My work day as a screenplay writer.

Since I have a full time job, two kids and a house to renovate I don't have 8 hours a day to spend writing scripts. But I do have 30 minutes on the commute to work and as a magical bonus I get ANOTHER 30 minutes on the way back home. Lucky me.

During the time on the train I go over the book page by page and transcribe to screenplay format into my notebook. When I come across something in the book that I need to address earlier in the script I take a little note of it and continue on.

Since I'm trying to get the book into actual script format I don't just copy every line I read but try to make everthing happen in realtime and make it visual and aural so it can be represented by a movie.

When I get time for myself in the evening I take my notebook and my laptop and write it all down. I also insert all the notes I took earlier in their correct places so they make sense when viewing the movie and you don't get explanations about things like you do in a book.

Well, this is basically what I do every day right now. Well, I also read about writing scripts and read scripts to movies I like. You probaby heard of Imdb.com(Internet Movie DataBase) but did you know that there is an imsdb.com (Internet Movie SCRIPT DataBase) as well?

I'm going to make a movie!

Well I'm not actually making the movie myself but I plan to write the screenplay for it. I have been in contact with the author, Roger L. Di Silvestro, of "Ursula's gift" about aqcuiring the movie rights for his book.

It all started when I was about 12 and I read a book in Swedish called "Varulvens tid" or directly translated "Time of the werewolf". It was a fantasy-comedy that I thought was very cool. I reread it in later years and I still liked it. Many years later I still like fantasy and I feel that I miss not seeing this book turned into a movie when it's so great!

One evening I thought to myself: Why can't I write the screenplay? It can't be that hard, the story is already there so all I have to do is basically just decide how to interpret it into visual mode. So.. how do one go about this? I had no clue. I searched the web for how to turn books into movies and came up with the advise that I should acquire the movie rights for it. All I had to do was to contact the publishing company and I would be on my way.

The only problem was that the publishing company consisted of a single person, Donald A. Fine, and his company Donald A. Fine, Inc. and Donald, had passed away. After searching for a while I found that Penguin Books had incorporated the company but after searching their database I came up short. No rights for that book to be found.

I gave up and didn't continue until after a few weeks when I thought of contacting the author himself and ask him if he knew who held the righs currently. After several very nice letters back and forth between me and Roger I have now acquired the rights to turn his book into a screenplay. Hurray!

Work plan

Since the contract for the option states that I have 24 month to make a sale to a production company I thought I should make up some kind of crude schematic so that I have a couple of mile stones to aim at.

The contract is dated the 18th Oct so I figure I could make 18 breakpoint day for different tasks. I will take different peoples advice on how to do things but I will only show them at certain levels of completeness. So here we go.

18th Nov. I would like to have transcribed the whole book into a first screenplay draft. I will hopefully have managed to transform thinking parts into visual interpretations and have a pretty coherent story. I imagine it will be far to long since the book is over 200 pages and a screenplay should only be about 95-120 pages.

18th Dec. Work on environment and person descriptions.

18th Jan. Make the conversations flow more naturally.

18th Feb. Correctly formatted according to screenplay standards and make sure I use correct and appropriate scene cuts.

18th Mar. Correct the structure according to the three acts and five points screenplay guidelines.

18th Apr. I will tweak and polish the first page to be interesting enough to capture the interest of a reader. Hopefully I will have a finished screenplay by my birthday on the 19th.