, A picture is worth a thousand words”.  Most people probably don’t stop to think about what it really means though.  I know I never did until I was having a conversation with my son regarding the production of short films. 
He writes screenplays and I have written several screenplays, also.  A typical screenplay is 90 to 120 pages.  Each page equates to approximately one minute of film, making the 90 page screenplay an hour and a half movie and the 120 page screenplay a two hour movie.   To a novel writer who is used to writing 60,000 to 80,000 words, which usually equals 300 to 400 pages, a screenplay may sound just way too easy to write. 
Veronica Roth, author of the book, Divergent, which was made into a movie and just released, was interviewed for an article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press regarding her feelings on whether the movie accurately reflected the story in her novel.  She realized once the movie rights were sold, she would lose control on which parts of her book would be used in the movie, but in the end, she felt they did a good job.  The interesting point she made was that in the beginning of her novel, she spent a lot of time on back story to build her futuristic world for the story.  When she watched the film, it became quite apparent how the thousands of words she wrote to explain what her futuristic world would look like, could be shown on the screen in just a few minutes. 
As the saying goes—A picture is worth a thousand words!  But we are writers and that is what we do. We write thousands and thousands of words to tell our stories.  So let’s keep on doing what we do—writing down the words to those movies going on in our heads and telling stories our way!

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