What Novelists Can Learn From

Screenwriters

You will, at times, encounter a somewhat cocky, snobbish attitude (well henceforth
refer to this attitude as the attitude of the cocksnob, or as an act of snobcockery) that
elevates the book above the film or TV show.
This is, of course, a microwaved platter of gopher diarrhea.
It is in fact the attitude of those nose-in-the-air, lips-frozen-in-an-everlasting sneer
literary types who have elevated the novel to places where most people cannot reach it.
They cite television shows or films (Uhh, hello, Jersey Shore? Transformers 2?) as
emblems of how this visual format might as well go stick its head in doo-doo. Of
course, these people fail to ever mention the most powerful illustrations of the TV and
film format, whether were talking The Wire or Mad Men or Casablanca or UHF
starring Weird Al Yankovic. Further, this act of literary snobcockery often fails to
gaze toward those examples of the written form that are so rank and vile that one must
assume they are gassy corpses: let us all bow our heads and remember the time when
the greasy orange homunculus known as Snooki got herself a book deal.
Books, films and television shows all aim to do similar things, and chief amongst all
those things is tell the audience a story. They tell different stories or, more accurately,
tell stories differently.
But thats a good thing.
And its a thing from which we novel-monkeys can learn.
Screenwriting has its own tips and tricks of the format, and thats something novelists
can look and learn from if one were to choose, and thats what Im talking about today.
What, then, can you learn?

The Purity Of Narrative Movement

A screenplay reduces the storytelling form to a very simple form, and that form is this:
characters act and talk and in doing so, move the story forward. Its almost like playing
with action figures or dolls when you were a kid: Tomax and Xamot siege the Ewok
Village and save Strawberry Shortcake who had been captured by Wasteland Barbie.
(Damn, did I just give away the plot to my next book? Sonofabitch.)
Characters talk. Characters act. The narrative steps forward.
What lives on the page and by proxy, what lives on the screen is all the audience
gets. The internal life of the narrative is only given if its made external; glimpses of it
are assumed, but never confirmed.
That means the screenplay is the ultimate version of show, dont tell. Because thats all it
can do.
Now, should you do this with your novel? Probably not, no. A novel has its own host of
unholy powers, and one of those powers is the ability to wander off the beaten path and
move into dark spaces. The novelist can rip away the storys facade and show the
internal workings in ways the screenwriter cannot.
That said, weve all read novels that get boggy, right? That feel like youre stomping
through clayey mud? That make us shake the book like a baby and cry, I need
something to happen, godsdamnit.
Here novelists can turn to the narrative purity of the script: while you should never be
afraid to move toward the internal, you also should master the external, because a lot of
subtext can live there. Master the movement of, Character does shit, character talks
about shit, and then the story jogs-runs-leaps-karatekicks-forward. A script must
always be moving forward, and so too must your novel.

The Economy Of The Page

A screenplay has very little real estate with which to work. Youve got your ~110 pages,
and the formatting on those pages is precise. Cant cram a lot in there. The best scripts
out there have an almost poetic grace (and some of the worst offer pages that look like
brick shithouses, just blocks and blocks of text). Mastering the screenplay is in part
mastering the format, which is to say, understanding the economy of the page.
Novelists dont always learn this from the get-go. Hell, you find yourself as an English
Lit major and one of the novels you read is James Joyces Ulysses: a book so big and
uneconomical Luke Skywalker couldve used it to choke the fucking Rancor Monster.
Its a beautiful, strange book, no doubt there, and novelists can learn a lot by reading
Joyce. The economy of the page is not one of those things.
A script must rely on short sharp shocks. Description for an entire scene comprises little
more than a short paragraph. Characters are created and built in hard, brief strokes: in a
single scene, page, or line of dialogue you must perform double- or triple-duty to get
those characters established neatly in the minds of the audience. Dialogue, too, cannot
go on for pages and pages you ever try to write dialogue in a screenwriting template?
Its like watching gremlins multiply. Like watching a garter snake breeding ball. Like

watching Jabba the Hutt eat those little froggy critters. Okay, I dont know what that
means, I just know I cant stop thinking about Return of the Jedi all of the sudden. You
know how David Lynch was once on the docket to direct that movie? Imagine if James
Joyce had written Return of the Jedi. Man, thats weird. That hurts my brain. I
instantly come up with:
The ineluctable modality of the Force: at least that if no more, thought through my
mind. Signatures of all droids I am here to scan, lightsaber and mynock, the vaporators
of moistness, that rusty robot. Two-suns, starfields, sand: villainous hives.
Man, I should rewrite all the Star Wars movies in the mode of James Joyce.
What the hell was I talking about?
Ah. Right. On the script page, dialogue builds bulk fast, and in scriptwriting, it helps to
stick the landing and nail your page count. Only way to do that is to keep control of
your descriptions and dialogue. But eventually, you learn to use this to your advantage:
you can start using spare but elegant language and storytelling tricks to pack more
oomph into every page. Novelists, take note. Monitor then the economy of your own
pages. A page shouldnt exist unless it deserves to be there, unless it pulls its weight,
unless it does more than one thing. Dont bloat. Dont go long just to go long.
Concentrate the story. Include only those things that you feel must must must be
included.

ZZZzzZZzz Bo-ring
Think about all the ways you could take a film and drag it through the mire to make it as
boring as possible. What would you do? Not much happens for 30 minutes. Two
characters stand and talk to each other. Nobody says anything. Long internal
monologues. No nudity or flamethrowers or nude flamethrowering. Ta-da, youve
just found some of the same stuff that threatens to make your novel boring. Novels
dont get a pass. Why some novelists feel a novel should be dull as a potato to read,
offering as much fun or entertainment as a brick to the tits and/or testicles, is beyond
me.
Find the boring parts, and do the same thing the film editor would do: chop em out,
leave em on the floor.

Cede Your Authority

A screenwriter only has so much power. Youre writing a blueprint. A highly-detailed
and terribly valuable blueprint, but a blueprint just the same. So many others will bring
effort to the table in terms of telling the story, other writers, actors, the director, the
cinematographer. A film or show is a team effort, and this makes editing a screenplay
oddly easier, at least for me. Even though you know the script still has to rock out with
its [insert euphemism for male genitals here that just so happens to rhyme with rock]
out, you still know that its a group effort. Youve less ego baked into these brownies.
With your novel, relinquish some mental authority and recognize that the manuscript
still remains a team effort (though arguably one where you remain the quarterback,

pitcher, or some other arbitrary controller of team sports). Youve got agents, editors,
beta readers. Other hands will mold this clay. And thats freeing. With some of your ego
extracted from the equation, you may find it easier to attack future drafts.

Structure Matters
Scripts are written with structure in mind. Even if youre not a fan of the three-act
structure (and Im amazed at how often I read screenwriters trotting out the same tired
fuck you to the three-act structure), screenplays are still hammered out according to
structural beats: beats into scenes, scenes into sequences, sequences into acts. You have
very clear breakdowns of when one scene ends and another begins. You simply cannot
avoid it.
In novels, you can avoid structure all day long, ceding to structure only when its
complete and recognizing that some skeleton has crawled his way into the skin of the
thing to help it stand up.
Except, dont. Go the other way. Embrace it, if only for a time. Think in the same
structural sense that you would with a script: imagine the beats, build beats into scenes,
and add scenes into sequences. Consider act breaks and turning points. Think about
catalysts for action, about inciting incidents and dramatic shifts. Dont resist them. Open
yourself to them. Bend over the barrel and spread the ol flapjacks and allow structure
to enter your body. (Wow, that got weird. Did I just refer to buttocks as flapjacks?
Eeesh. ) I was just saying to my writing partner the other day that the mark of a
storyteller isnt in how he resists these beats or these structures but how he owns them,
how he turns them to his will.
Nobody ever looks at a flash fiction challenge and barks about how its too strict or
about how the structure of the challenge is stifling. Yet thats what you often hear in
regards to narrative structure. Ive said it before and here Ill say it again: if your
creativity is defeated by structure, you werent that goddamned creative to begin with.
*poop noise*
View it as a challenge, and accept it.
Own structure the way the best screenwriters do.

An Imperfect Fit
Again, novels are not screenplays and screenplays are not novels (this is a tip from my
forthcoming book, Duh, No Shit, And Fuck You, Sherlock: Writing Advice Tips From
Herr Doktor Obvious, Esq.). You shouldnt try to make one be the other; they are their
own creatures and deserve to abide by their own crazy rules and break those crazy rules
in their own unique ways.
But that doesnt mean you cant learn some lessons.
So, noodle it. What am I missing?

Further, what can screenwriters learn from novelist? (First answer there: A novel has to
be a compelling read and so too does your script. Just because its a blueprint doesnt
mean it shouldnt leap off the page.)
What else?
Your turn to school me, Internuts.

Dr. Scriptface: How I Learned To Stop

Worrying And Love The Screenplay

As demanded, Im going to take some time over the coming weeks to devote a post or
three toward screenwriting. I write so often about novel-writing, or about the overall
construction of a narrative that for the most part I havent really addressed this part of
my writing life. And its a substantial part: this week is a revisit of the film script to go
through a new draft (this would be draft number eight, for the record).
It seemed then that the proper place to begin was a very simple, Why I Love The
Unholy Shit Out Of Writing Scripts. I do! I adore it. I dont suffer the same sense of
anxiety when writing a script, anxiety that nibbles at my edges when Im lost in the
belly of a novel.
So.
Why do I love screenwriting?
Let me count the ways.

One: Super-Fast Payoff

Ill cut to the chase and get to the lazy mans reason: writing a script is fast. At least,
compared to writing a novel. It feels fast, too like, boom boom boom boom, suddenly
youve progressed by several scenes, things have changed, shit has happened, the
characters are active. Blink and youre halfway done. You can feel the wind in your hair.
You have momentum. A novel can feel sloggy, boggy, a long marathon rather than a fast
sprint. Screenplays speak to my inner crack-monkey, patience be damned.

Two: Sniper Bullet Instead Of Machine Gun Spray

Very few novels feel highly-tuned. Many feel sloppy big, bloated paragraphs;
rampant cliches; unnecessary language; dialogue that goes on too long without saying

enough. Thats just my feeling, but a lot of novels get out of control with the word
count. This can be a feature, sure, but a lot of the time its a bug: stories that sprawl out,
airing their junk, growing fatter with each reading.
Ive said it before: the novel feels like a spray of machine gun bullets. Fire a hail of
lead, you know that some are going to hit, and some are not. Just chew apart the
landscape until you kill the target. (Its been a while since Ive read a novel where I felt,
Wow, each word, each sentence, is critical. You cannot remove any language from this
and have it stand. Maybe, maybe Finch, by Jeff VanderMeer. Reading that, I felt like
each word was perfectly placed, a critical component to the overall work.)
A script is like a sniper bullet, though, in much the same way that a short story is: you
only have one bullet. You must make it count. It teaches you about the importance of
language, and specifically, how crucial brevity is to the art of elegant communication.
Speaking of elegance

Three: The Elegance Of Action Plus Dialogue

The simplicity of the screenplay is deeply compelling. Its like youve distilled the
nature of a story down to its two most visible and critical elements: action plus
dialogue. It is the embodiment of the show, dont tell admonishment: it is all the more
difficult to use the visual form of a screenplay (and despite the words on page it remains
a visual form) to rely on telling rather than showing. Novels, though, even some of the
best novels are guilty of the tell. They explain away so much: the history of this, the
look of that, the thoughts of this character, the telegraphed arc, and so on.
A script doesnt have that luxury. It is distilled down to the two thing that matter most in
a story:
Characters do stuff.
Characters talk about stuff.
Action.
Dialogue.
(And its for this reason that I declare: if you want to know how to write a novel, first
learn how to write a screenplay. A bold statement, and one without any evidence at all!
Enjoy! Im here all week.)

Four: The Art Of Bonsai

Editing is also a lot easier when it comes time to pick apart a script: because its already
down to its spare elements, because its already an exercise in brevity, its so much
easier (mentally and practically) to take it apart at the seams and add new components
or restitch it together in a brand new order. Its like Bonsai: pruning down, creating art
from a minimal form, the freedom of simplicity.
Screenwriting is some crazy Zen shit. The editing even moreso.

Five: A Reduction In Pressure

A novel is all you. Thats a great thing, but its also a heavy burden: yes, the novel is
also built with the critical help of editors and agents, but at the end of the day whats on
the page is all you. I dont mean to suggest this as a negative, but only that it puts a lot
of pressure on you: that brick of pages in peoples hands reflects on one individual and
one individual alone.
You.
A screenplay though, its so much more. Youre only a part of it. The directors going to
make it his own. The actors will, too. The way its cut will alter it, too. Youve written a
blueprint, a plan, a recipe with action and dialogue, and its up to others to cook it up.
The part about this thats awesome is the lack of pressure: it is oddly freeing to be a part
admittedly, an absolutely necessary part of the process rather than The Only
Known Quantity.
It feels lighter, somehow.
Less straining.
Once more: it feels kinda Zen.

Any Questions?
Man, I kinda feel like that was a boring post. Lets liven it up with some questions or
thoughts from you, the ever-critical peanut gallery. Whazzup? Whatchoo got? Anything
you want to know? Any thoughts you want to share about scripting? About that versus
novels? Cmon. Jump in the water. Its warm. Probably because I peed in it. Shut up.

Little Chuckys Screenwriting Bible

You may note that, in my bio, I sometimes refer to myself as a screenwriter in

addition to novelist, or game designer or freelance penmonkey. (Also in addition
to: bee wrangler, canary in the coal mine, and fluffer.) At this point I no longer
consider the identifier a matter of wishful thinking: for years Ive worked on scripts that
remain unproduced, but by this point my writing partner and I have worked on scripts
that have, in fact, seen the light of day: Collapsus and Pandemic, just to name two.
Plus, we have a feature film in development and a television show up for pilot
consideration.
And yet, you may notice that I dont talk much about it.
Screenwriting, I mean, not the bee-wrangling or porn fluffing.
Reason being: Ive only been doing this a few years. I can talk about being a fiction
writer or game designer or the life of the slack-jawed freelancer because Ive been
living those roles for a long time. Im no expert, but I can at least wade into such
swampy waters without fear of being sucked under.
Still, I get a lot of requests to talk about screenwriting.
People say to me, Talk about screenwriting! Do it now!
And I try to reply to them and explain but its difficult what with the dirty panties
duct-taped into my mouth. I mostly just want to go back to the grocery store from
whence I was abducted.
Good news is, Ive managed to bite through my panty-gag, and now I will regale you
with my ahem-cough-cough rules of screenwriting, which are really just guidelines

with all the firmness of gravy-soaked bread. Again, I am no expert. Read this not with
a grain of salt but rather an entire salt lick.
Ready? Lets roll.

Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit, Anything Else Is A Bowl Of Shit

The screenplay is a bucking horse, a rammy stallion the first time it sees the barn
door open, that fucker is going to be off like a shot. Before you know whats happening,
you have a 300 page script in your hands. And, given that one page is equivalent to a
minute of screen time, thats bad juju.
So, you have to make a concerted effort to rein that beast in, always aiming for that
sweet spot between 90 and 120 pages. This requires an almost religious devotion to
brevity.
Conversations shouldnt go on too long. Descriptions should be terse; this isnt a novel.
Youre not Lovecraft. Do not spend two pages discussing the insane non-Euclidean
geometry of a lamp. Find and report on only those most critical of details. Youre not art
directing the thing. Scenes shouldnt go more than three, four, maaaaybe five pages.
Keep it tight. Fast. Loose.
Its like bad sex get in, see the sights, pop your cookies, get out.

Think Of It Like A Story Blueprint

Dont be married to the material. A novel is the end of the road. What you write is what
ends up on the shelves (after edits, of course). Screenplays dont work like that. The
work is always in flux. Its in flux up until the final directors edit (at which point
youve long been out of the equation). You are writing more a story blueprint than a
story. Its an architectural map. Its not yet a constructed building.

And Yet, It Needs To Be A Compelling Read

By the same token, it still has to read like a kick-ass compelling story. Characters must
leap off the page. Descriptions must be vivid. Dialogue should be sharp, pointed,
purposeful. And you must do so with that aforementioned devotion to brevity. Which,
yes, is like saying, I need you to spit liquid gold into this thimble, but fuck it, thats
your job.
I write my scripts in accordance to screenwriting rules, but I also try to make them
interesting. I want them to read a little bit like novels or short stories without
conforming to those particular conventions. (Oh, and for the record, I do not believe that
novel = screenplay. I believe short story or novella = screenplay. Anybody who tries to
adapt a novel into a screenplay will find the challenging task of determining what
massive cuts the novel will require. Just my two cents.)
Write so it will be read at the same time you write so it will be filmed.

No Matter How Much Your Struggle, Structure Matters

I read blogs or screenwriting advice and you hear a lot of, Adhering to the three-act
structure is a myth, blah blah blah, dont do it. Except very rarely do they cite films
that dont adhere to this classic filmic structure. Most classic films do. Most modern
films do. Seriously, you can check your watch during a film and predict the act turns.
For better or for worse, it is the accepted and expected structure in film-making. You
can do differently, but you may be challenged. Just lie back and think of England, love.
Structure is a beautiful thing. The challenge really, the art is how you subvert
structure, how you brainwash it to make it your own. That is, at least, how I see it.

Do Not Write A Shooting Script

Youre a writer, not a director, so unless its demanded of you, leave all the camera
voodoo out of there. That also gums up a clean and compelling read. So. Uh. Dont do
it.

In TV, Characters Are Static; In Film, Characters Are Dynamic

The nigh-universality of it sucks, but in television, we dont like our characters to
change. Yes, you can point to characters that have changed, but its not common. In
film, however, we are granted the opportunity to see change in our characters, and in my
ego-fed megalomaniac humble opinion, you dont want to waste that opportunity.

Action Action Action Shit Be Happening Action Action Action

Novels offer the writer and reader a luxury that a script does not. In a novel, we are
often treated to a sense of history, of thought, of internal monologues, of peeling away
layers.
In scripts, you still have to think about all that stuff. But it just doesnt end up on the
page. Characters with rich character histories will not find those rich histories on display
like in a museum.
Screenplays are about shit happening. I dont mean action in the sense of constant
karate kicks and exploding F-14 Tomcats, I just mean, things must be in perpetual
motion.
You dont have time to stop and wax poetic. Thats not to say pacing fails to matter or
that you dont get those same peaks and valleys its just that pacing does not account
for 10 pages of talking about your fantasy kingdoms oh-so-fascinating history or five
pages of a characters internal process.
Shove it all beneath a layer of wordsmithy and bury it there. Text must become subtext.

Writing Is Rewriting
Be ready to rewrite.

I enjoy it. I love rewriting scripts way more than I do rewriting novels. I guess its
because rewriting novels is like hauling stone. Editing a script is fast, light, loose the
tool is far more scalpel than dumptruck.

Table Reads Are The Cats Knees, The Bees Pajamas

Its critical to read your novel aloud.
Its also critical for someone else preferably lots of someone elses to read your
script aloud. Weve had table reads for all our feature scripts and it is incredibly
valuable. Your ear will pick up things: inadequacies, inadvertent alliterations,
repetitions, linguistic quirks, muddy phrasing. The actors will do things with your words
that you never expected, both for the awesome and for the unpleasant.
You do not merely want this. You need this.

Oh, And Have Fun

I adore screenwriting. Its like Ive opened a gnome door, and all these little fun goblins
are in there having a party, and Im inviting them into my brain. Where they make a nest
and drink goblin beer and have giddy goblin babies. I have a blast doing it, and in
reading scripts, I can tell when fun (or excitement or engagement) is in the recipe. This
is true of novels, too, but because a script is so spare, so bare, I personally think that it
comes out more distinctly?
So, rock out and have fun, will you?
And thats it. Thats all she wrote.
But I want to hear from you. Anybody tinkering with scripts out there? Got any golden
rules you care to share? Dont make me get the dirty panty-gag.