What we learn from screenwriting

Writing screenplays is a very good discipline for other forms of writing. You have to get off the mark quickly with a screenplay: you don’t have fifty pages to introduce your characters and setting and lay out the tracks of your story. If you haven’t hooked your audience within the first ten minutes, you’ve almost certainly lost them. I’ve seen a lot of blogs on FB and other such platforms that seem to treat the structural model for screenplays as a kind of universal template for creative writing: hook the audience, introduce the main characters, get to the 1st Act climax, then on into complications and reversals of fortune in the 2nd Act, before arriving at the climax which leads into the denouement and resolution of all problems in the 3rd Act.
All well and good. Or is it? The model fits the screenplay so well that many may be unaware that it doesn’t really suit other forms of writing with the same degree of snugness. Our lack of awareness may partly stem from how much time we set aside for the different (and often competing) forms of entertainment available to us in the 21st century. It’s a no-brainer that more people watch films and box-sets of series on TV than read the novels of Trollope or Dickens. If I read a Dickens novel it usually takes me a month or three, whereas I can watch even a fairly longish film in 2 – 3 hours.
The novel format is more akin to symphonic music with its various movements, slow or lively, and its carrying over of thematic material by way of recurring leitmotivs and tropes. The novel has, to a large degree, suffered with the rise of film as both a commercial and artistic entity. I think it’s fair to say that cinema is one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century. Yet, if we look back to the early days of cinema, film didn’t seem then to have the depth and resonance of the novel. Take a look at the year 1916, for a comparison of the best that cinema was putting out to the public and, on the other hand, what novelists were creating. On December 29, 1916, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published -a ground breaking work of Modernism, taking us into the heart and soul of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus. By contrast, D. W. Griffith released Intolerance which at just over 2.5 hours isn’t the most indulgent of silent movies. But it relies almost entirely on its spectacular sets and lavish design. I doubt very much whether a viewer of today would be able to digest it all at one go. He or she might be able to take it in on a DVD in manageable bites. But it would still be a hard sell to anyone below the age of fifty!
So, look back now to the opening sentence of this blog. Why do I say that writing screenplays is a very good discipline? I say this because once film studios had adapted to sound, and actors became comfortable with a naturalistic style in front of the camera, then a different sort of movie emerged that began to match (in its own way) what novels had been doing for the previous two centuries. There was a creative blossoming that brought great screenplays to Hollywood and captured the imagination and hearts of millions. And writers did this by creating scenes that made a host of total strangers sitting in darkened rooms feel the anguish and pain or deep joy of the heroes and heroines in their stories. This is why we write: through empathy to reach out to others, complete strangers, and make them burn with a passion to see justice done, to have a wrong righted, to see love triumph and evil cast down.
I had my first novel (all things must pass) published in late October 2021. The curious history of this piece is that the first part of it was written as long ago as 2005. In 2019 I had this first part published as a kind of chapbook and showed this to two very good friends of mine. Thankfully, they both liked it very much and encouraged me to continue the story and make it a novel. I hadn’t really considered doing this until this point. What I had been doing in the intervening years between 2005 and 2019 was writing short film scripts and a couple of feature-length scripts. In September 2019 I won an Empire Award for The Last Days of John Wilkes Booth at the New York Screenplay Contest. So, I had been making progress in my screenwriting and it was the hard graft that I had put into these screenplays that came to my aid as I turned to consider extending the story that would eventually become my first novel.
It’s hard coming back cold to a piece of writing that you let go of nearly a decade and a half ago. But I had two things to fall back on to crank the old motor into motion: my own life experiences and the experience of writing scene after scene in screenplays. I knew I had to take my protagonist, Martin Wilson, into new territory and challenge him if he was going to be able to change and adapt and move the story forward. This is what happens to us in life: we move from the family home and we have to make a life for ourselves. It isn’t ever straightforward and simple. There are setbacks and complications, just as in a story. So, I had an overarching trajectory for Martin’s story and as I read and re-read that long short story which would become the first part of the novel, I began to dimly see how the story could progress.
But here one of the great differences between novel writing and screenwriting starts to reveal itself. Unlike in a screenplay, where you can sketch out virtually every scene before you write a word of dialogue, the scenes in a novel can be of such varying length and contain such a wealth of ideas that you never really have quite the same degree of control over where the novel is heading as you do with a screenplay. You can get so surprised about the direction that your novel is taking that you may wonder from which part of your subconscious a particular character or sequence of images emerged. The thing is that with a novel you (the writer) are everything: director, cameraman, actors, and puppet master! In a screenplay you mustn’t describe the scene in too much detail. That glorious sunset you spend half an hour creating may be washed out in a thunderstorm as the cameras turn over. I can see Bogie standing in front of a fireplace as he talks to Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Masltese Falcon, but don’t ask me to give a detailed description of the room.
Perhaps the greatest bit of advice to writers was given by Aristotle nearly 2,500 years ago: a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can have a rush of inspiration and be like a momentary maniac or drunkard trying to get that beginning down on paper (or into your computer). But once that rush of inspiration has left you (and it always does!) then you have to fall back on hard graft and a knowledge of structure -what scenes are meaningful, what scenes push the story forward? This is where screenwriting can be of great assistance. There is no room in a screenplay for pretty scenes that do not support and advance the story. As one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century (William Faulkner) is reputed to have said: “You must kill your darlings.” In other words, you may have written a purple passage of prose but if it jars with the rest of the story or indeed impedes that story -cut it out! It is surely no accident that Faulkner worked in Hollywood for a number of years as a screenwriter.

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