Timothy's Thoughts

M ark this one down in the you’ve got to be kidding me category. Thomas Nelson has announced that they are rebranding Book Review Bloggers as BookSneeze. I know Mike Hyatt is a fan of Seth Godin and all of that, but this takes the cake. The name doesn’t fit the image I have of Thomas Nelson. When I think of Thomas Nelson, I think of a old respectable company. I think of Bibles. I think of quality. What I don’t think of is snot coming out of my nose—until now. I joined Book Review Bloggers and review a few books through that program. I have one book that I haven’t had time to review. I was thinking of rushing through it and writing a review, but with the name change, I might just forget it. (Thomas Nelson, you can have the book back, if you want it. I would just as soon never say that I am reviewing a book through the BookSneeze program.) 

N ovelists aren’t writing a screenplay. Perhaps we have overlooked some of the subtleties of that statement. I’ve read a few books on writing screenplays and the storyboard is king. I’ve tried storyboarding a novel and while it works to some extent, I have found it easier to use mind mapping software to generate an outline. However, if I were to write a screenplay, I could see myself going the other way. I might use the mind mapping software, but I might then want to move it over to a storyboard. While a story is a story is a story, we must conclude that there are some differences in novel writing from writing screenplays. We talk about scenes in novels, but I think this may be the heart of the differences between a novel and a screenplay. In a screenplay, you have to have a scene. The scene defines who the players will be, the shooting location, the lighting requirements and a number of other things. There are some tricks in filmmaking that may require more than one location for a sce...