Screenwriting with Leslie Ann Sartor

I'm excited to introduce Leslie Ann to Seekerville! I met Leslie when I first became a member of Colorado Romance Writers YEARS ago. She wrote awesome Romantic Suspense back then : ) Now Leslie is a contracted, award-winning screenwriter with lots of tips on the film writing industry to share with us.

Morning Leslie!

Morning Audra. Thank you for having me here at Seekerville. I'm honored, you have an incredibly talented bunch of writers here.

How long have you been writing fiction and screenplays?

Oooh! Really, I have to date myself? Then, because you insist, since I was about 4 years old.

You mean writing for a career? Since the 90s'. You can tell I'm obviously one of those writers who has experienced that meteoric rise to fame. LOL. Well I thought it would happen that way, don't we all have that hope?

You wrote romantic fiction for many years and were quite successful. What made you think about writing scripts?

This is why you're my BFF. My novels did do well in contests, thanks for reminding me, you tend to forget those things when you keep plodding onward.

Screenwriting was always a goal of mine, or something to do with movies--as a kid living in the Pacific Palisades, movie stars were abundant, we saw them at the market, the gym, mom knew a lot of them by first name...but moving to Colorado made that goal seem unreachable.

Then several things happened, and I was open to them. The internet made it feasible to live away from the heartland of movie making and I found an incredible mentor, Robert Gosnell, who moved from the Hollywood scene to Colorado, continues to sell, and better yet, wanted to teach, to pass on his experience and knowledge... so here I am, in Boulder CO, writing screenplays with contacts all over the world.

Are there special tools or programs you use, or can MS Word and other popular word processing programs be modified?

You can modify your existing word processing program with tabs and Macros, but it always looks unprofessional in my opinion. And often that will be the kiss of death. There are more screenwriters in the world trying to sell than novelists, that I think I went from the frying pan way into the fire!

Currently I'm using Scriptware, but I think the industry standard is now Final Draft. The dedicated programs solve so many issues with screenplay formatting--which is very precise. Furthermore they allow the production team to break down the script and pull the info each department needs; lighting, time of day, interior/exterior shots, characters per scene or conversely, scenes with particular characters. All of this is vital information for the production team.

As novelists, we have many more words to work with than screen writers. How do you convey emotions and tone without the room for all the narrative?

You know that is one of the hardest things I've had to adapt to--the lack of words. I do miss the ability to write longer scenes, but in novels I'm finding even those long elegant passages with all sorts of imagery that we used to devour are now nearly a thing of the past.

Every word in a screenplay must do at least double duty...triple or quadruple duty if you can find a way. The dialogue has to convey emotion, or lack there of...it should have subtext and it has to move the story along. Not an easy task. But it's absolutely a must. See my blog on this at: http://fivescribes.blogspot.com/2008/07/importance-of-great-dialogue.html

You also learn visual vocabulary and find physical proxies to take the place of expository dialogue, to SHOW what the character is thinking, is doing.

Can you tell us how getting contracted to write a screenplay is different than receiving a contract for a book?

The contract for Cry of the Dove (adaption of Mother of the Pound, a non-fiction book) was concrete proof that someone thought I could write a script that was sellable.

I still remember every detail of the interview, the long contract negotiations and when it was finally signed, the overwhelming fear that I couldn't do it. And then I remember after the last rewrite was completed, sitting around the author's dinner table, with the development team and Jeffrey Reiss (MOW ABC movies) standing up, toasting me and all of us, saying, "we have a movie on our hands." I was absolutely speechless.

As an aside. I was lucky, my husband is an attorney and conducted the intense negotiations for me. I would have caved far earlier. During the process it became obvious that one needs to find a professional to be your negotiator, allowing you to concentrate on what you as a writer can do best, write. Attorneys, agents and managers know what to look for, they have learned how to be tough, hold 'em, fold 'em.

A contract in screenwriting is paid out differently than a contract for a novel. You get a portion, generally a third of your money when you sign, then another portion when the first draft is done, then the last portion when you turn in the rewrite.

Future rewrites can be negotiated. If you're an A-list writer you can negotiate points on the gross/net of the movie. Now, what I've mentioned above is fairly standard for WGA (Writers Guild of America) signatory productions. Non sig's usually can't hire WGA writers because of the union restrictions. Note I say usually ;) My contract was non-sig, but we wrote the contract using the MBA (minimum basic agreement) of the WGA.

There are so many elements of screen writing that would benefit the novelist. Could you list some and tell us how it would help our writing?

Subtext, action, movement! Movies move. Novels are beginning to move more. This is an interesting aside, but while talking to a director/producer in Israel for Cry of the Dove, it was revealed that the audience is far different there than that in the US. The Israel audience wants everything to move quickly. I asked why, and he thought it was because there is so much conflict and uncertainty there that people just want to be quickly entertained, and then are on to the next part of their life. News is delivered quickly, movies are fast paced.

If you can, remember while writing that the story has to move, always move onward, upward, downward. A great way to accomplish that is to create tension and conflict on every page, then you'll have a page turner and a long lived career. I know this is stuff we've all heard before, but it's so true and oh-so-hard. I think Donald Maass' book "Writing the Breakout Novel" has a lot of great advice on writing conflict.

If you can find ways of visualizing your scene before you write it and then use the objects in the scene to show WITHOUT explaining what is happening, you're a huge step ahead. A master at that is Nora writing as JD Robb. In a blog post on the Five Scribes blog, http://fivescribes.blogspot.com/2008/10/fluff-and-feathers.html, I talked about that very thing

Now in screenwriting, we minimally set the stage and the stage dressers do the rest, but if it's important we can highlight the object by using caps, and if the director agrees, there will usually be a second or two focus on the object. It's almost a prompt. If you see it, you know it'll be used somehow in the movie. You know we've all seen those. Well, writing a novel you can use prompts as well, just think about what will give the most bang for the buck what shows us that we're in the future, or in England, or a ranch high in the Rocky Mountains.

Emotion. The object, the primary goal of a movie is to make you feel, not just watch the actors on the screen. We want you to feel the terror, the love, the triumph along with the actor/s on the screen. That's when you leave the theatre FEELING like you've just experienced something different, something thought provoking, something wonderful.

Dialogue. Vital.

It's been said a million times, but read it aloud and try not to use INFLECTION and see if you're getting those points across without being "too on the nose." Sometimes you'll need expository dialogue, but try, and try hard to eliminate from your writing. It's hard, but it's vital in a screenplay and will only help the pace of your novel. Another trick we use is to have the script read by actors, to see if their inflection is what we were aiming for. You can do this by having someone who doesn't know the story read parts aloud. Listen carefully and see if you're getting the emotion you're striving for.

And of course, Show, don't tell. Movies are all about SHOW. If you have too much dialogue, you'll lose the viewer, who doesn't have the ability of re-reading a passage to make sure she's caught the gist of the scene (and we don't really want them re-read anyway.) If you lose a viewer, you may have lost them for the entire film.

Novelists have the luxury of building contacts through conferences and contests. How do you develop a rapport with the screen writing industry?

Yeah, I miss that. RWA is fabulous for that. But I've a new set of contests and contacts I've developed. I had to search the internet then do research, there is very little word of mouth, which is kind of odd...anyway, I have a list of contests if your readers want, I'll forward it to them....

For the novelist thinking about writing screen plays, what advice or suggestions do you have?

You want an honest answer? If an agent or someone tells you that "your story would make a great screenplay, so go write one," I cringe. It's a totally different media, the pacing, the lack of words, the STRUCTURE is all so different.

As a novelist you're mastering your medium, so you must ask yourself if you want to take on the challenge of learning to write a screenplay. Yes it's ONLY 120 pages long, give or take, but it takes much more concentration and skill than I ever dreamed. I could not write a novel while I was learning screenplay structure. It was too different.

Now I can, but not at first.

If however, you want to learn if screenwriting is for you then, by all means, jump on in. The water is choppy, and you'll need the life-preserver of information that books and classes can offer. And there is an explosion of them. When I started, there were few books and people like Bob www.qadas.com/~gosnell were almost extinct.

I'm going to post a bibliography of my favorite writing books on my website, http://www.lesliesartor.com/ - give me a few weeks. Maybe Audra will post when I get the list up?

Finally, could you fill us in on what's hot and what's not in the film industry today?

Franchises. Batman, the Marvel comics, Spiderman--though I just heard that Disney is pulling out of the next Narnia, which is a franchise.

And contrary to what Disney is doing with Narnia (because we don't yet know the real reason Disney is pulling away) I'm seeing a lot of requests for faith based films on http://www.inktip.com/. Not overtly religious, but with a lesson, a moral to the story. And funny thing, I know a screenwriter who can adapt your book to screenplay ; )

What's not hot? Hmmm let me check that out. Nothing, nowhere can I find out what's not hot.

Thanks again. And please if you have questions, comments, I'll be happy to answer them.
LA, aka Leslie Ann Sartor

Leslie is a frequent contributor to the Five Scribes blog http://www.fivescribes.blogspot.com/. Please visit her there for more screenwriting advice and to read her interview with Marilyn Atlas, Film Producer. Also in the coming weeks, Leslie will be interviewing InkTIP, and other film professionals, sharing her knowledge of an industry that tends to keep information under wraps.