Is writing changing?

Our eager embrace of a brand new verb — to text — speaks volumes. We’re rapidly moving away from our old linear form of writing and reading, in which ideas and narratives wended their way across many pages, to a much more compressed, nonlinear form. What we’ve learned about digital media is that, even as they promote the transmission of writing, they shatter writing into little, utilitarian fragments. They turn stories into snippets. They transform prose and poetry into quick, scattered bursts of text.

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If this is true, if writing is becoming more compressed, then a written storytelling form already exists to meet this change: the screenplay! One of the first lessons I teach my students is that the screenplay is not a literary form, it's a blueprint for a movie. Which in the marketplace today is absolutely true. But what if the screenplay became a literary form?

Look at David Hare's screenplay The Hours, adapting the novel. It is, IMHO, not only a literary document, it is literature. Of course, in the spec screenplay market in which beginning screenwriters are forced, a script like this would never get read. Pro's get to write with more freedom because they are an investment, they get paid BEFORE they write! There is no competition except against, perhaps, some ideal script in the producer's mind. But Hare's script deserves to be read, not as a blueprint for a movie, but as a work for its own sake.

Screenplays could, in a rushed world preferring concise text to verbosity, become a primary READING form, a major storytelling form. No one reads screenplays now except screenwriters and wannabe screenwriters. But this could change.

SCENARIO, "the magazine of screenwriting art," tried to address this but made the mistake of over-producing the product, creating an expensive coffee table book, not a handy reading journal. I think the times are right for a new attempt, less glossy and more aimed at portability, a readers' experience. Maybe even an electronic journal to be read on Kindle and iphones.

Screenplays are a reading form as yet undiscovered by the masses. But the potential is huge because they are concise, they deliver big stories in little time, little reading investment.

If I were younger, much younger, this definitely is a project I'd look into, moving screenplays to the masses as a READING form. Maybe the format would have to be tweaked a bit, into something less rigorous than the formal screenplay format. But the concise language, the ability to tell big stories in few words, these appear to be part of the same thing happening in the culture.

Screenplays read by the masses. Somebody should run with this.