Andrew+Mosquera's+Unfamiliar+Genre+Project+Reflection

Andrew Mosquera W. Tucker ENGL 408W 02/21/12

Reflection on the Unfamiliar Genre Project:

Screenplay

One big thing that I overlooked at the start of this project was the immensity of this work! I suppose I had overlooked the overarching lesson and focused on perfecting a far from perfect first shot at a draft. I have overlooked the modesty of this project and forgot the resulting grand skill of transferable method. More specific to the genre of screenplays, I overlooked the need for time to research the details of the real world that the writer imitates. Too many times I found myself afraid to embarrass myself by assuming some naivety about the world of criminal justice, and spending lots of time looking up the way things work in real life. Eventually, I had to plod ahead and make some assumptions, mistaken or not. I guess the writers of Law and Order must either have doctorates in criminal science and jurisprudence or a team of editors or consultants who feed them the facts. This genre demands mostly descriptive and analytical writing. The expository side of screenplays is the easy part: explaining what actions happen or where the camera should be. Being such, they are encouraged to be minimal but precise. The description is important for the successful production of the film. This is where a screenwriter has most liberty but he must defer to the liberty of the director. The analysis comes into play in the actual dialogue. This is the most difficult part. I had underestimated the difficulty of this, especially in the sub genre of mystery. A writer must first understand his plot in the simplest sense, then begin to analyze all of his characters' involvement in the plot. He must analyze how the plot makes each character act. Second, a writer must analyze how honest each character needs to be about their actions in the plot. Thirdly, a writer must analyze whether a character will speak about their actions, honestly or deceitfully, or whether they will keep quiet. Finally, a writer must analyze how the collective dialogue will make an impression or form an assumption for the viewers. This writing involves such intricacies of analysis that it cannot be accomplished by any deduction: a successful screenplay could only be the product of sheer intuition! This is a truly humbling experience, for I am pretty sure that I lack the talent necessary to make it in the Big Time. (This is probably why I resorted to so much Voice Over Narration.) Irony is fun though. It is essential to making an entertaining TV show. A master of irony will play on the two dimensions of image and word. The contradictions between what we see and what we hear are the funniest. This genre is primarily dialogue so Standard American English must give way very often to dialects, slang, Standard Lazy English, or to sum it all up, what one hears in speech. SAE gets a bad rap for the sake of appreciating dialect and spoken language but I believe that no one can become a master of dialogue until he masters Standard American English. Once a writer masters proper English, he can begin to appreciate the differences of speech and write anywhere along the spectrum of dialect. One ought to use SAE in the descriptive sections, but I have seen it (and I have tried it here) where screenwriters affect an easy tone directed to their production crew colleagues. The third distinction from SAE is the use of film jargon in the filming directions. This requires some second language acquisition! Should a writer abuse any of these conventions? This is already a very abusive genre. This is a form of commercial art which, at its lowest, takes the finest works of poetic fiction, and after reducing their IQ by 50 points attempts to prostitute their naked story! How nastily high-brow of me... While a screenwriter must abuse many standards of classic genres, he is under high economic pressure to refrain from the slightest abuse of the genre's own conventions. We all see the TV shows that start out with loud, strutting, obnoxious commercials promising epic seasons only to lose funding after two episodes. How many more raw screenplays are fed to the paper shredder even before they get a production contract? Only the best of the best make it. So screenwriters must have the talents first of all but secondly they cannot write something amazing in text but unfilmable. The conventions that make shows engaging, exciting, gripping, sexy, brand new, shocking, all of the buzz words... these conventions are of highest importance. Again, as with the example of Standard American English, only after mastering the conventions of screenplays, can a screenwriter begin to successfully break those rules for distinction. This was hard work. Lots of thinking involved. I noticed that I had to invent more characters than I anticipated. One last consideration is how funny it is that imaginative writing is so much at the mercy of the conventions of real life, as noted above. In this final draft, I tried to wax poetic and get wordy for my descriptions. I tried also to overuse camera cues in the effort of displaying mastery of these terms. So, in some ways including these, this is a rather unconventional draft. If I were trying to sell this draft I would minimize all of my description and probably delete all of the camera cues. Please pardon the tenuous plot for the sake of investing most of my writing in developing character. I think that there are many redundant cues (e.g. V.o. Bamonte) but these clarifications were added at the behest of my peer editors. At the heart of it all, my goal was to write something that could be envisioned on screen, gripping or not, conventional or not, consistent or not. This was the primary goal of my UGP. As always, feel free to rip into the work! I am well humbled enough now to understand my weakness as a writer.