Novel written in "Transcript Form" - Is this OK?

This is formatted like a screenplay, not a novel. Were you planning on this being a novel? If so, this won't fly.

I just don't see this working as a novel. A story needs narrative to drive it.

I'm not going to say it's completely impossible. If you honestly have a good reason to use this gimmick, and if you've written an undeniably tense, conflict-filled manuscript that flows well despite the format and length, it just might work.

However, I've never seen anything like it published as a novel before.

But I am concerned that the agent might be immediately put off by the format.

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I would be. More so, I suspect the readers would be put off as well.
Good luck to you, mate, hope it's good enough to succeed.

Over the years I've seen a few Sci-Fi short stories written in this format, after a puzzling few pages they'd turn out to be transcripts of a rogue space captain's court martial, that kind of thing, so the reasoning seemed solid enough.

But yes it's gimmicky, and anything longer than a short story would bust my head. I strongly suspect that the agents are going to be very surprised, but not in a good way.

Then again, who knows? They may perceive it as something different from the rest and turn that into a selling-point. All you can do is wait and see how they react.

-Derek

There are novels (and stories) made up of "found texts" - reports, diary entries, letters, emails, and other documents, which could include dialogue transcripts. But I can't think of a whole novel made up of transcripts.

Whether it works or not, is hard to say without reading it.

150,000 words in transcript format? That would be a hard sell. Also, that reads more like a play than a novel.

But why worry about it now? You did it for a reason. Maybe it's not the time to second guess yourself. Send it out. I mean, what are you going to do? Not send as requested or completely rewrite it at this point? Either way, you're not going to get the agents. Why not stick with your vision and see what they have to say?

I've enjoyed a book with plenty of 'mini-chapters' formatted like that - it was presented as excerpts of phone-tap transcripts. As transcripts, however, they certainly weren't formatted exactly like yours (they don't have an emotion listed) and usually have the occasional '(unintelligible)' listed etc.

It worked quite well for alternate chapters .. it was basically a shift of POV .. the 'normal' chapters were from the POV of our hero planning a heist, the 'alternate' chapters were presented as case file excerpts showing the police's idea of what was happening.

(The mismatch between the two reminded me a bit of the old short story 'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate this card'.)

For the life of me though, I can't remember the title of the book.

Good luck!

Mac
(PS: I'm curious why you'd present an entire novel this way.)

Transcript is as good a technique as any with it's own strengths and weaknesses. It's certainly doable albeit a bit more difficult to pull off than some other narrative techniques. I'd be interested in finding out why you chose this way of writing it. I think it's very relevant.

As noone else has said it, I wouldn't delay too long sending the partials to the other agents. It'll make you look poorly organised if you wait for six months to send them (you can't rely on a quick turn-around from the agent with the partial). The time to think about restricting the agents getting a first read was the query stage.

I do own a book written as a transcript. I seem to recall it had stage directions in the author's voice, rather than being impersonal instructions. It also had sections from the author relating what happened between transcripted sessions. I'll see if I can find it later.

Polenth said:

As noone else has said it, I wouldn't delay too long sending the partials to the other agents.

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I wouldn't delay at all. You may be getting a good response rate to your query based on the strength of your bio, but the chance of any particular agent liking any particular submission is slim. So it becomes a numbers game. You may need ten fulls out to get an offer. And if you send them out sequentially, it could take many years.

There's just no way to know. A week is not long at all in terms of waiting to hear from an agent, so don't worry on that account.

As for whether the format of the novel is a problem...it would be for me, but I'm only one reader. What have your other readers said?

Why don't you post the first few pages?

I was about to answer to the same post in Roundtable (there's some little rule, er, 'suggesting' on AW about only posting one copy of a post in one place, and Writing Novels is the right place for this - if you feel you don't get much of a response in a day or so, you ask elsewhere for more input into your original thread) when I found this one.

I’m a first-time author with strong professional credentials. I queried 3 major literary agents and all 3 responded back within a week and requested that I send the first 50 pages.

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Okay, that definitely looks like a good response(!!!). I've read through some threads on queries and from what I've seen, most people are happy to get three positive responses out of ten or a hundred queries.

My guess is your format may put them off, but if they start reading and really like the story, they may ask you to redo it in "conventional" format and resubmit. But that's best-case. If you have a really strong, justifiable reason for this format, then I suppose that's the way you should submit it, but it's going to be a hard sell.

I think that format looks too much like a screenplay, and an agent may think you meant it as such, and think 'oh, this person's confused, we don't handle screenplays' and not read past page 1. Agents may skip to the next transcript to look for something closer to publishable.

I recall Crichton's "Rising Sun" starts off as the start of some sort of "report" but then it quickly (in a page or three) settles down to be a "conventional" novel with the usual conventionally-written dialogue and action, then the last page or so it goes back to the end of the "report." But then, Crichton published many best-selling novels before that one, so to think the the OP can get away with this in his first novel is, uh, ... <insert Bensten quote here>

Julie Worth said:

Why don't you post the first few pages?

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Yes - do so over in the password-protected "Share Your Work" section, of course (with only two posts, the OP might not know to do that).

Imagine going to a job interview at a large company wearing a plaid coat and a tie-dye "peace sign" tie - that might be a really short interview. With agents and publishers it's like a job interview, and you want to put your best foot forward and all that. That means making the transcript should be as conventional as possible.

150,000 words written like that (that's approximately 600 pages, if I am not mistaken)? I think that is going to be very, very hard to sell to anyone as a novel. You might have a good story which is why agents requested it in the first place but to have it accepted will be another matter. It looks like a script for a series, which is not a bad thing...for a script. And scripts will not be 600 pages. Perhaps you have a play or, I should say, a few plays?

I moved this to novels. Enjoy!

Did I see this thread somewhere already? Deja vu...

There are some novels which are written as transcripts: Funnymen by Ted Heller is at least partly in transcript form, and there's at least one other novel about Hollywood in a similar form.

That said, 150,000 words is probably way too long for something in that form.

Polenth said:

I do own a book written as a transcript. I seem to recall it had stage directions in the author's voice, rather than being impersonal instructions. It also had sections from the author relating what happened between transcripted sessions. I'll see if I can find it later.

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I found the book. It's The Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn by Adrian Plass. The genre is Christian humour. My memory was accurate about the layout. Stage directions are personalised and there are small sections of prose between the transcripts.

What I didn't remember is that it starts with a section in standard prose. So it doesn't have an 'is this a screenplay?' feel at the start.

No worries about the duplicate threads, they'll probably be merged in the wee small hours, when everyone's green lights are out.

-Derek

Were I the author I would ask myself.

1. How easy is this work to read?
2. Would I enjoy reading a novel in this format?
The reader wants to enjoy their time with whatever they are reading.
As long as it doesn't make them work too hard I think the format would be okay.

Next, A first time novel usually doesn't rate 150,000 words. 80 to 120 is closer to the mark. But, if they are good words then you could have a shot.

It comes down to how much money a publisher wants to put into an unproven writer with no following of readers.

Agent. They will reply when ready, either way.

They may want to shop it if they like it for the reason stated above. It's different. But, above all it must be good.

I'd like to hear Gillhoughly and UJ's take on this.

maestrowork said:

Did I see this thread somewhere already? Deja vu...

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Yup, there are two instances of the same original post, looks like...