#48: Action, Dialogue, Image: Using Screenwriting as a Revision Tool for Fiction
Virginia Woolf, Jesse Eisenberg, Nicholson Baker.
Hello friends! Three quick bits of business before we get to this month’s craft essay!
First, for those of you have signed up for paid subscriptions, I’ve decided to give a quarterly live craft lecture on Zoom! It’s something I love doing, and I hope it’ll be a good way to connect with the community of readers here and to give you more value for your support. The first one will be on March 11 at 7pm ET, open to anyone who’s a paid subscriber at that time, and will be a version of the Refuse to Be Done lecture on novel writing and revision that I gave during that book tour. (We’ll have time for Q&A too.) Assuming that goes well, I’ll send out a survey with choices for the June lecture, and we’ll go from there. Thanks to everyone who’s signed up already!
Second, my only scheduled online teaching this semester is with American Short Fiction’s MFA For All program, where registration ends on February 25th. I’d love to have you join me, if you’re interested! The full semester of courses gets you classes from me, Kristen Arnett, and ZZ Packer, plus seminars on publishing and from agents and editors. You can also signup for individual classes: mine will be on “Fulfilling and Subverting Genre,” where we’ll look at what I think of as the “obligatory scenes” of various genres in film and literature before writing versions of our own. It’s a distillation of a really fun graduate course I taught last year, and I hope anyone who signs up will get a lot out of it.
Finally, my Worldbuilding Initiative at Arizona State University has announced its events for the semester, all of which are free and open to the public, either in-person on our Tempe Campus or online via Zoom. This semester’s lineup is as follows:
February 18: “Among the Robots, Our Relationship With the Nonhuman”
April 9: Speculative Histories: Lost Archives and Alternative Realities
April 23: ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Student Showcase
I hope you’ll join me for any of these events that might interest you!
Every writer arrives at the task with their own set of default strengths and weaknesses, and I’m no exception. If I can brag about my own writing without being too obnoxious, I think I have a good sense of what makes an interesting sentence or paragraph, a good nose for vivid weirdness and strong imagery, and a penchant for research that comes through in most everything I write. I don’t shy away much from my own ideas or my impulses: very little self-censorship happens at my desk. (Some might argue more should!) I’m getting better at structure every day, both at the level of the book and the level of the scene. On the other hand, there are elements of craft that I’ve had to practice and study: dialogue, for instance, is and probably always will be one of my weakpoints. (The urge to write novels where a dude wanders a lonely landscape is too strong in me!) But the thing that constantly, consistently gums up my work—especially my early drafts—is far too much unnecessary exposition, explanation, and interiority.
Now, the proportion of how much action to narration is appropriate varies wildly from story to story and book to book, even genre to genre. There’s no one right ratio. But speaking only for myself—and, if I may, for a lot of the work I’ve encountered as a teacher and as an editor—it’s very easy to write reams of material that may be necessary to the draft but is not itself story, if story is action unfolding through time. It’s common for me to draft a five-page scene that is more narration about the action than the action itself; it’s likewise easy to write scenes in which characters deliver lines of dialogue, then think about those lines of dialogue for far too long, then… white space? And of course there are the scenes where there is simply too little for the reader to visualize. (I believe readerly attention quickly drifts in fiction whenever there’s nothing to see in the mind’s eye.) And there there are the scenes where a character gives the reader a tour of some new location, working as a camera instead of being the subject the camera looks upon.
These kinds of scenes are often important to draft, if not to publish. They can be good ways of learning what a character thinks or likes or wants or fears. They can help a writer figure out some aspect of setting or worldbuilding, by musing on the page. But for me, most of the time they’re scaffolding: on some level, I’m writing all this explanatory, expository, interior prose to learn what my book is about, which is different than writing the book.
Not so big a problem. There’s always the prose you write in order to figure out what book you’re writing, and also what book you’re not. But at some point in my draft, the manuscript in progress becomes a slog in part because I can’t see the forest for the trees, in large part because I have made too many unnecessary, badly shaped trees.
Stretching that metaphor a bit, I agree. But you get the idea.
Okay, at the turn into what I’ve lately been doing about this, I’ll offer two caveats: first, I am not and may never be a screenwriter, so everything I’m about to say has less to do with real screenwriting than it does with some of the ways I’ve used tactics from screenwriting to help me with my fiction. Anyone who is a screenwriter by trade or by hope will probably find plenty to quibble with. But the goal here isn’t to adapt your fiction into a screenplay, exactly—just to use certain tactics and “rules” from screenwriting to help diagnose and repair scenes in fiction.
Second caveat: Obviously tons of great fiction makes great use of extensive interiority and exposition. I wouldn’t want to read To the Lighthouse without Woolf’s constant tunneling into the histories and thoughts of her characters. Etc. And I generally think novels written expressly with the hopes of being adapted for TV and movies can be pretty thin affairs. That said—I do think many of us are trying to write vivid, action-oriented, dialogue-driven scenes, no matter what else we’re up to, and it’s those of you who agree with that goal who I’m mostly writing to this time out.
Okay! Enough throat clearing. Here goes.
I’m a good ways into a new novel draft that’s in general going pretty well, I think, but as I passed the 100- and 150- and 200-page marks, I could feel it was also getting a little bogged down. Forward plot progress was taking forever. And while I know not to be impatient—I’m an overwriter who cuts back, so my drafts are always slower going than my published books—I also wondered if there wasn’t a way to retrain myself mid-manuscript to be more efficient. And that got me thinking about screenwriting, and the constraints of how it appears upon the page.
Obviously there are hundreds of books you can buy to explain those constraints to you, but for my purposes I’m basically trying to boil scenes down to three elements: dialogue, action, and image. That’s it. As I’m trying to render a story in screenplay format, I decided I can really only let myself advance the plot by one of those three items.
Additionally, each individual scene can’t be very long. If a page of properly formatted screenplay is a minute of screen time, it doesn’t take too much experience to realize that most modern movie scenes are very, very short, at least compared to the average scene in a novel.
These are good pressures, ones I hoped would help me find the real spine of the scenes already in my manuscript, as well as to highlight places where I’d gotten too far away from the kind of visceral, sensory information a reader needs to visualize the scene at hand. So what I’ve been doing lately is converting novel scenes into screenplay format, one scene at a time, trying to boil them down to the best, most evocative actions and images, and putting pressure on the dialogue to do absolutely as much as possible, as concisely as it can. It’s slow, inefficient work, but so what? There are no prizes for efficiency.
(Sidebar: in an interview at the podcast Smartless about his new movie A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg described his transition from writing plays to writing movies as switching from writing four 20-minute scenes to something more broken up, more fast-paced that worked better on the screen. I bet that’s a pretty similar transition to the one novelists turned screenwriters have to make. Plays and novels have a lot more in common than plays or novels and movies.)
In the past month or so, I’ve adapted the first 80 pages of my novel draft into about 35 pages of screenplay. (Such a big difference! Did I mention I’m an overwriter who cuts back?) What I do is this: I open First Draft on one side of my screen, then my novel draft in Word on the other. And then I go through the novel one scene at a time, trying to adapt each scene into screenplay format, reducing everything important in each scene to dialogue, action, or image.
Some of what I’ve found in my own work while making this English-to-English, prose-to-screenplay translation, scene by scene:
Even when a scene is set somewhere interesting, often my characters aren’t. They’re standing still in an interesting place, trading lines of dialogue. Talking heads on the page. A movie might be able to get away with this by changing camera angles but imagine the same scene as a stage play: two actors standing still and chatting, while the audience grows ever more bored. No matter how interesting the dialogue is, it needs to be surrounded by action—and that action then becomes the other thing the scene can be about, in addition to whatever the dialogue is revealing.
One thing good action is generally not: overdramatic facial expressions. Furrowed brows, endlessly arched eyebrows, winks and squints. So many smiles and frowns. (In the old days: so many cigarettes.) Most of the time, I’d say that if you can’t imagine seeing it from the cheap seats, it’s not big enough action. But there’s a lot of that sort of minute movement in my drafts, and having to retype those actions into a screenplay version is such a bummer that I immediately start seeking something better for my characters to be doing.
The dialogue in my first draft is hardly ever doing enough work at a fast enough clip. Characters hem and haw, digress and divert, or simply don’t know what they need to say, because I don’t know what they need to say either. Often instead of saying a thing, the character thinks about saying a thing—which can work in a novel but not in a screenplay. (Especially if you’re trying to avoid the much-maligned crutch of voiceover.) So two things happen as I convert my draft novel dialogue to draft screenplay dialogue: conversations grow drastically shorter and become drastically more direct. Interior thought gets translated into dialogue or action, or cut altogether.
Where focusing on action and dialogue often feel diagnostic—something is wrong and in need of repair—focusing on imagery has been almost entirely positive: either the necessary images are already in the novel manuscript (usually barnacled with unnecessary exposition) or the act of trying to very, very concisely set a scene in a couple sentences of screenplay action forces me to find the most telling image possible. This was the place where I made the most interesting discoveries, unearthing possible motifs and other kinds of telling images that I hope I’ll be able to successfully weave back into the novel.
The other problem this exercise has highlighted for me is anywhere there’s long bits of prose with no forward-moving beats of time. Events in a novel don’t always have to happen at a breakneck pace, but eventually they probably do have to have happen. (Even the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine must eventually complete his elongated escalator ride.) In the kind of novel I’m trying to write, a long section of prose detached from forward action is usually a sign that I need to make a drastic cut or else find some way to convert the content of so much narration into action. I’ve done both, as I’ve progressed through this exercise.
Obviously, at some point, I’ll have to begin the reverse process of adapting my screenplay scenes back into novel pages. In doing so, additional narration and exposition will necessarily flow back in, but hopefully more of it will be what’s necessary to make my newly enlivens scenes work best in fiction, rather than just putting the same old scaffolding back up.
If you do try this, I hope it works for you, or is at least fun! (Having fun writing is never a waste of time.) It’s been enjoyable to imagine my novel as a movie, even before it’s finished. But it’s also clarified a lot of elements about the book itself, and I’m grateful for the time I’ve spent so far. In many ways, this is a different version of radical revision tactics I talk about in Refuse to Be Done, like rewriting troublesome scenes or stories in a different point of view—and then sometimes rewriting it a second time back into the original, to capture all the good new writing you did in the earlier rewrite. It’s often just a way to get a fresh glimpse of the story you’re telling, and to gather new energy for the writing ahead.
If you’ve tried this yourself, or you have other similar tactics, I’d love to hear about them in the comments. Thanks for reading, as always, and good luck with whatever you’re writing this month!
What I’m Reading:
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. I’m only about eighty pages into this novel right now, but it’s got one of the best voices and the best worlds I’ve seen in SFF in a long while. It reminds me of China Mieville’s work, in the best way, while being its own thing entirely. I’m excited to read more, and I can’t wait to talk about it with others when I’m done.
Thanks so much for reading! If you’re not already subscribed, please consider doing so by clicking the button below.
Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable book) was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Matt, I don’t see where to sign up for the March 11 event for paid subscribers. Can you point me to it, please?