Screenwriters Are Coming for your Lunch, Novelists
Surprised? They’re uniquely positioned to deliver on what readers want.
Fledgling screenwriters and newbie novelists subject themselves to similar indignities to gain access to viewers and readers, but there’s a huge chasm between their specifics journeys.
Studios and publishing houses are still effectively gatekeepers, but with two big differences.
First, if a movie or TV script is acquired, it will only ever be a “blueprint” if the project isn’t funded and shot. The number of scripts that are optioned (a fee paid for the exclusive, temporary right to develop and purchase a project) aren’t high to start. The number that are actually produced and released are vanishingly small.
Blueprints can be admired, discussed, even framed and hung over the fireplace mantle. But in film and television, the “blueprint” that is your script will likely never become the “building” you set out to construct.
Novelists, on the other hand, create the thing that is meant to be consumed. When framed in the language of filmmaking, the novelist is effectively the director, the lighting gaffer, the sound guy, the editor and, when said-writer is hungry, craft services. They are both the architect and the construction crew. The completed novel manuscript is their singular vision realized.
Novelists are Gods.
Screenwriters are, with very few exceptions, replaceable.
Secondly, at the highest levels, film producers are idea people. They have general creative visions, and they hire screenwriters to realize them. Sure, the occasional groundbreaking film that boasts an original screenplay will pop up in your local theater like the head of a meerkat on an empty horizon, but the large majority of Hollywood gigs for writers are to serve as a hired gun on someone else’s project.
While you may think Tinseltown is patiently waiting for your gripping speculative screenplay, it will most likely only serve as a “calling card” that signals your capability. And when it comes to getting paid work, that alone can be incredibly valuable. But beyond that, the script is still just a blueprint.
For all but the one-hundred-and-twenty-seven consistently-employed scribes in Hollywood, the only real path for screenwriters—to anything other than ulcers or malnutrition—is a consideration of other forms of storytelling.
And take heart, screenwriters. Because you are uniquely positioned to deliver the kind of prose that readers crave.
When it comes to book sales, the cash cows are in genre fiction.
Your Romance, your Thrillers, your Mysteries, your Sci-Fi, your Fantasy. Literary fiction gets undue attention from the press when money-changing-hands is considered. When you get down to brass tacks, the large majority of the book-buying public wants story more than they want flowery language used in the service of character depiction.
They want naughty bits diddled, prison breaks, interesting methods of corpse disposal. They want everything that gets them from A to B to C in a gripping yarn.
Do they want purple prose about glorious sunrises or moonlight glimmering on rain-soaked cobble stone? Chapter after chapter of suffering and loss and trauma that serve as teachable moments? Maybe not so much…
At least not in great numbers.
Most readers want to be roused, lifted by the lapels and shaken.
They want to be entertained.
And part of being entertained is being immersed. You do that by not wasting a reader’s time.
Screenwriters are trained from the very start to produce stories with very low BMIs.
The mantra in the world of writing for film is one-minute-per-page, meaning that each page in a script equals roughly one minute of screen time. Movie-goers have bladders. That’s why—until recently—scripts were expected to be no more than ninety to one-hundred-and-ten pages long.
The recent spate of ludicrously long movies is less an indication of Americans having healthy prostate glands than it is proof that theatrical releases don’t mean what they once did.
Blame Oppenheimer on the pause button.
And did it really need to be Marty Supreme? Why not just Marty?
Screenwriters are bred to get a story up and on its feet quickly.
They’ve also had the idea of the three-act structure hammered into them, so they know when a good story turn is required. And further, that each act climax needs to be bigger and better than the last. You can call it formulaic, but there’s little denying that in the absence of these essentials, story momentum flags.
The novelist is raised differently.
Novels that focus on character often disregard plot. While those stories can have a charm all their own, they can also be a slog.
“Pantsers”—those who write by the “seat of their pants” (versus those who outline their plots)—follow along behind their characters, waiting for those heady creatures to tell them what they might do next.
That can lead to a lot of meandering, a lot of in-the-head reflection from a first-person narrator.
The reader might start out bouncing along on the white-water-rapids of story, but quickly find themselves drifting off into some swampy tributary of regret, flashbacks to childhood trauma, the occasional “you think you know about depression? Let me tell you about depression” diatribe.
Which can be…well…depressing.
Screenwriters are functionally not able to go there. One-minute-per-page, baby.
And don’t even get me started on Showing Vs. Telling…we’ll save that one for my next post.
So beware, born-and-bred novelists.
Because screenwriters are everywhere.
There was a time when everyone and their brother played acoustic guitar. You couldn’t spit without hitting one of the damned things, and there was a lot of spitting going on.
Screenplays are the new acoustic guitar.
Walk into a coffee shop in any town, in any state, and the jittery dude in the Schopenhauer tee-shirt in the far corner is grappling with slug lines and image systems and elevator pitches.
At least for now.
When he hits thirty-two, though, and realizes that his big-budget action / adventure script isn’t going to be at the center of the bidding war he’s staked his reputation on? He’s going to start fishing in a different stream. Maybe yours.
And that mofo knows how to bait a hook…
Oh, and here’s why Marty Supreme couldn’t just be Marty…
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