Genre Feeding Genre: A Novelist's Adventures in Screenwriting

Photo by Mason Kimbarovsky on Unsplash

I never considered myself an obsessive compulsive writer until I was told on the first day of Grub Street’s intro to screenwriting class that much of the world building I love to do as a novelist was an unnecessary drag on the narrative flow of my screenplay.

What do you mean you don’t need to know the exact shade of rust in the carpeting in the hallway? Are you absolutely sure my character-specific similes won’t help the director set the movie’s tone? And who are these so-called actors and directors to want space in my story to superimpose their visions onto my work?

“Think of the screenplay as a blueprint for a movie,” instructor Cheryl Eagan Donovan patiently explained while my inner novelist hyperventilated in panic. I nodded. I smiled. But inside I was a two-year-old rattling off question after question:

How do I show backstory in a script?

Summarize scenes?

And without “he said” and “she said” how on earth do I regulate the dialogue’s rhythm?

Where novelists have the luxury of telling a story by weaving between external action and lyrical detours into their character’s minds, screenwriters have to unfurl their stories visually If the screenwriter wants an emotion or thought in the script, then she better find a way to turn it into something the reader can see.

Which is just the fancy way of saying that studying screenwriting this winter has been a bit of a boot camp for my show-don’t-tell muscle starting with the way my commanding officer kicked away my favorite fiction crutches—backstory and those precious lyrical detours inside a character’s mind.

You could say I was grumpier than a cat in a bath.

Except if you’re a screenwriter you probably wouldn’t.

Because there’s not much call for similes in a script.

Harumph and phooey.

But a funny thing happened a few weeks into this ten-week writing class. I pulled up my novel’s opening chapter, looked at it through the eyes of a (very, very novice) screenwriter, and asked myself one very simple question: what  would an audience see if this chapter were a few minutes of a movie instead of a novel?

When the truest answer was not a whole hairy heck of a lot, I kicked away my own damn crutches and reimagined the chapter. Then I sat back and had the first of two I’ll-be-damned moments—after more revisions than I care to count, I actually thought the chapter might be finished.

The second I’ll-be-damned moment came when I called up the working draft of my script and realized the little story I’d dreamed up to have some fun learning screenwriting had exploded into the full story of a character I really want to spend some time with. Working in a genre that I essentially thought of as play, I found myself fearlessly tackling themes I’d avoided in my fiction. And suddenly I’m working on a movie I really believe in.

But there’s a problem.

My atrophied mover and shaker muscles have about the same chance of taking root in let-me-tell-ya Hollywood as a water lily has of rooting in the Mojave (this is an essay, not a screenplay—just let me have my precious similes!).

Plus, there’s the altitude sickness I already have from trying to reach the summit of Published Novel Peak. The last thing I want to do now is start trekking up Mount Movie Magic.

But given that I spend most of my writing time slogging through the meticulousness required of a late novel revision, I’m kind of loving the freedom of being a beginner with a new idea in a new-to-me genre. Plus, because of the sparseness of the screenplay’s blueprint format, changes feel like they make themselves (though that might be because I’m about as sick as I can be of the ripple effect of every blessed change I make in my novel—don’t mind my twitching over here).

And then it hit me.

If the screenplay is supposed to be a story blueprint for a director, why can’t my screenplay be the blueprint for the first draft of a novel I’ll write later?

I haven’t tried it—I’m still working on the script—and I suspect when the time comes to transform the script into a novel, I’ll encounter all kinds of cross-genre complications I can’t imagine right now, but the idea of a new genre feeding my old genre electrifies me. In ten weeks I wrote 55 pages and a 20-page outline. As a chronic over-writer, the thought of a detailed 90- to 100 page outline seems like as good a way as any to keep my novel’s page count on the lower side.

Unless of course I go crazy filling in all the world-building details I’ve left out of the screenplay. I don’t know how this screenplay-turned-novel experiment will end, but I do know that if I write this movie as a novel, my readers will absolutely know the true dinginess of the rust-colored carpet in the dim and paneled hallway.

This essay was originally published as a guest post for the Grub Street Daily blog on April 18, 2013.