Ever Thought of Writing a Novel?

Many screenwriters dream of someday writing a novel. Indeed, novel writing has been a long time desire of the Wave-inatrix but so far all I have is the title: This Shattered Life. Novels are sexy, daunting, intimidating and the ultimate validation for a writer. But how does it compare to screenwriting? What's it like?

The Rouge Wave presents another in a series of guest bloggers with interesting stories to tell from the trenches. For your pleasure and edification I present my very own screenwriting partner, published novelist, reformed screenwriter and bon vivant - JP Smith:

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From the moment you buy your ticket to the second you sit down with your tub of popcorn and the soda you probably shouldn’t have ordered (wouldn’t a five-buck water have had the same effect? You still have to run and pee before the second reel kicks in), the experience of film is a public one. You sit beside strangers; you listen to their laughter, sometimes—gimme a break—even their cellphone conversations. And when something moves you deeply, you’re almost embarrassed to wipe away that tear. The experience of the movies—from writing a script to seeing its final product—is all about how it strikes the largest public you can reach. Writing a novel, on the other hand—something I know a lot of screenwriters and would-be screenwriters would love to try—is a completely intimate experience. What is it about writing a book that makes it so attractive?

Well, for one, your photo’s on it. And you get to hold the thing you created. And not only hold it, but unpack it from the box when you get your complimentary twenty copies, give it out to loved ones and friends, sign it when you do readings, and allow it to sit on a shelf to remind you from time to time that you’ve created something that isn’t being shown with commercial breaks and all its juicier bits censored out on Oxygen at three in the morning.

A work of prose, as the English writer Henry Green defined it, is a long intimacy between strangers. Reading is a private act. Because the experience isn’t a shared one, writing fiction is also a form of seduction. Readers sometimes speak of being caught up in a book, or deeply involved. This is the language of being in love, and the language of love is the whisper, the secret glance, the thrill of innuendo. Yet it’s all as quiet as someone putting words on a page, and someone else lifting them off with his or her eyes.

Fiction-writing is a solitary and rather haunted activity. As a novelist you have to live a little too much with yourself. You’re both creator and audience. Everything else is perks. As a writer of fiction you’re tapping into things of your past, you’re catching glimpses of the gargoyles of your subconscious; and over those two or three years you’ve grown just a little too familiar with that navel into which you’ve been gazing.

Writing screenplays is a shout as opposed to a whisper. When we write movies, we write for others—for those thousands of people who may fill seats on a Friday night to see our product. And therein lies the big difference between the two practices. It’s the difference between navigating a boat across the Pacific Ocean and rowing a canoe down a narrow river. In screenwriting there’s only one way you can go; and you’d better move fast.

Another simile: if writing fiction is like writing free verse, then writing a screenplay is like writing a sonnet, that poetic form that relies on a limited number of lines adhering to certain predetermined rhyme-schemes; a thing full of rules. In the end it’s like the difference between sitting alone in a room, staring into the fire and thinking; and walking into a party and making everyone laugh. For two solid hours.

Just as any respectable screenwriter will always go back to the great classics of cinema time and again, if you want to write novels the best thing to do is to read novels. And not just the latest bestseller. Having a solid grounding in the history of the novel and reading the great masters of prose is the only place to start. There’s a good reason why writers such as George Eliot, Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Flaubert, Balzac, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, et al. have never gone out of print. It’s because their work speaks to us even centuries after it was written. Reading such writers can teach you a great deal about how character in fiction is successfully portrayed, how tension is built, how scenes are constructed and emotions expressed. Because human nature hasn’t essentially changed, these writers can still tell us something about the lives we live even now in the 21st century. Not to go back that far in your reading is like believing movies began with Quentin Tarantino and thinking that “Citizen Kane” is just another boring black-and-white movie starring that Orson guy.

For a screenwriter about to sit down to write his or her first novel, the big realization is that fiction is all about language—the sound of things, the choice of words we use, the fact that the sentences and paragraphs we write are the driving force that makes our readers turn the pages. It’s about character, of allowing them to reveal themselves and develop over the course of several hundred pages. Of plots and subplots, and how these intertwine to create a tragic vision, or a comic one.

In movies, though, language is secondary to image: remember that the first movies were silent. A novelist can be subtle; elusive; innovative to the point of tricky and sometimes even obscure. But readers can flip back a few pages or even a hundred of them to reread, to pick up the thread. We can’t do that in a movie. We must move forward, and we mustn’t ever dare to lose our audience.

The greatest difference is that writing a novel is like an archeological dig—it’s to a large degree about exploration. You turn up bits of pottery, the odd coin, sometimes even a bone or two. By the time you reach the end you may even uncover a lost city of gold, all glint and sparkle as it’s seized by sunlight. But writing a script is all about disclosure—telling a story in a compelling, visual way that you already know in advance.

BIO:
J.P. Smith is the author of five novels published both here and abroad. An adaptation of his first novel, The Man from Marseille, was his first foray into feature screenwriting, and he currently has a script, co-authored with your very own Wave-inatrix in circulation with A-list talent. Not to mention the dark satire and action blockbuster he and Madame Wave-inatrix have recently completed as well. When he finds the time, he’s also working on a memoir.

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