Screenwriting: Doing the Dirty Work

Screenwriting to me has almost become something painful to do, or at least in this short format. I cannot see myself at all able to shorten what I have written to the one or two scenes that was suggested to me in the workshop on friday. I cannot stress enough how hard it is for me to chop up the story I am wishing to portray. I do think that Steve's points are valid and that his advice is quite helpful to me as a writer in general, it just seems to be the format within which we are expected to write. In perfect honesty, it surprised me how short the other scripts were and how much they were just a clip and not a story. I think this is my biggest problem. I have always written in long format. My poems take up pages and pages, my stories evolve into idea for novels and despite learning a lot about screen writing, I can hardly bring myself to hack up the story from what it is.

The story itself is a personal story with names changed and the ages advanced, and even that was hard, all of the names reference the original names and the advancement was awkward for me to write. Im not saying that this was something that I disliked, I enjoyed retelling something that I had been yerning to write for quite some time. I simply wish I had not been limited by time and by length to tell this story. In hindsight I should have chosen another story but I do feel that maybe with some tweaking and some getting used to I can fix my story to fit the format.

I need to reach a level in my writing where I am comfortable in many genres or style as opposed to one. The shortness and conciseness of Jack's story as well as Molly's was quite impressive and I feel that is something I need to get used to. I think I need to change myself in some way. I know there is a point that I need to get to, I'm just not sure when or by what means of getting there are necessary.