SILVANO WILLIAM
 SILVANO WILLIAMS
Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
In an old little town just south of Austin called Buda, Texas. Your script stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your story and why did you write a script instead of a short story or a novel? The screenplay is adapted from my original novella, Spoon-fed Addiction, which I wrote in 1995 — so in a way, this story has been with me for thirty years. I wrote the novella as a catharsis and confession, almost a way of processing real pain from my own life. Traumas I lived through, and damage I caused by passing that pain on to people who trusted me. The decision to adapt it into a screenplay came from wanting to show the story from the outside in. The novella lives inside Adiran's head — it's his confession. But the script gave me the chance to show what he looks like to the world, and more importantly, to give the shadows a physical presence. In the novella they are atmosphere. On screen, they are a character — an entity that moves, chooses, and feeds. That distinction changed everything about how I understood my own story. How long did it take you to write your script...and what is your writing process? Do you outline...use index cards...white board...or just start with FADE IN? Almost a year, though in some ways it took thirty. I didn't outline in the traditional sense — I had the novella as my blueprint, but the process of translating prose into screenplay format forced me to interrogate every scene. What survives the page when you strip away internal monologue? What has to be shown instead of felt? Most of my time was spent streamlining, finding where the prose was doing too much work that the camera could handle instead, and identifying scenes that needed to exist visually that I had only implied in the book. Revisiting something I wrote at twenty-one with the eyes I have now was uncomfortable and necessary. I had to earn the right to tell this story all over again. What is your ultimate ambition as a writer? To write something that makes a person feel less alone in their worst moment. In the case of Spoon-fed Addiction, the message is that trauma spreads — to those we love, without our permission, sometimes without our awareness. Untreated, it infects everything it touches. I know that firsthand. If one person reads this or watches it and thinks, that's me, and I didn't know I was doing it — and then decides to get help, or reaches out to someone they hurt, or simply stops blaming themselves for something that was handed to them — then I've done my job. That's the message I want repeated. Not my name. The message. Was your entry at The Wiki Screenplay Contest a full script or “the first ten pages”? Why did you make that choice? I submitted the full screenplay feature because my intent was to receive feedback on it to continue polishing it and finalize it. It confirmed what needed to stay and revealed what I'd been too close to see. What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show...and why? My all-time favorite will always be Star Wars. When I watched it as a child, it did something I didn't have language for at the time — it made me believe I could disappear into a story. That the world I was sitting in could just stop existing for two hours and something better, stranger, and truer could take its place. That's what I want Spoon-fed Addiction to do, but in reverse. Instead of transporting you to a galaxy far away, I want to pull you into the darkest room of someone's interior life — and have you recognize it. Have you think: I've been in that room. I know what lives in those shadows. What advice do you have for writers hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as you have? Don’t stop because you stumbled. Use the feedback you receive to find out what you are missing, or what the reader is missing. Don’t take feedback personally, even when it is not fully applicable to what you are intending. Every feedback helps, so just figure out why you are getting any negative feedback and use that to power your creativity even more. Some of the best scene ideas came from having to add or explain something that a reader did not connect with. Then keep writing and submitting! What else are you working on that the world needs to know about? The Spoon-fed Addiction audiobook is in development, and I'm finishing the second edition of the novella, which has been genuinely transformed by the screenplay process. Writing for the screen forced me to make decisions I had been avoiding on the page for years — tighter pacing, harder scenes, less hiding behind prose. The book is better for it. I'm also continuing The CW Chronicles, a separate series where I'm currently writing the second book. It lives in a very different world than Spoon-fed Addiction, but the same question drives it: what do people carry, and what does that cost everyone around them? And if anyone asks — yes, I do think Spoon-fed Addiction deserves to be made. I wrote it to be seen. Trauma is a shadow monster that stalks us all, and this is one of its origin stories… |
