From Courtroom Battles to Captivating Stories: Vincent Scarsella’s Unexpected Journey Revealed
Ashley
What are some tips you can give us the differences between writing novels and writing screenplays and then turning those novels into screenplays, pairing stuff down. Maybe just talk about that process a little bit. How do you go about that? Do you create an outline when you have a novel, do you create an outline, then turn into a screenplay, you just start writing the screenplay. Just how does that go for you?
Vincent Scarsella
Well, as I said, I have to have a beginning and you end to write something that people are going to want to read, you better have a good beginning, something that’s going to pull them in immediately. And I need to have an ending. And I’ll outline roughly outline from beginning to end. Now the outline never ends up being what the final product looks like. But it’s a good guide and it gets you into the process of writing, and then it changes things come pop into your head that you didn’t anticipate. So that’s my essential process. I have to have a beginning and I have to have an end. That works for me or else I can’t do it. I can’t get into it. And in terms of the different formats, novel writing, prose writing, play writing, and screenplay writing are three very different formats. They’re very different things to write, I found. Because you know, prose, you’re being more descriptive. You have to be to build a world from your world building, whether it’s lawyers gone bad, the world of being a disciplinary counsel, play writing, you’re writing for an audience looking at actors perform on a stage, and film, you’re you have to be much more cinematic and briefer in writing your screenplay description. So you know, I’ve read various things about, you know, the page should be almost all white. When you write a screenplay, I don’t know if that’s, you know, something that you’ve also but so yeah, so and I, you know, to be a good writer, you’ve got to read a lot. And when I got into screenplay writing, especially back in 2022, before I met Tom, and we went on with the lawyers gone bad project. I was it was awful the things I was putting out, you know, but and then I started reading some screenplays, I went back and read The Godfather. There’s a great book, The Annotated Godfather, which gives you the screenplay plus stories underlying the screenplay, which is a great little tool. And I also read some other screenplays that, you know, that were out there by people who are great screen writers. And, and I sort of filtered in, you know, that good writing, you know, tends to filter in. And I’ve gotten better at it, not that it’s not that great, but I mean, I’ve gotten better at it. And some of my, you know, I entered a bunch of contests along the way and to get some feedback. And it’s been, frankly, I’ve gotten some positive, very positive feedback.
