what is the procedure of the organization of a story?

Question

I am writing 5 civil war stories: Mark Geyser at the Wilderness, The Battle of Old Men and Young Boys, Promotion at the Crater, Weldon Railroad in the Sun, Amputation at Five Forks, and 1 Reconstruction story: The Marriage of Chris and Samantha during Reconstruction. And, I need to know the procedure on how to organize my stories for a movie that will be based on the books: Death in the Trenches: Filmed in Petersburg, Virginia, and the part Mark Geyser in the Wilderness, filmed wherever there is just brush, wood, bark, and limbs.

Answer 1

I think first write up the plot, do some freewriting to see what you can come up with. Build and flesh out your characters, put them in place in your mind, so that when you write you will know what they would do in a certain situation. Some writers I've heard, just write like that and wait and see what happens at the end. Others have the ending already figured out, though.

Answer 2

I would just worry about getting the stories down on paper first before you worry about how they are going to be organized. They won't necessarily end up in their final form until you are editing, anyway.

Most of the writers I know will end up moving around entire scenes within their writing, once they have the whole thing down. One suggestion is to write a short summary of each scene on an index card, then you can shuffle them around and put them in order as they work best! Just because you wrote things in one order when you began doesn't mean that it is where they should end up.

There are a ton of excellent reference books on screenwriting out there. Head to your local public library and browse through a few to see what kind of format the writing will need to be in.

Answer 3

Have you got contracts for all this, or is it all speculative?
If you're just working on your own, you might do better to finish one story to begin with. Then try to market that one. Now write the second, and try to market it. Etc.
Once you have all five books in place, take a course in scriptwriting, because it is a very special type of writing, and is VERY different than book writing.
Good luck. You certainly are ambitious.

Answer 4

You might want to work collaboratively with a scriptwriter if you don't know anything about writing for screen, or you could learn how to do it.