Tag: advice (page 23 of 25)

So, as you may know, over the Valentine’s Day weekend I went ahead and slapped IRREGULAR CREATURES up on Amazon for a wee widdle dollar (or, rather, a penny shy).

How’d it do? Was it worth it?

Numbers-wise, here’s the poop:

Between Friday and Monday, I sold 124 copies. Numerically, not bad. I mean, considering that after the first explosive week of sales I’ve been doing 40 sales a week, seeing a four-day jump that equals thrice that number is pretty good. Of course, that’s just in copies sold.

Money made is fine enough, but nowhere near what I would’ve earned had the price been $2.99 — earning thirty cents per sale as opposed to two bucks per sale is a significant drop. Then again, would I have sold 124 copies at $2.99? No. No way.

Ranking-wise, looks like the book got into the top 2000 at Amazon Kindle store. It did better on its first day of sales, when it made it up to #824. It was a good leap, but I was hoping for better.

Here are some larger conclusions — do with them as you will:

Ninety-Nine Cent E-Books Are The Same Kind Of “Problem” As Pirated Books

Piracy is viewed as a problem because it represents lost revenue, except the problem with that, erm, problem is that it avoids the reality: those pirates were probably never going to be real customers. The $0.99 book issue has a similar throughline: those who bought at $0.99 but not at $2.99 could be viewed as lost revenue. Except, smart money says most of them were never going to buy at the higher price. In this way, they represent exactly the revenue they should represent, and further, ideally represent “new readers.” And that leads to this next point right here…

Low Cost Is About New Readers

I just want to sequester that thought away from the others — stick it in a cage, zap it with cattle-prods, and make it dance.You put something out there at that $$, it’s about gaining eyes and, ideally, fans.

In a perfect world, you’re then training those fans that your work has value, regardless of what that value is. A buck is a dirt-floor price for fiction, but free is a lot worse. This isn’t scientific thinking, but my feeling is this: you give something away for free, readers understand its value, which is essentially nothing. You sell something for any price, even a low price, they at least understand that the value of the work is in cash and coin. It isn’t garbage. It isn’t floor-sweepings. I think any money given is meaningful in this regard.

Whatever the case, new readers — if your work engages and connects — are likely to stick around for future releases. I don’t say this having any evidence beyond my own known patterns, but I suspect it’s true.

I also suspect that ghosts are real, and that UFOs sometimes steal our Bigfeet.

So, I might not be the guy you want to listen to.

Always Let People Give You More

A few people bought the book at the Amazon price, and then wanted to ensure I got more $$ out of the deal. Further, some eschewed the Kindle purchase and just went to buy the (full-price) PDF. Feels like you should always leave room for fans to support you in ways beyond funneling money through a distributor.

Self-Promotion Is Still Hard

It’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s irritating (to myself and surely to others) becoming my own mouthpiece again and again. It’s bad enough I’m trying to generate energy for this blog and for Flickr photos and whatever else — suddenly I’m like, “Now you buy my shit!” And, for better or for worse it feels all the more salacious because I’m asking for your filthy wonderful lucre. On the other hand, shit doggity-damn, it works. Whenever I tweeted (which usually resulted in a number of retweets from followers, which was awesome and deserves a bucket of thanks), I got a spike in sales. I mean, a visible, sudden spike. So, it sucks being a whore, but being a whore also works.

The Amazon Sales Ranking Is Still Determined By A Crazy Robot

I’m sure there’s some kind of logic or sanity in there somewhere, in much the same way SkyNet had a “plan” when it nuked all of mankind and invented Terminators. But my mushy human brain just doesn’t understand it. Sometimes a leap in sales would register — other times a leap in sales would hamper the ranking. Beware Amazon’s crazy ranking robot. Best to ignore it because, uhhh, it’s gone insane.

What If You Stop Looking At E-Books As Individual Items?

If I have seven I Dream Of Jeannie-themed buttplugs, and they cost me $10 a pop and I sell ’em at $20, then I make $10 a pop. If I reduce my costs, I may sell more, but once they’re gone, they’re gone — I cannot sell anymore, and my sales potential is squandered. (Or something — let me remind you that I am a writer with middling math and/or business skills.)

The same cannot be said of e-books. My audience is theoretically limitless. Each e-book sold does not represent an e-book lost out of my inventory. I’m selling the equivalent of an imaginary friend.

Let’s look at my overall sales in the past month, right? I made around $5 – $15 a day in sales every day, earning $2 or so on each sale. Fine. Easy enough.

When I started the V-Day sale, on the first day I earned almost $30, and on subsequent days went back to the $5-15 range. I sold a lot more “copies,” but (for the most part) made the same amount of money.

If you stop looking at each sale as a lost e-book and instead look at the collective sales, the $0.99 is easier to swallow. I’m increasing my readership and, frankly, still making the same money. Now, again, in what I will crassly refer to as Normal Business Practices, that ain’t great — “increased consumer base” should translate to “bigger money.” Here, it doesn’t, but I’m also not losing anything, really. I don’t have overhead costs, I don’t have inventory, I don’t have a dwindling supply.

Forgive me if this makes no sense — I’m merely saying that if you look at e-book sales as a collective process with rewards that go beyond the individual sale, then a reduced price feels more valuable.

On The Other Hand

A buck is still too damn cheap for the book. For any book, really.

It’s why I don’t know if I’d recommend that price consistently. Feels like a good sale price. Besides, you start at ninety-nine cents, you can never incentivize by reducing the price temporarily or permanently.

Then again, what the fuck do I know?

The Apple Eats Amazon Kerfuffle

I don’t have much to say right now about the “Apple Shanks The Kindle App In The Prison Shower” situation, because Tobias Buckell says them for me. Go there and read his wisdom.

Only thing I will say: if you’re planning on self-publishing, may be either a good time to hurry up and do it or sit back and wait for the two giant Godzilla monsters to fight it the fuck out.

The writer is a complex animal. We are grotesque mutations — irregular creatures, as I have noted — that form a crass menagerie, a mad bestiary. A writer possesses the lion’s mane, the horse’s hoof, the unicorn’s horn, the moonbat’s milky nipples. We’re dangerous animals, bred as chimera, confused as to who we are or what good we may do for the world.  The world is home, quite frankly, to too many of us. We have bred wantonly, and now we are everywhere. Our creative heritage is watered down with liquor and insanity. We’re like designer dogs. We’re a Poodle crossed with a Weimaraner crossed with a Pomeranian. We are the Poomaraner. The Weipooranian. The Pomaranadoodle. Possibly rabid. Definitely bewildered.

Or, put more succinctly, beware of writer.

Just as you should beware of us, we should also beware of us. The writer’s life is a strange one. Sitting alone. Talking to made-up people. Watching our little tragedies and comedies unfold until all we’re left with is a page of repeated text: “All Writing And No Porn Makes Jack A Dull Facebook Update.”

You do this day in, day out, you start to feel a little nuts.

The rejections. The fictions. The criticisms. Endless words. Myriad characters. So much time.

And so I give unto you: coping mechanisms. Fellow penmonkeys, compatriot wordslingers, if you want to do this job and not end up shellacked in your own snot-froth while hanging from the ceiling fan — if you are to survive at all with your mind and spirit intact — then you must do as I say. Do not deviate, lest you be struck down by your own lunacy.

These, then, are your survival skills, your coping mechanisms.

Something Something Peter Principle

Blah blah blah, every employee rises to his own level of incompetence.

This isn’t that, exactly. But it sounded good.

Here’s what you need to do: you need to realize that worse writers than you have succeeded in ways you simply have not. Find a writer who is, by your estimation, a talentless gasbag, a semi-sentient fungus that can barely string together a paragraph much less a whole goddamn novel.

The more popular and successful this writer is, the better.

At first this may seem disheartening — “They gave a million-dollar book deal to one of the baby zoo pandas!?” — but that’s not the point, oh no. The point is to take comfort that you can do better. We obviously tend to read writers who inspire us, who move us, who we feel possess talent that is otherwise insurmountable. Pshh. Fuck that narwhal right in the blowhole. You need to realize that some truly incompetent and incapable writers have risen — which means that if those muck-slurping sea monkeys can do it, well what the hell, why can’t you?

Yes, of course this is ludicrously petty. Which is why we don’t do it in public, so please go take down that blog post where you mewl and moan about Dan Brown.

We do it in our minds. It’s called “mental masturbation.”

It is a critical coping skill.

Something Something The Opposite Of That Thing I Just Said

We also need writers who inspire us, so don’t lose that sense of wonderment, of purpose, of writers who are our Sherpas. I mean, we do this for a reason. We don’t write because we want to aspire to the level of a brain-damaged ostrich holding a pen in its crooked beak but we write because other storytellers have moved us with their stories and their telling of the aforementioned stories.

If you’re banging your head against the wall and wondering why you ever chose this madman’s profession, dig out an old favorite book. Pick a chapter. Read it. Soak in it. Absorb a lesson. Revel in the words. Rub it on your body like a loofah, lathering yourself up with the cleansing soap bubbles of inspiration.

You Cannot Milk A Dead Goat

Sometimes, you need to walk away from the writing. Some writers I know, myself included, will stay down in the word mines far longer than they should, obsessively chipping away the walls looking for one last story gem, one last character diamond. Only thing you’re doing is driving yourself nuts. Get the hell out of there. The canary died three hours back. Then its flesh dissolved, leaving only a greasy smear in the cage.

You can only get so much value out of a given day of work. Set a course for your daily word count. Do your work, then stop, pause, consider. Keep going if if the juice is there — but if it’s not, don’t lose your shit. You did your work. Exhausting your internal juju is like intellectual strip-mining. You gain nothing but the scouring and erosion of your creative resources. Get out of your skull.

Beer, Bacon, Meth, Wine, Coffee, Cookie Dough, Hookers

I drink coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, wine at night.

I’m not saying writers should become chemically addicted to a whole bunch of shit, but hey, it’s better than soiling your pants and attacking the mailman with a camping hatchet.

For God’s Sake Do Not Hang Out With Other Writers

Didn’t you hear me? We’re all crazy. Don’t hang out in little writer tribes. At least, not on a steady basis. It’s incestuous! It’s like putting a band together, except every band member is a paranoid schizophrenic. Talk to people that aren’t writers. Hang out with a park ranger or some shit. An accountant. A painter. A ninja. A detective. Or what about a detective who is also a painter? And who has a park ranger ninja cohort? See? You can’t get that kind of awesomeness by hanging out with other writers. There’s a story in there!

Seriously, though, other writers are good people, and yes, from time to time you want to get together and talk the business. But other times, you need to get out of that headspace. Free yourself.

The Publishing Industry Will Explode Your Brain-Tits

Should I have hyphenated “Brain-Tits?” I thought about just going with “Braintits.” But that almost looks like “Braintitis,” which is probably some kind of swelling of the brain disorder. Of course, that’s probably apt, isn’t it? Publishing? Brain-swelling. Yeah. I thought so, too.

What I’m saying is, the publishing industry is interesting and all, and sure, you can be served well by knowing its Ins and Outs. But don’t focus long on it because it’s like staring into the unblinking Eye of Mordor (which, for the record, looks like a lava vagina). Gaze too long and you cannot look away. It’s like that quote by that German dude: “Gaze too long into the Abyss and before too long you realize you’re never going to get a book deal and then you wanna  jump into the hungry mouth of a lava vagina.”

You will go nuts trying to figure out the publishing industry. Pull back. Relax.

Write the best book you can write.

Start there. Worry later.

Beware The Superinfo Cyberhighway

The Internet has gravity. It will suck you in. Sure, it’s fun. It’s a great place to spend time. And read about book deals. And about other writers. And their success. And then you go on Amazon and you see all the books that aren’t yours. Next thing you know, you’re curled up on the floor, your iPad held tight in your arthritic talons. Your pants are in the corner. They’re smoldering, as if recently on fire.

The Internet is not always a healthy place. It is a place of rank negativity. Escape Cyberspace. Take the next exit off the Information Superhighway. Realize that nobody calls it “Cyberspace” or the “Information Superhighway” anymore. (They should really combine them for maximum coolness: The Infospace Cyberway! Or The Superinfo Cyberhighway!)

Leave your house. Let the sun fill your body with Vitamin D or whatever other voodoo vitamins the Big Fiery Sky Ball lends to us pale-fleshed writer-types. Take a fucking walk, for God’s sake.

Writing Isn’t Always About Reading

You don’t get new stories from old stories. You get new stories by closing your manuscript and going out and doing some shit. Big adventures, small adventures. Jury duty, Krav Maga, art museums, squid wrestling, garden planting, squirrel killing, windsurfing, long drives, long walks, making love to a grizzled longshoreman, whatever it can be.

Should you read? Of course. You’re a writer. Should you do more than read? Well, duh. Books aren’t just about writing. They’re about stories. Stories are about life.

Live life, lest you have no stories to tell of your own.

Set A Not Totally Insane Metric For Success

Writers are notorious for creating unhealthy watermarks for success.

“If I don’t have a novel published by the time I’m 31, I’m going to swallow a grenade.”

“If my first book is not a bestseller after the first ten minutes, I will hate myself so hard my bowels rupture.”

“If the writing I do today is not the best writing anybody has done ever, then I’m just going to quit this writing thing and go drown myself in a sewer treatment tank, hopefully choking to death on used condoms.”

Writers are afforded advantages few others manage: we are gifted with the power of the do-over and the take-back. If I’m a pilot and I fuck up, I may have just killed everybody on board by crashing into the Washington Monument. If I fuck up my day’s writing, I get to go back and fix it. And fix it some more. And fix it again and again until I’m happy or someone gives me money for it.

Set simple targets for success. Just finishing something is a thing that a lot of writers can barely manage.

CTFO: Chill The Fuck Out

Like I said, we’re all a little crazy, yeah? We can be intense, depressive, fiery, passionate, shameful, horrible, mean, obsequious, and like, a triple dozen other adjectives. It’s good to be that way sometimes, but writers, we tend to burn hot and fast like a road flare: everything is now or never, glorious or awful, everything or nothing. To that, I say:

Chill out. Calm down. Relax.

Do some Yoga. Take a swim. Pop your cookies alone or with a friend. Get a head massage. Drink some Ayahuasca and go fight the Jaguar King to learn your spirit name. Wait, maybe don’t do that last one.

I’m just saying, do you feel your heart palpitating? Do you feel suddenly overcome by uninvited worry and embarrassment? Shhh. Shhhh. Realize that this doesn’t matter. None of this matters. You’re not saving the world. You’re just telling stories. That’s supposed to be awesome, not awful. Stop shitting your pants. Stop creating false dichotomies and crazy expectations.

Seriously.

Chill the fuck out.

Then, when you’re easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, get back in the game and do some writing, will you?

How Do You Cope With Life As A Writer?

You got coping mechanisms for this crazy life? Share and share alike, word-apes.

Bold proclamation time:

The most critical thing that a story must do  —

the tippity-top of the narrative mountain!

— is make the audience feel something.

The key verb there is “make.” As in, to force, to manipulate, to induce, compel, impel, coerce. As in, to turn the audience into your wide-eyed butt-puppets and demand that those suckers dance.

You are an emotional manipulator. You are a callous puppetmaster.

Think about it. The best stories — the ones you remember, the ones you tell again and again, the ones you keep coming back to — are the ones that made you feel something. You feel fear during a campfire tale. You feel shock and betrayal when Vader reveals his heritage and lops off his son’s hand quick as thumbing the bloom off a daisy. You weep during Brian’s Song. You masturbate vigorously during Career Opportunities starring Jennifer Connelly. What? Just me?

Uhhh. Then I was clearly just kidding. Ha ha! Ha. Heh. Shut up.

Point is, the real skill of a gifted storyteller is the ability to twist the emotions of the audience. To conjure feeling for — and please observe just how absurd this is — completely imaginary people.

“Here is a person that does not — and will never — exist,” you say. “Now I will make you care for them more than you care for your own mother, at least for two hours or 300 pages or a handful of comic book panels. P.S., you are my butt-puppet. Or, if you’d prefer, rectal poppet. That is the one choice I will give you.”

The Essential Toolkit

To achieve this, I suspect you must be:

An excellent liar.

Someone who is at least mildly disturbed.

Capable of thinking of profound evils and delirious virtues in equal measure.

Willing to commit acts of overwhelming cruelty to invisible, non-existent people.

Someone who had lots of imaginary friends as a child. And possibly as an adult.

The First Emotion Must Be Love

The core of every good story is a character for whom we care — and not just care a little, but care deeply. This alone is no easy task: Such a character must be likable, but not annoying. He must have virtues but remain imperfect. She must possess the potential for sacrifice, for selflessness, for selfishness, for evil. He may be funny, but not only that. She may be serious, but not only that. He comprises many dimensions but not so many that he seems unreal or unpindownable.

How do we foster love? How do we ask the audience to care for her (and by “ask” I mean, “twist up their emotions like a pair of frilly panties”)?

I don’t know that any one way exists, but I suspect it helps if you go in knowing why the audience is going to connect with a given character. Are they going to respect his honesty in the face of criminal tendencies? Will his warm heart buried beneath a crusty exoskeleton of calcified snark be their undoing? Is it her unexpected toughness, her motherly instincts, her witty sardonicism, her laser-shooting uterus?

Best figure that out. Identify it going in. Easy tip: pick three traits that will make the character lovable. “Irascible scamp,” “charitable to a fault,” and “photon ovaries.”

Character magic, complete.

Now You Stab The Audience In The Kidney

First comes love, yes.

But after that? Sweet, sweet betrayal.

Hey! That handsome John McClane, he’s going through some rough times — oh! Oh, he’s trying out that toe thing. On the carpet. And then oh snap, terrorists and OH GOD HE’S RUNNING ACROSS BROKEN GLASS AND THERE’S FIRE AND A GUN GLUED TO HIS BACK WITH TAPE AND BLOOD EW.

That Buffy sure is a sassy little vampire slayer, isn’t she? She’s cute and snarky and has such great friends and HOLY CRAP SHE JUST HAD TO KILL HER VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND OH GOD NO.

Oh, that Elizabeth Bennett! Trapped in a stuffy society where status matters, the poor woman just wants to marry for love and YE GODS AND FISHES SHE’S BEING EATEN BY A KOMODO DRAGON.

Okay, I maybe made that last part up. But I dare any of you to claim that Jane Austen’s novels would not be a smidgen more entertaining with the introduction of various ravenous reptiles.

Point is, that character you just made the audience love? Now you have to hurt that character. As badly as you can stomach, I suspect.You have earned the audience’s love and trust. Now you betray it.

Trick is, audiences are both really stupid and damnably clever. They’re stupid because, duh, they keep coming back for more. They keep walking back into bookstores and movie theaters all year ’round, expecting that something will be different, expecting for once that their love and trust will be rewarded.

(It won’t.)

On the other hand, they’re smart because they’ve wised up. They can see your machinations laid bare. They know you’re not likely to kill the protagonist. They know you’re not likely to irreversibly destroy some precious plot point. That forces you to either a) get creative or b) throw caution to the wind and do the exact thing that they think you can never do.

Getting creative suggests that you find secret in-roads that lead to a character’s pain — sure, you can’t kill the character, but you can kill their spirit! (Or appear to, at least.) Harm their loved ones! Take away everything they hold dear! Hobble their efforts at every turn!

It should become increasingly clear that the character is a voodoo doll representing the audience. You stab the character with pins — but the character is an imaginary proxy. The one who feels the sting of the prick (stop sniggering) is the audience. In fact, what you’re doing to the audience — give them love, then stab the love with pointy evil — is the same thing that you’re doing to the character, isn’t it?

It’s an endless cycle of love and pain.

And That Is Only The Beginning

That simplest of equations (create love, betray love) is only the first and most direct way of instigating emotion in the reader. But the most accomplished storyteller has an unholy cabinet of torture tools and cruel curiosities. You can make the audience feel hatred. You can make them feel disgust. You can drag them into the depths of terror while elevating them to the heights of ecstatic relief.

What about the power of a loathsome villain?

The wrenching uncertainty of a love triangle?

The sting of defeat, the reverie of triumph?

A puppet might have a half-a-dozen strings, but the strings that lead from your story to that story’s audience are nearly infinite. And in the next couple weeks, we’ll be taking a look at more of those ways to tweak, twist, fold, spindle, mutilate, maul, and molest the tender emotions of your unwitting audience.

Stay tuned, story-slingers.

(Credit to Angela Perry who kicked my ass into this line of thinking with this comment.)

You may note that, in my bio, I sometimes refer to myself as a “screenwriter” in addition to “novelist,” or “game designer” or “freelance penmonkey.” (Also in addition to: “bee wrangler,” “canary in the coal mine,” and “fluffer.”) At this point I no longer consider the identifier a matter of wishful thinking: for years I’ve worked on scripts that remain unproduced, but  by this point my writing partner and I have worked on scripts that have, in fact, seen the light of day: Collapsus and Pandemic, just to name two. Plus, we have a feature film in development and a television show up for pilot consideration.

And yet, you may notice that I don’t talk much about it.

Screenwriting, I mean, not the bee-wrangling or porn fluffing.

Reason being: I’ve only been doing this a few years. I can talk about being a fiction writer or game designer or the life of the slack-jawed freelancer because I’ve been living those roles for a long time. I’m no expert, but I can at least wade into such swampy waters without fear of being sucked under.

Still, I get a lot of requests to talk about screenwriting.

People say to me, “Talk about screenwriting! Do it now!”

And I try to reply to them and explain… but it’s difficult what with the dirty panties duct-taped into my mouth. I mostly just want to go back to the grocery store from whence I was abducted.

Good news is, I’ve managed to bite through my panty-gag, and now I will regale you with my ahem-cough-cough “rules” of screenwriting, which are really just “guidelines with all the firmness of gravy-soaked bread.” Again, I am no expert. Read this not with a grain of salt but rather an entire salt lick.

Ready? Let’s roll.

Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit, Anything Else Is A Bowl Of Shit

The screenplay is a bucking horse, a rammy stallion — the first time it sees the barn door open, that fucker is going to be off like a shot. Before you know what’s happening, you have a 300 page script in your hands. And, given that one page is equivalent to a minute of screen time, that’s bad juju.

So, you have to make a concerted effort to rein that beast in, always aiming for that sweet spot between 90 and 120 pages. This requires an almost religious devotion to brevity.

Conversations shouldn’t go on too long. Descriptions should be terse; this isn’t a novel. You’re not Lovecraft. Do not spend two pages discussing the insane non-Euclidean geometry of a lamp. Find and report on only those most critical of details. You’re not art directing the thing. Scenes shouldn’t go more than three, four, maaaaybe five pages. Keep it tight. Fast. Loose.

It’s like bad sex —  get in, see the sights, pop your cookies, get out.

Think Of It Like A “Story Blueprint”

Don’t be married to the material. A novel is the end of the road. What you write is what ends up on the shelves (after edits, of course). Screenplays don’t work like that. The work is always in flux. It’s in flux up until the final director’s edit (at which point you’ve long been out of the equation). You are writing more a story blueprint than a story. It’s an architectural map. It’s not yet a constructed building.

And Yet, It Needs To Be A Compelling Read

By the same token, it still has to read like a kick-ass compelling story. Characters must leap off the page. Descriptions must be vivid. Dialogue should be sharp, pointed, purposeful. And you must do so with that aforementioned devotion to brevity. Which, yes, is like saying, “I need you to spit liquid gold into this thimble,” but fuck it, that’s your job.

I write my scripts in accordance to screenwriting rules, but I also try to make them interesting. I want them to read a little bit like novels or short stories without conforming to those particular conventions. (Oh, and for the record, I do not believe that novel = screenplay. I believe short story or novella = screenplay. Anybody who tries to adapt a novel into a screenplay will find the challenging task of determining what massive cuts the novel will require. Just my two cents.)

Write so it will be read at the same time you write so it will be filmed.

No Matter How Much Your Struggle, Structure Matters

I read blogs or screenwriting advice and you hear a lot of, “Adhering to the three-act structure is a myth, blah blah blah, don’t do it.” Except very rarely do they cite films that don’t adhere to this classic filmic structure. Most classic films do. Most modern films do. Seriously, you can check your watch during a film and predict the act turns.

For better or for worse, it is the accepted and expected structure in film-making. You can do differently, but you may be challenged. Just lie back and think of England, love.

Structure is a beautiful thing. The challenge — really, the art — is how you subvert structure, how you brainwash it to make it your own. That is, at least, how I see it.

Do Not Write A Shooting Script

You’re a writer, not a director, so unless it’s demanded of you, leave all the camera voodoo out of there. That also gums up a clean and compelling read. So. Uh. Don’t do it.

In TV, Characters Are Static; In Film, Characters Are Dynamic

The nigh-universality of it sucks, but in television, we don’t like our characters to change. Yes, you can point to characters that have changed, but it’s not common. In film, however, we are granted the opportunity to see change in our characters, and in my ego-fed megalomaniac humble opinion, you don’t want to waste that opportunity.

Action Action Action Shit Be Happening Action Action Action

Novels offer the writer and reader a luxury that a script does not. In a novel, we are often treated to a sense of history, of thought, of internal monologues, of peeling away layers.

In scripts, you still have to think about all that stuff. But it just doesn’t end up on the page. Characters with rich character histories will not find those rich histories on display like in a museum.

Screenplays are about shit happening. I don’t mean “action” in the sense of “constant karate kicks and exploding F-14 Tomcats,” I just mean, things must be in perpetual motion.

You don’t have time to stop and wax poetic. That’s not to say pacing fails to matter or that you don’t get those same peaks and valleys — it’s just that pacing does not account for 10 pages of talking about your fantasy kingdom’s oh-so-fascinating history or five pages of a character’s internal process.

Shove it all beneath a layer of wordsmithy and bury it there. Text must become subtext.

Writing Is Rewriting

Be ready to rewrite.

I enjoy it. I love rewriting scripts way more than I do rewriting novels. I guess it’s because rewriting novels is like hauling stone. Editing a script is fast, light, loose — the tool is far more “scalpel” than “dumptruck.”

Table Reads Are The Cat’s Knees, The Bee’s Pajamas

It’s critical to read your novel aloud.

It’s also critical for someone else — preferably lots of someone elses — to read your script aloud. We’ve had table reads for all our feature scripts and it is incredibly valuable. Your ear will pick up things: inadequacies, inadvertent alliterations, repetitions, linguistic quirks, muddy phrasing. The actors will do things with your words that you never expected, both for the awesome and for the unpleasant.

You do not merely want this. You need this.

Oh, And Have Fun

I adore screenwriting. It’s like I’ve opened a gnome door, and all these little fun goblins are in there having a party, and I’m inviting them into my brain. Where they make a nest and drink goblin beer and have giddy goblin babies. I have a blast doing it, and in reading scripts, I can tell when fun (or excitement or engagement) is in the recipe. This is true of novels, too, but because a script is so spare, so bare, I personally think that it comes out more… distinctly?

So, rock out and have fun, will you?

And that’s it. That’s all she wrote.

But I want to hear from you. Anybody tinkering with scripts out there? Got any “golden rules” you care to share? Don’t make me get the dirty panty-gag.