Listening to Scripts vs. Reading Them
I have to admit, I was kind of paranoid about the fact that people were listening to the scripts, but I also want to make sure I am giving myself the best shot. So how would I tweak my writing knowing that someone is listening?
I'm a pretty basic writer. I try to keep my action lines sparse, my dialogue snappy, and make my scenes transition with some sort of flow. The first thing I did when I heard this was listen to one of my screenplays.
I felt like it sounded okay? Truly, it was hard to judge. But I understood the appeal. You can also speed up the voice, and I found it went played back about 1.5 times the speed I feel like people typically read at, and I also liked that I could walk around the house and do chores while I listened.
Something I noticed that did stood out was that typos are much more glaring. It would throw the whole sentence off, and then I would bump out of the story to try to figure out what was supposed to be there.
Now, I usually pay to have my scripts spell-checked, so I'm personally less afraid of that as a concern, but it is something to think about. Outside of that, I'll say that long action scenes and pages multiple pages without dialogue tend to get tedious. I felt like they read better on the page. but also, they made me conscious of how much I could cut down later, just to get the point across.
Finally, the robot voices were boring. But I know a few people who paid a premium for services that would assign different robot voices to different characters. I listened to those, and they were much better.
At the end of the day, I think these were all generally good lessons to know.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
