Are stories allowed to be written in the form of a TV/movie script

[ChuckWolf]

Thinking about doing a story about the pilot script of a fictitious failed and super-explicit late 80's sitcom.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Yes, pretty much anything goes. Just think about if people will actually want to read something in that form, or rather how you grab them early enough that they keep reading.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

I did a section of a story that way once.

Dilara in the Harem, Ch 2. Not a masterpiece or anything but proof of concept.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

Thinking about doing a story about the pilot script of a fictitious failed and super-explicit late 80's sitcom.

I’ve been considering a script format as well, as an excerpt to include in a typical story. For your approach, would you be formatting it like a script, with the center align, such as below:

JOHN
I like dogs!

JILL
Good for you.

​

Or would be doing a more basic version with left align, with a name followed by a colon, then dialogue?

John: I like dogs!

Jill: Good for you.


If the former, it’d take a hell of a lot of HTML tags! I’d want to see if another writer has tackled it.

 

[MrPixel]

Every play script I have read, which is not many, uses the left-justified format with colon delineation, and narrative paragraphs for scene setups. I'm sure there are examples of TV/movie scripts out there, so I'd search to see if you can find one.

That format would be useful for most of my writing, which is dialog-heavy with groups of characters. But I'll stick with (admittedly awkward) dialog tags.

 

[ChuckWolf]

I’ve been considering a script format as well, as an excerpt to include in a typical story. For your approach, would you be formatting it like a script, with the center align, such as below:

JOHN
I like dogs!

JILL
Good for you.

​

Or would be doing a more basic version with left align, with a name followed by a colon, then dialogue?

John: I like dogs!

Jill: Good for you.


If the former, it’d take a hell of a lot of HTML tags! I’d want to see if another writer has tackled it.

Yeah, that's a good point.

The former looks better, but I'm not looking to spend a lot of time on that, so definitely the latter.

This WIP is on the absolute bottom of my to-do list (I already have 16 works in my draft folder, which I'm slowly getting to).

 

[MrPixel]

The former looks better,

Not on a wide screen. It looks lost more than anything else. Never been a fan of centering 'cept for major headings.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

Not on a wide screen. It looks lost more than anything else. Never been a fan of centering 'cept for major headings.

Good point. On a phone, I’d imagine it’d look more natural. And, depending on the Lit reader’s font settings, the centered format may look differently than intended by the author.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Every play script I have read, which is not many, uses the left-justified format with colon delineation, and narrative paragraphs for scene setups. I'm sure there are examples of TV/movie scripts out there, so I'd search to see if you can find one.

That format would be useful for most of my writing, which is dialog-heavy with groups of characters. But I'll stick with (admittedly awkward) dialog tags.

I don't think you need to follow screenwriting rules exactly on Lit. (I think they're pretty strict.) Also, scripts are supposed to take time into account - how long each scene will be, how long the movie or episode will be. When I experimented with scripts, I ignored most of that because, well because it didn't matter to me. Thus I wound up with one movie that probably would have been five hours long if filmed as I wrote it. Okay, it was a mini-series! (Is Berlin Alexanderplatz a movie or a mini-series? It was released in both formats I think.)

Also, I didn't have the formats for stage directions or camera angles, which may or not be ignored by the director. Real scripts are kind of choppy to read. They appear as surprisingly short pieces of dialogue with constant instructions. ("Interior: Hill House dining room, night.") Also, really large set pieces are described briefly at times. That's for the production crews to figure out. ("USS Arizona blows up and debris come down everywhere.")

It was still fun to write a lot of dialogue.

 

[JayHawnee]

Yes, publishing scripts is possible, but it has it's perks. I published the first part of my series "Welcome to Hawnee" initially in script format, but soon expanded it into continuous text.

I think, that especially for this format one needs a lot of knowledge to pull it off:

JOHN
I like dogs!

JILL
Good for you.

I actually didn't manage it (with left align, instead of center), despite I tried using <br>-Tags. I later read, that the trick probably is to put it in the HTML-Editor like that:

JOHN<br>I like dogs!

JILL<br>Good for you.


instead of:

JOHN<br>
I like dogs!

JILL<br>
Good for you.

else it ignores the <br> tags, but I never tried it. I used something similar to the latter one to publish and it looked beautiful in the preview window, but as soon as it was published, it looked like:


JOHN

I like dogs!

JILL

Good for you!


What's awful to read (and probably gets you a lot of negative feedback for the format alone). So in general I think it's better to publish it as follows:

JOHN: I like dogs!

JILL: Good for you!

since any corrections will take much longer to be published than the initial submission (2 weeks+ vs. 2 - 3 days).

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

While the world of TV production is a lot more dogmatic about the script format than in film, in the real world there’s a lot more leeway than you might imagine when it comes to format. Some of the greatest films ever made were based on a mere paragraph of text (Rossellini) or a sing-song around the piano in the morning (Leo McCarey). In other words, don’t sweat things like justification etc. It’s really not that important for authenticity.

To my mind, the biggest difference between a film script and the written novel or short story is that, in a good script at least, there is zero description of how an actor is to play the scene or what a character might be thinking.

And that’s because a script is a tool for production: it gives only the most basic information for the people on set to apply their own skills and take on the material.

This makes a script particularly dependent on the imagination of the reader. Could be an interesting format for erotica…

 

[gunhilltrain]

While the world of TV production is a lot more dogmatic about the script format than in film, in the real world there’s a lot more leeway than you might imagine when it comes to format. Some of the greatest films ever made were based on a mere paragraph of text (Rossellini) or a sing-song around the piano in the morning (Leo McCarey). In other words, don’t sweat things like justification etc. It’s really not that important for authenticity.

To my mind, the biggest difference between a film script and the written novel or short story is that, in a good script at least, there is zero description of how an actor is to play the scene or what a character might be thinking.

And that’s because a script is a tool for production: it gives only the most basic information for the people on set to apply their own skills and take on the material.

This makes a script particularly dependent on the imagination of the reader. Could be an interesting format for erotica…

I think the OP is mainly interested in submitting his script to Lit. If he was serious about shopping in around to studios or talent agencies, he'd do best to follow standard script formats. There are slush piles of these things around Hollywood and elsewhere, and he had better make the format look right if there is any chance that it will read.

Also, I have seen some scripts online back when I was experimenting with them. One of them was the 1999 version of The Haunting. I thought it was such a terrible movie that I might as well see if I could do better. Anyway, there is quite a bit of how the actor might play the scene and what the character might be thinking. The director did follow some of that. The shooting script is at:

https://sfy.ru/?script=haunting_1999

Anyway, I mostly ignored standard format too. I knew there was no chance I'd ever sell it, so I just did what I wanted.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

I think the OP is mainly interested in submitting his script to Lit. If he was serious about shopping in around to studios or talent agencies, he'd do best to follow standard script formats. There are slush piles of these things around Hollywood and elsewhere, and he had better make the format look right if there is any chance that it will read.

Also, I have seen some scripts online back when I was experimenting with them. One of them was the 1999 version of The Haunting. I thought it was such a terrible movie that I might as well see if I could do better. Anyway, there is quite a bit of how the actor might play the scene and what the character might be thinking. The director did follow some of that. The shooting script is at:

https://sfy.ru/?script=haunting_1999

Anyway, I mostly ignored standard format too. I knew there was no chance I'd ever sell it, so I just did what I wanted.

Yes, it was pretty clear to me that his ‘super explicit sit-com’ was destined for this website and not actually the inboxes of CAA!

Good luck to him though!