Screenplays

When I attended Killer Nashville (www.killernashville.com) last weekend, I learned many things. One of the shockers to me was the length of screen plays. I attended a panel on tricks novelists can learn from screen plays. Screen plays are much shorter than novels. I heard over and over again that they average around 100 pages, but many times less. No wonder so many times the book is better than the movie! I hadn't realized how much less room there was in a screen play to get plot across.

A typical novel runs around 100,000 words, or around 400 typed Microsoft Word pages when double spaced and size 12 font.