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WeScreenplay Chats With Orson Scott Card On His Anonymous Contest Win

By Staff · April 6, 2017

The screenwriting community received quite the shock last month when WeScreenplay revealed the winners of their recent Feature contest. Nestled just behind the grand-prize winning FORGED by Kenlon Clark and Will Rubio was a name that instantly raised eyebrows: Orson Scott Card. Yes, you read that right. That’s the Orson Scott Card – Hugo Award winning author of Ender’s Game, whose impressive bibliography has attracted legions of devoted fans worldwide.

How’s that for a third act twist?

Submitted anonymously so as not to detract from other entrants, Scott Card’s latest award winner is a screenplay entitled MESA 1966, which depicts the circumstances surrounding the real life massacre of five at a beauty college in Mesa, Arizona. It’s ambitious, heavy stuff for a feature film, and it marks a striking departure, both in content and form, for an author whose name is more often associated with science fiction.

Why make the leap from heady science fiction to a small town true-crime story in the vain of In Cold Blood? Well, the writer used to live there, for one, making MESA 1966 something of a homecoming. In fact, WeScreenplay recently caught up with Mr. Scott Card for an in-depth and surprisingly candid interview that spans the author’s entire career – from his earliest days as a novelist, to his first forays into screenwriting, including his attempts at adapting Ender’s Game.

Check out a few of the highlights below:

On Dialogue:

“Forget trying to make the characters “sound” different from each other.  All the dialogue is going to come out of your head, so it’s all going to sound like you.  That hasn’t hurt Woody Allen or Neil Simon, and it won’t hurt you.  If you’re thinking about the dialogue, consciously shaping it, it’ll come out dead on the page.”

On Hearing Your Work Read Back to You: 

“You never know what you’ve written till you hear someone else read it aloud — cold.  Under such circumstances, if there is an incorrect or incoherent reading, they’ll find it!

Creating In-Depth Characters

“The illusion of a “full life” is not time- or space-consuming.  You merely make sure you have your character respond to events and words in ways that show that he or she doesn’t hear those words or see those events the same way everybody else does.  This implies that the character has had experiences we’ll never see, that make them respond in an individual way.”

Screenplays versus Novels:

“The problem of coming up with a story that fits the requirements of a medium in which every page is a minute and every minute is a million dollars.  The story has to be short.  You have to tell it without ever getting inside the characters’ heads, where only novelists can go.  In film, you only know people by what they do and what they say, and in many cases, the more they talk the less the audience likes them.”

On Adapting Enders Game:

“My early drafts were crippled by my having taken to heart the idea that movie scripts are all about the action, with as little dialogue as possible… But movies are pretty lousy if none of the scenes has room to breathe, or if crucial scenes are missing because the writer never wrote them.”

On The Idea For MESA 1966:

“What worked for me was that I really lived in Mesa at that time, I heard about the murderer, Robert Smith, from friends at the high school we both attended (I didn’t actually know him), and I could use this painful event as the center around which to structure a story based, to a slight degree, on my own mother and some of us kids.”

The entire interview is worth a read — if not for the stranger-than-fiction circumstances surrounding the author’s anonymous contest win, than for the fact that he clearly knows a thing or two about the craft. The discussion is filled with a career’s worth of insights on the writing process, along with a frank and revealing look at what it means to be a screenwriter in an increasingly risk-averse, bottom-line driven industry. The full piece can be found here.