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!

ABDUCTED BY ALIENS?

 

            When I first heard on the radio that a commercial jet disappeared over the ocean, my first thought was that it was abducted by an alien space ship.  Then my next thought was that I must’ve not heard the news correctly. 

            In this day and age how can a plane possibly go missing?  I mean we do have radar, don’t we?  We have satellites capable of tracking pretty much everything, so why can’t they track planes over the water?  The mere fact that they obviously can’t is quite scary.  We think we are so smart, have come so far in our understanding of science but we lose a large plane?  Maybe they just aren’t telling us everything?

            Then the sadness sets in.  So many lives have been lost.

            At this point you may be asking yourself what this has to do with writing?  Susan Grant is a New York Times Bestselling author who writes romance and also is a commercial airline pilot.  One of her first books, Contact, was a Futuristic Sci-Fi Romance.  It had an intriguing storyline involving a commercial flight from LAX to Hawaii which naturally flew over the ocean, and then, of course, there is a major incident on the plane.  The Captain has a heart attack and dies and there is fear the plane has been hijacked. It appeared the plane would crash and everyone would die.  But instead the plane is beamed aboard a large alien spacecraft.  It was a fabulous read!  And it was at least 10 years ago.  However, the story was quite memorable, as I have mentioned it on occasion throughout the years.  I am sure at the time she wrote this novel she never dreamed another commercial airliner would go missing over the ocean, but it happened only a few weeks ago.

            They always say the best place to look for story ideas is by reading the current news stories.  Headlines read, “Airliner missing on flight over the ocean.”  Story line reads, “Airliner missing while crossing the ocean abducted by alien spacecraft.”  Susan’s story was great, but I bet we could all write an intriguing story from that news headline.  They all would be great stories and they all would be different.  So write away!