Novels
gp101 said:
GonnaBe:
I have no idea how you finished (or will soon be finished with) five screenplays in five months. Are you independently wealthy and have all this free time to write? Cuz if not, what is your secret? I work sixty hours a week and when in the middle of a screenplay, put in about 18-20 hours a week on writing. I consider myself fast if I finish just the first draft in a month. But the subsequent rewrites take anywhere from two to six months. Granted I'm never completely happy with the finished product, but when I'm finally satisfied with the damn thing I'm so mentally drained, I can't even consider starting another one right away. So how do you do it? Are those five screenplays revised to the point that you're confident enough to send them out? Or do you finish a first draft only, then move onto something else? And if so, why don't you see one through to the end of vast re-writes? Where do you get the stamina? The time? You're really Bill Gates, aren't you? Tired of ruling the world with your O.S. so you've decided to take on Hollywood.
Very clever, Bill.
And don't assume novelists have that much an easier time writing screenplays. Sure, they have a head start with basic story-telling skills, but screenplays and novels are such different animals, most can't handle it. F. Scott Fitzgerald may be the biggest example of this. He wallowed in Hollywood to no avail after a couple of successful novels (though the novels became more popular decades after his death). If it was easier for novelists to write for the screen you'd see them turning their own best-sellers into screenplays. But it doesn't happen often. I think part of the problem is they have to show not tell even more with screenplays than with novels, and have little room for character introspections they put in books. In other words, they can't tell us what's going on in the charcaters' minds the way they do in their novels, unless they use VO's, which are apparently Hollywood's least favorite bastard children.
Novels and screenplays are indeed very different animals where the writing is concerned, but I've found that story structure and dialogue are pretty much the same. I do think it's easier for a novelist to learn to write screenplays than it is for a script writer to learn to write novels, only because one is leaving out and the other is putting in. Once I read a couple of dozen screenplays, I got the point. Keep the story structure and leave out the narration and most of the description. Ninety to one hundred and twenty pages isn't much writing, especially when many pages have very few words on them.
But you still have the beginning, the end, the basic storyline, and the necessary dialogue. That part was a cakewalk. The really tough part of learning to write a screenplay for me was teaching myself how to make sure character growth made its way into those pages. That was tough. I'm used to taking four to seven hundred pages to get in character growth. Figuring out how to put that same growth into no more than 120 very sparse pages took awhile. I think I studied screenplays and watched movie after movie for almost four months before the light came on.
Once it did, writing a screneplay proved a lot easier, for me, than writing a novel.
There have been quite a few good novelists who also proved to be good screenwriters, but I think the reason there aren't more is because most of us prefer writing novels. Or maybe more exact, we greatly prefer the way the publishing world works to the way Hollywood works. When I write a novel, it's my novel. An editor may make suggestion here and there, do a bit of clean up editing, but for the most part, she leaves my work the hell alone, and that's how I like it.
Right or wrong, I think a lot of us get the feeling that Hollywood is flat full of people who can't tell good writing from bad, who have no skills at all for writing, but still have the power to change whatever they want to change.
In publishing, it's the writer who is or isn't the hack, and if you're a good writer, there's no one above you to say otherwise. In Hollywood, even a great writer can have a dozen hacks above him, all of whom have the power to turn good writing into crappy movies.
When I write a novel, then good or bad, it's on my shoulders, and if it is good, it stays good. It's published as what it is, and that's that. In Hollywood even a great screenplay can be turned into horrid mush by other writers, directors, and producers. Or even by illiterates who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the written word. Hollywood is far too often writing by committee, and this is not how most novelists want to operate.
This certainly isn't true of the upper tier of Hollywood, but the maze of no talent, no training, no brain hacks many have to wade through to get to that upper tier can be frustrating to any writer. I can't remember who it was, but one screenwriter once described life in Hollywood as "Life in a Rabbit Hole," or something like that. I've found it's true.
The horror tales of Hollywood are the kind of things you would never have happen in the world of publishing.
