Improve Your Novel with a Script

Improve Your Novel with a Script

I’ve always been a fan of W. Somerset Maugham’s famous aphorism, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” It captures the great flexibility novelists have to write their stories anyway they want, for better or worse. First person and a variety of third person narratives can be employed; even second person can be made to work. We can tell it in the past, we can tell it in the present, and we can mix and match these points of view and tenses to suit ourselves and our stories. We can mark our dialogue with quotation marks, or em dashes, or nothing at all. The characters in our novels can have deep internal monologues that capture their views of themselves and the world around them.

None of this is true of the screenplay. Since it operates as an instruction to the film makers, third-person omniscient is essentially required, perhaps including occasional dips into first-person POV camera shots. The narration is in the present. Flashbacks, if used, are also narrated in the present, with clearly noted entry and exit points. There is no flexibility with dialogue format—it sits in the middle of the page, 2.7” from the left, 2.4” from the right, 34 characters per line. Period. If you want your character to say something a certain way, or do something as they speak, you’ll put that after the character’s name, before the dialogue itself, 3.4” from the left, 3.1” from the right, 19 characters per line. Period. And nobody can “think” anything; if you want it in the story, someone has to say it or do it. A very rigid and time-tested standard, which can provide an amazing tool to help improve your novel.

I enrolled in a screenwriting class at a local college just to gain another perspective on storytelling; something that would help me tighten the writing in my novel.  I couldn’t be happier with the results. During the first semester we wrote shorts—10-12 pages, 10-12 minutes. That gave me the basic knowledge and the appetite to adapt my novel into the first draft of a screenplay during the weeks between semesters. When I eventually got to the final “FADE TO BLACK” it was 207 pages long, approximately twice what it needs to be.

During the second semester  the hunt was on to get rid of:  1) things that didn’t need to be there, 2) things I kinda/sorta needed/wanted, 3) things that were awesome and necessary, but would still have to be cut. The limit for spec screenplays is 110 pages. Period.

One of the things we were told was to avoid “orphans”, the one or two words on a line by themselves at the end of a descriptive paragraph or dialogue. In attempting to make dialogue shorter by a word or two, you can find yourself coming up with a completely different (better) way of saying it. A really critical eye can result in some dialogue being cut entirely.

This novel is an introspective, sardonic first-person narrative. Much of the story goes on in my protagonist’s head, and all that thinking had to somehow be turned into action or dialogue. That also generated scene additions, deletions and changes. Characters were eliminated—why hire an actor to say or do something that one of the others could do? Do we really need this extra location or could this scene take place at one of the others? It’s much harder to go to Mars in a film than it is in a novel.

The script is still a work in progress at this point. I’m down to 190 pages and moderately optimistic about getting to 110. But I took the course to improve the novel and I’ve definitely accomplished that. I’ve retrofitted many of the changes I made for the script back into the manuscript. There were many instances where I had to choose between what I’d written for the book and what I’d written for the film, and the film version often won out. The manuscript has gone from 86,000 words to 84,000. And it’s better.

 If you’re looking for ways to improve your manuscript and your skills, I highly recommend you give script writing a try.

Danny Boy and Leonardo (Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication)

Danny Boy and Leonardo

Leonardo da Vinci and Frederic Weatherly walk into a bar. 

The bartender says, “What can I get you gents?”

Frederic says, “A Danny Boy.”

The bartender says, “Sure thing. How would you like it?”

Leonardo says, “Semplice. La semplicità è la sofisticazione ultima"

Frederic says, “He always says that. But I’m kind of curious – what are the choices?”

“You can have it any way you want it, of course,” the bartender says, “but our three most popular are the Deanna Durbin, the Eva Cassidy and the Elvis Presley.”

Frederic says, “So, tell me about them.”

“The Deanna Durbin,” says the bartender, “you might say is our old standard. You got your melody and your words; straight ahead, clear as a bell. Some people might think it’s kind of old fashioned, but sometimes the old ways can be the best ways. Now for the Eva Cassidy you take that same basic melody, but you add some notes here and there, give some of the words some color, kind of change the voice for different parts; it makes it Eva’s, if you know what I mean. And the Elvis Presley, well, what can I say? He’s the King. Talk about making it your own, it has ‘Elvis’ written all over it from beginning to end.” 

They listen to the songs:

Danny Boy - Eva

Danny Boy - Elvis

Danny Boy - Deanna

The bartender looks at Frederic and says, “So, what’ll it be?”

Frederic says, “Well, I’m mostly a lyrics man, myself, and those all sound pretty much the same, so I’ll let my friend choose.”

Leonardo says, “Porterò il Deanna Durbin. È la sola scelta.”

Frederic says, “Leo – English, please.”

Leonardo says, “Sorry. I said the Deanna Durbin; it’s the only choice. Only she sings the song with true simplicity.”

“Eva’s is lovely,” says the bartender.

“Perhaps,” says Leonardo. “But she has, as you say, made it her own by adding notes for one thing. In the first verse alone there are at least a dozen of these embellishments, and not one of the four verses is free of them. In the second verse, in addition to these extraneous notes, she completely changes her voice in the higher register. When she sings ‘ye back’ and ‘here in sunshine’ it sounds like a different singer. And what about that big breath right in the middle of the phrase, ‘summer in the meadow’? And the words that are sung so softly that they can barely be heard – I refer you to ‘bide’ at the end of the first verse, or ‘will hear’ at the beginning of the fourth verse. These are affectations we do not laud in bel canto singing.

“So, lovely in her own way, but not simple. The Elvis Presley has far fewer of those adornments; he even sings the entire third verse without any to speak of. He also projects his voice evenly throughout the full range of the song. But when he does embellish it’s noticeable, as when he goes ‘d-o-o-w-w-n the mountainside’ in the first verse. He can’t seem to resist little guttural intonations every third of fourth word, and what is going on with that ‘I love you’ at the end of the second verse?”     

“Chicks dig that,” says the bartender.

“Signore,” says Leonardo, “the chicks are digging the man; he could be reciting the telephone book like that. I’m speaking about the performance of the song. The song is the message, the singer is the messenger. When singers deliver the message with great skill and emotion we offer a bravo or brava, but when they change the message we must demur.

“So we arrive at Deanna, who delivers the song - the message - as it was written. She does not add ornamentation or embellishment, she is free from affectation and pretense. Her singing is legato throughout; the song covers an octave and a half, and each word and note is delivered in equal measure. She starts and finishes each word clearly and evenly, on the intended note, so that we understand all of them. She controls her breathing so that it supports her singing and phrasing without us noticing it. For me, for simplicity, it must be Deanna Durbin.”

“Make that two”, says Frederic.

“You got it,” says the bartender. “So what’s the punch line?”

Frederic says, “What are you talking about?”

The bartender says, “The punch line. This started with two-guys-go-into-a-bar; that’s the beginning of a joke.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Frederic says, “it’s an essay. For a college course.”

“I doubt that,” says the bartender. “You don’t even have any footnotes.”

“Oh no? What do you call this?” Frederic(1) says.

“I call that totally bogus,” says the bartender.

“OK, you win,” says Frederic. “Here: A priest, an imam and a rabbi go into a bar. The bartender says, ‘What is this, a joke?’”

“I don’t get it,” says the bartender.

         (1). Frederic Edward Weatherly, 1848-1929, English lawyer, lyricist and radio entertainer. Weatherly wrote the lyrics to Danny Boy as well as thousands of other lyrics.