Journey From Writing Screenplays

to Novels Can Be A Tough One

After writing screenplays for several years, and abandoning my career as a novelist after two publications, the transition back was very difficult and painful. Screenwriting and novel writing are two different animals. Yes, both tell a story, but a movie is a story told in pictures with words. A novel is a story told in words.

In screenwriting the rule of thumb is to get into a scene as quickly as possible and get out as fast as you can. A friend who is a writer/director, told me it was in the film editing room when he cut his movie that he really saw how much a movie is slowed down by ignoring this rule.

No matter how powerful a scene you have setup, say with two characters in strong conflict with snappy dialogue, in films you rarely can get away with “running” it as long as you want. The scene becomes too “talky.”

With that mindset, when I returned to writing novels I found it difficult to give myself the freedom to stay with a scene for as long as it was going good. The first draft of “The Hurting Game” was short, very tight and made for a quick, breezy read. But as Gertrude Stein once said about her native city of Oakland, “There’s no there there.” Same held for my novel.

The first of what would eventually grow to be over 50 drafts in several major reconstructions simply didn’t have enough meat on the bones. When I wrote screenplays, I did so with a more experienced partner in L.A., and if I wrote a scene that ran long, I would be scolded. That scolding voice stayed in my head for at least five or six drafts of “The Hurting Game.” Now, four books later, if a scene is going good, I give it free reign, even if it runs pages.

Screenwriting and novel writing are not completely incompatible. Two good lessons a novelist can take away from screenwriting is the use of character arc, and making sure each scene advances the story. In a good movie, characters change from beginning to end, or go through their arc. Audiences like to see a person evolve over the course of time. Same holds true for novels, and of course in “real life.” If characters in my book are interacting with each, then it stands to reason they will eventually be changed by each other.  Of course story action also changes people: if you put a character through a life threatening scene, or have a loved one die, they will be altered in some way, too.  

Any scene in a screenplay--no matter how sensational it is--should be discarded if it doesn’t advance the story.  If you leave it in, it becomes a “set piece,” something that exists for its own good, not the good of the story. I have employed that rule in my novel writing, and it really improves the book.

Screenwriting also teaches you economy. Description in screenplays is short and there just to set the scene. The real “description” comes later in the filming when a director chooses what to put in a scene in terms of color scheme, positioning of characters and many other creative choices. As a result,  my  books don’t have an excess of description. I rely more on dialogue. If, for example, a scene takes place in a public park, it is not necessary to draw a full, in depth portrait of that park. You are writing a novel, not a travelogue. Too many times in reading the work of other writers I run into a passage with an excess of description, and skip over it and get to the dialogue or action that it is supposed to be setting up.

My rule for description was actually learned early in my writing life from reading something about Hemingway’s learning curve. He said he acquired his clipped style by studying the paintings of the “pointillism” school of art, where a short brush stroke or a dot would imply a person or a tree and so on. In novels, include just the “brush strokes” that set the scene and nothing more.

They say in films action defines character, not words, and that holds true for novels and in real life. A person can tell you about themselves all they want, but the truth lies in what they do during the course of the story or life. As the old adage goes, action speaks louder than words.

In “The Hurting Game,” a private investigator with a somewhat jaded view of life (outside of his family), is thrown together with a young boxer who plays by the rules and sees life through rose colored glasses. The only thing they appear to have in common at first is their goal: find the killer. By the end of the book, however, the boxer and the PI discover they have several things in common. The boxer eventually “moves” a few feet closer to being like the PI, and vice verse.

In one of my favorite scenes, the PI, Frank Boff, tells the boxer, Danny Cullen, his life philosophy (indulge me in my excerpt):

“You want the ‘Boff Theory on How to Get Through Life?’”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I start with one basic assumption--all people suck and are out to screw you. That way you aren’t aggravated when it happens. The bonus with my theory is when you meet someone who doesn’t suck or try to screw you, like my wife, then you feel blessed and never complain about them, even when they do something you don’t like.”

“Most people go under the assumption human beings are basically good.”

“That’s because a lot of them listen to their priests, comical considering the penguins are among the most perverse human beings on earth. I’m not just talking about the child molesters. I mean what kind of man chooses never to have sex with a woman? That’s sick.”

“They call it devotion to God.”

“Why would God want priests to keep their peckers in their pants? Give me one good reason. Fact is God wants people to get laid, because that’s how the human species propagates. Ministers claim to have channels to God, yet they marry and lead relatively normal lives. So do rabbis. It makes no sense God would tell only priests not to get their dicks wet. Bottom line, if there is a God he’s the only one more clever and diabolical than me.”

“You’ll never get into heaven with that attitude.”

“Is that where you think you’ll be going?”

“I like to think so.”

“You love to box, right? Do you think they have boxing in heaven? What are you going to do up there to kill time? Play the harp? From what I’ve observed, you have no outside interests, everything is boxing. The reality is heaven is a pipe dream. Nobody in the history of Man has gone through the pearly gates and come back and given us the skinny on what they do there all day without sex, sports, movies and all the other things we love here on earth. This life is ‘The Big Show,’ so enjoy it before the final curtain comes down. That’s why I tell you not to take things so seriously. If there was a trial to prove the existence of heaven and twelve priests were on the jury, I guarantee I could convince them there isn’t any evidentiary way to show beyond a reasonable doubt there is such a place. Face it Cullen, when you die the only place you’re going is into the ground or an urn.” 

Cullen is changed by that scene, and eventually so will Boff.

Instead of forgetting about my period writing screenplays, I have taken the best of what I learned and used it in my novels. Not a bad life lesson in general, now is it?