Ramblings of a Splatterpunk

It has taken a while, but the screenplay for Redress finally crept across the 100 page mark last night. My target length for the script is about 130 pages for this draft and then I plan to go back and trim the fat back to about 115 pages.

For those of you following me on Twitter you may recall I posted a photo of a book called How Not to Write a Screenplay. I bought the book mainly as a reference for scripting items like flashbacks and dream sequences. It also has some great tips for trimming the fat and rewording scenes into the basics while using examples from other screenplays. I tend to be extremely descriptive when I write, so it was a good booster for me and really drove home a few points.

Now that I have my head wrapped around the story more, I’m starting to make things a little more uniform and adding explanations for things that were initially kind of like WTF? I have been having fun adding new frights and gore to the story and developing the characters further along the way. I’m at the point where my characters are starting to control the story so I find myself saying “Oh, Henry wouldn’t do that…” so then I have to forcibly push him in the direction I want with violence or horror. One thing the first draft lacked was a high enough body count for my satisfaction. I don’t want to start dropping corpses like Jason Voorhees on a mushroom bender, but there is an underlying crime story plot, so I’ve started showing glimpses of the violent nature of the crimes rather than lightly eluding to them after the fact. We see the girl get murdered rather than simply mention it in a news report; stuff like that.

The final piece of the puzzle I have plugged in are some the physical manifestations of the main tormented spirit. I never wanted to come out and say there is a haunting going on, but I wanted to explore how somebody battling with stress and nightmares may easily brush of some of the more subtle tendencies of a haunting as coincidence.

-DQ