Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work: Transcribe Screenplays
If it worked for Felix Mendelssohn and F. Scott Fitzgerald…
If it worked for Felix Mendelssohn and F. Scott Fitzgerald…
Perhaps you’ve heard stories about how a young Felix Mendelssohn transcribed note for note musical scores by Johann Sebastian Bach, just to get the feel of how Bach wrote music.
Or about how F. Scott Fitzgerald transcribed the novels of writers he admired such as Charles Dickens to get the feel of their writing.
Why not do the same thing with screenplays?
If you’re struggling with any of the following:
- How to handle scene description
- How to manage transitions between scenes
- How to balance action and dialogue within scenes
- How much scene description is too much / too little
- How to write realistic dialogue
- How to use Scene Headings and Shots
- How to write a series of scenes, series of shots, and montage
You can read screenplays. But what about typing them — word for word?
An anecdote. In my quest to accumulate screenplays of my favorite movies, some years ago I commented in one of my screenwriting classes that I couldn’t find a script online for To Kill a Mockingbird.
Some months later, I received a PDF of the script via email. One of my students had purchased a hard copy of the script, then typed it up word for word in Final Draft, made a PDF of it, and sent it to me. And here’s the thing: She had quite positive comments about the transcription process, noting she felt like she understood the story much better than before having typed it out word for word.
Quite a learning experience!
Besides if it worked for Mendelssohn and Fitzgerald, don’t you think it could work for you, too?
This has been another edition of Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work.
For more articles in the Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work series, go here.