We’ve all got that story that we haven’t been able to get quite right yet. Maybe it’s a novel that stalled out so you never finished it. Maybe it’s a short story that just isn’t working no matter how many revisions you do. Maybe it’s that memoir that you just can’t figure out the right way to tell.
Try rewriting it as a script even if you’ve never written a script before in your life. Try that same story out as a movie, stage play or comic book. Here’s why:
- You’ll get a fresh perspective. Forcing yourself to rework something like a novel into a script isn’t just a matter of changing formatting. You’ll need to completely rethink each scene and figure out the way to approach it within the confines and features of the new medium. This mental exercise will force you to think about your content in a completely new way, discovering new ways to tell the same story, new scenes to replace the ones that no longer fit. Even if you later realize the content works better as prose, you’ll find yourself discovering ways to mix things up and better ways to tell the same story.
- It’s an almost guaranteed way to get yourself unstuck. Diving back into a story you were sick of and forcing yourself to tell it in a different way won’t just give you a new perspective, it’ll give you entirely new ideas. What does staging the story as a script teach you about your characters, their world? How does it change how events unfold? Where scenes take place? It doesn’t matter what format you decide to tackle, you’ll end up feeling the excitement and discovery of a brand new idea, even if you’ve been banging away at this story for years.
- It will make you a better writer. The biggest difference between prose and scripts is their immediacy and emphasis on the visual. It forces you, quite literally, to show and not tell. It pushes you to make the action happen “on stage” and to reveal things more through actions and dialog over description and info dump. Script writing teaches you to do more with less, sharpens how you write dialog and helps you to re-imagine scenes in the most active way possible. You’ll take these lessons back with you to the original material and be better prepared to make the story the best it can be.
- You’ll discover the best way to tell your story. I’ve struggled with stories for years only to breeze through them in days when I tried writing them as a script. Story is king. Sometimes you’re trying to shoehorn a story into a format that you’re used to when that isn’t the format the best serves the story itself. Until you stretch your writing muscles and move out of your comfort zone, you won’t know what format will best serve the story you have to tell.
Do you have a stalled project that could benefit from a fresh look?
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Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
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