Guy Burt's Blog

Much of this blog is going to be day-to-day thoughts: what I’m doing, how it’s going, whether the process of translating the voices in my head into words on paper that actually work is happening well or not. But I feel like you’re owed a bit of context too, so you know what you’re getting into. We need some kind of origin story.

It starts with being a reader of stories. I devoured books as a kid: read incessantly and insatiably. I loved the way books transported me to different places and times. I read quickly, constantly and fairly indiscriminately: adventure stories, histories, myths and legends, fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy, pretty much anything I could get my hands on. (The back of the cereal packet if nothing else was available.) From almost before I can properly remember, I internalised the simple truth that books can be transformative and transporting.

It also starts with inventing stories. My parents were head-teachers who ran a school: it was an old Victorian building set in several acres of grounds, and until I was nine years old we lived above it, in the attic; in what had once been the servants’ quarters.  After the school day was done the building was echoing and dustily empty; the grounds seemed limitless. I spent hours outside, often entirely alone, exploring, building camps, creating fantasy worlds with toys or just in my head. Some kids would have found this lonely, but I was an introverted little creature who was perfectly happy with the solitude. In many ways I was extraordinarily lucky to grow up in this environment: wild-seeming, but safe.

Solitude worked for me, but I was less good in company. I was nerdy and bookish and while these things were assets when I was on my own, they grated on others. A nerd with a big vocabulary has two targets pinned to their back, and I got bullied at school. Instead of keeping quiet and trying to blend it, I tended instead to answer back. This didn’t help much. It just made me a smartmouth nerd with a big vocabulary; one who was asking to get bullied. And the things I found fascinating – computers, science and science fiction, books and comics – marked me down as weird. I got called freak a lot.

This went on for a while, but gradually, gradually things improved. The other kids got to know me a bit better, and I learned to tone down some of the ‘freak stuff’ just a little. The two worst bullies were in the year above me, and finally they left the school; life lightened up quite a lot at that point for several of us who’d been their victims. I found – a little to my surprise – that I had a small but loyal group of friends around me, kids with whom I could talk about science fiction or computer games without being ridiculed. By the time I was twelve, I was genuinely enjoying myself.

And then everything changed. In 1985 I left my familiar little day-school; said a final goodbye to the handful of friends I’d managed to gather around me; and moved to a huge, imposing boarding school. It was about an hour from my home town but might as well have been on the far side of the moon. There were seven hundred pupils. I had never boarded before; was terrified at the prospect; didn’t dare tell anyone that although I was proud to have got in, I just didn’t want to go.

All the things that had singled me out when I was small suddenly snapped back into focus. Weird kid. Freak kid. Not welcome here. Not one of us.

There’s a year of my life here, between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, which I’ve all but erased from my memory. I retain glimpses of it, but only glimpses. Most of them are pretty deeply unpleasant.

Again, gradually, gradually things improved; and by the time I was doing A-levels, aged seventeen, I was once more in the position of having found my place in the environment; of having some friends; of feeling okay in myself. I genuinely enjoyed my last two years at school.

But rewind back to the thirteen-year-old whose life is coming apart. (And it really was. The fleeting memories that I do retain are of genuine despair.) I was being bullied again: worse than before. I was lost in an enormous environment that felt implacable and uncaring. I was far from home; there was nowhere safe, nowhere familiar, no-one to turn to.

My reaction to this was to start writing a novel. I wrote it on A4 schoolpaper in a black binder that I carried around with my schoolbooks. I wrote it in lessons, at the back of the class, under cover of whatever textbook we were using. I wrote it in my free time. I wrote it urgently, with fierce determination, as though writing was saving my life: which I now think it was.

I got caught writing it, by a Geography teacher, and punished for writing it with two hours’ Saturday detention. (And, in those two hours, kept writing it. Wrote a whole stack of pages. Two hours was like a gift.) There was anger and hurt going into it, but also all the love and hope that felt missing from around me. I put them into the story and I lived in the story, and the real world faded a little and became faintly more bearable.

For what it’s worth, the book was about a girl called Jo (the first of many female characters I’d end up writing). On the first page, she dies in a car-crash and wakes up in a strange afterlife; the book is about her journey through it, the people she meets, what she has to overcome and accomplish. It was a fantasy story, because I loved fantasy as a genre and because the idea of a dead girl on a quest through the afterlife was clearly a fantasy idea. I called it Jo’s Game, and if I remember right, the first sentence was “It is a very curious thing to be dead.”

Writing a book was utterly different from reading. I wasn’t just inhabiting the world of the story the way I would as a reader: I was creating it as I went along. Whether the story stood or fell depended on whether I could craft it well enough. The characters were my responsibility. What happened to them was up to me, and how real they were was dependent on my ability to write them. (And the more I wrote them, the more I cared about them, and cared about getting them right; doing them justice.)

Writing was difficult – sometimes very difficult indeed – and I liked how difficult it was, how much it asked of me.

(And it’s still difficult; and I still love how difficult it is.)

That year, aged thirteen, writing became the lifeline that saved me from drowning. I clung to it with the ferocious determination of someone who knows that the water is closing over them but that this is the way out. I wrote and wrote, and finally finished the book; got Jo and her friends to the end of their journey.

(The story doesn’t end there: although Jo’s Game was never published, it played an essential role in my becoming a published author. But I’ll save that for another time.)

And, like I said, things started to get better for me after that. But something of the way in which this first novel came into being marked me permanently. So little of that school year remains, but the process of writing is one of the things that I still remember with utter, vivid clarity. And I suddenly understood that being a writer was something that I could do. All you needed was to write, and keep writing, and not let anyone stop you. I loved books so much that I think I had imagined writers to be almost mythical creatures: but there was an actual novel in that black ring-binder, and I had written it, even though I was just a kid (and a freak). It might not be very good; no-one else might want to read it; but the pages were covered in words and I’d put them there. There was a world in the pages that I’d not just inhabited, but invented. It was the most astonishing feeling, and I carried it with me, small and warm and wonderful, from that point forward.

The Story So Far

I’m going to try to post fairly regular updates on what I’m writing and how it’s going, so let’s start by setting the scene and getting you up to speed.

I’m currently reworking a novel. This is an exciting place to be: I have the raw material of the text finished, and am now tinkering, adjusting, refining. But it’s been quite a journey getting to this point. For example: last autumn, I cut 74,000 words. Just took out and threw away a novel’s worth of writing. (And haven’t regretted it for a second.)

I thought it might be interesting to explain how that came about. The short version is this: the novel changed under me while I was writing it.

Planning vs letting it grow…

I’m not good at planning novels. I plan screenplays (because you have to: people want to know in advance what the story is going to be, before they commit time and money to a script.) But novels have always evolved while I was writing them; and of my three published books, I didn’t start a single one knowing exactly where it would end up.

This time I was determined that it would be different: that I would write better, and more efficiently, if I made at least some kind of plan before I got started. I had a basic idea: a middle-aged astronomer who sets off to try to find a woman he’s seen on the news, and who he’s convinced he knows from his childhood. The woman is in a crowd of protestors but her glimpsed face is enough to propel him away from his job and his life and onto the road, searching for her (and, I think we’d all agree, probably searching for other things too – his own past; his lost youth; paths not taken… that kind of thing).

I had a title – Leaving the Observatory – which I was pleased with because it had a neat double meaning: Finn, the astronmer in the story, has always been on the periphery of things; always an observer but rarely a participant; and this quest was going to mark his alteration as a character, his decision to engage. So he leaves his work at the observatory but also makes the shift from watcher to doer.

So far so good. I wanted Finn to have some other characters to bounce off before he finally locates (or doesn’t locate) the woman he’s searching for, so I introduced his childhood best friend, Garrett; although it quickly became quite fun to see how Garrett was the worst kind of friend anyone could ask for. Boorish, drunken, incredibly selfish, borderline unhinged; I wanted him to be the anti-Finn, a kind of force for egotistical chaos who would keep derailing Finn’s ordered, scientific universe. I thought he could be real fun to write (and to read).

I also thought it would be useful, and interesting, to have a child involved in the story; in order to get a different perspective on the two adult worldviews represented by Finn and Garrett. So I gave Finn a travelling companion in the form of Noah, the daughter of Finn’s boss at the observatory. I decided Noah was fourteen, and that her mum Marie was not just Finn’s boss but also his best friend. I figured that Marie and Noah’s dad were separated, and Marie wanted some time to try to work things out with him; so she’s asked Finn to take Noah off her hands for a few weeks. Finn agrees, but then this childminding gig crashes into his personal midlife crisis when he sees the woman on the news and decides he has to go in search of her. Noah gets caught in Finn’s slipstream, so she’s along for the ride.

First draft

With my characters in hand, and a setup, and a fairly good idea of where things were going to go, I started writing. This must have been about three years ago now. I found the going quite tough. I felt confident writing Finn, but less confident writing Garrett; his boorishness and narcissism could be funny (which I liked) and sometimes shocking (which I kind of liked); but I struggled to humanise him, to take him beyond a kind of caricature of a figure. I wrote a couple of scenes in which Noah, the kid, called him out on his behaviour: it felt to me that her generation is far less tolerant of this kind of masculine bullshit, and I let her articulate that. The thing was, having written this, I found myself kind of disliking Garrett; and when I stopped having sympathy for him, he became tougher still to write as anything other than a caricature, a foil for Finn and Noah.

Nevertheless I pressed on, because I suspected this could be fixed once I had a first draft. I could go back, rework some of Garrett’s passages, work on him more.

By now I was approaching the midpoint of the book. There was a key sequence coming up which changed the focus of the story quite severely: took us away from our comedic childhood-pals-reunited dynamic and into something more serious. As I got closer to it, I had an idea – one which I thought was exciting. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got.

The idea was this: to swap the perspective of the story, just for a handful of chapters, from Finn to Noah. The book was written in the third person, but firmly from Finn’s perspective: Garrett and Noah were characters, but it was always Finn’s story. But I couldn’t leave this idea alone: why not do a few chapters from Noah’s point of view?

It would allow a striking shift of worldview, away from the adult characters. It would allow me to foreground elements of Finn’s character of which he’s not fully aware, but which Noah – from the outside – could see clearly. It would let me comment on what had gone before with a new voice. The nearer I came to the point where I was going to switch voice from Finn to Noah, the more excited I became.

The plan, initially, was to break at the midpoint of the book; do three chapters from Noah’s perspective; and then return to Finn, to carry us home to the conclusion of the story.

But the moment I started writing in Noah’s voice, everything changed. The book started to flow. I found the way that the adult world looked through her eyes was exactly what the story needed. The themes of the novel snapped into focus seen this way. Noah was the secret weapon the book had been waiting for: where Finn was hesitant, Noah was dynamic. Where Finn was uncertain, Noah had conviction. Where Finn was an observer, trying to leave his observatory, Noah was already a participant in the world: leading him by the hand, almost.

I quickly abandoned the three chapter plan, and settled on a new plan: that the book would be in two halves. First Finn, then Noah. The same story seen from two angles; but not told completely in either – Finn would start us off, and Noah would finish the narrative.

I finally got the novel finished in Spring of 2023. Section 1: Finn. Secion 2: Noah. Garrett a brooding, drunken, chaotic through-line, bringing trouble to whatever he touches.

Feedback… and it’s not good.

At this point I let a tiny group of very trusted readers take a look at it: close friends and family whose opinions I value extremely. I was quietly confident that they were going to like it.

Instead, all three said variations of the same thing: the novel wasn’t working.

(This is just a horrible thing to hear. A gut-punch. I was utterly dismayed; but they were all saying variations of the same thing, so there was no way I could not listen.)

Here are their thoughts in summary.

Reader 1 said she loved Noah but, almost as a consequence of that, hated Finn. Felt that he was essentially taking advantage of Noah in pursuing his midlife crisis with her in tow; and reneging on his duty of care. She also didn’t like Garrett, who she found dull. All her sympathy was with Noah, and she felt that the adults were letting her down so badly that the book infuriated her.

Reader 2 said that she didn’t know whose story she was supposed to be following: was if Finn’s story? Or Noah’s? What was Garrett doing in there? She didn’t like Garrett much, but her most central criticism was that there were too many voices vying for the reader’s attention. Why had I split the book down the middle? Whose story was this?

Reader 3 said she found Garrett difficult and unpleasant, Finn rather too passive, and that there were too many voices; but that she loved Noah’s story strand and felt that I’d painted a really tender portrait of a teenager trying to deal with enormous issues.

And all I could think of was how the book had suddenly felt like it came alive – started to flow – the moment I began writing Noah’s strand. How exciting that part had been; and, compared to it, how tough I’d found the earlier Finn / Garrett chapters.

It suddenly seemed very clear that the book had changed while I was writing it: that the two sections into which I’d divided it weren’t two halves of one whole, but rather, two books. One about Finn and Garrett, one about Noah. And no-one was liking the Finn and Garrett part.

Not even me, by this point.

It was very weird to have to admit that to myself, but it was true. I didn’t like Garrett any more; and Finn had shifted in my head. Initially he was the central narrative voice of the book, and Noah a background character acting as a foil; but the moment I started writing in Noah’s voice, all that changed. The truth was that Finn had become the background character in Noah’s story; and that Garrett had become entirely redundant.

Where do we go from here?

I took the summer of 2023 to think all this through; make my peace with the criticisms; and come up with a plan for how to deal with them.

I came back in the autumn feeling a strange, slightly reckless determination. I knew that if I was going to sort this properly, it couldn’t be a half-arsed solution: nothing tentative was going to have the effect necessary. I needed to be brave, because what  clearly needed was a pretty radical reworking of everything I’d done so far.

It’s at this point that I cut 74,000 words from the book. The entire first half. (Weirdly liberating, once I got going.) I also cut the ending, because it was Finn’s ending (when he finds, or doesn’t find, the woman he’s been searching for); and this was no longer Finn’s book.

I removed Garrett from the novel entirely. Now he exists only in a ringbound printout in a drawer. (He’s probably furious about this.)

Finn I recast as an important, but supporting, character in Noah’s story. His quest – seeing the woman on the news; embarking on the search for her – got lifted out. Instead, the characters are propelled into their situation by something more prosaic and teenager-centric: a family holiday that ends up going adrift when Noah’s mum has work commitments she can’t escape. Finn, who’s been Noah’s friend all her life, takes her on holiday instead; and that’s how the story begins.

There are still observatories: Noah’s mum is still an astronomer, and so is Finn, so observatories and telescopes are things that Noah has known all her life. But they’re in the background now. The foreground is filled with issues that are much more to do with Noah’s life than that of her parents’ generation. Climate change and what the future holds for Noah and her friends are central concerns in this version of the book.

Noah’s in charge now

So what happened, essentially, is that a secondary character took over this novel: wrested control from the guy supposed to be the main character, made the story about her instead, was so vivid and compelling that she wouldn’t stay in her place. The book became Noah’s story in spite of what I was trying to do as an author.

I am now in the final stages of redrafting the book with this new, fresh perspective. The initial crude edit was a bit like taking a chainsaw to the story: it left a lot of tattered edges which no longer connected to anything. I needed a new start, a new end; what was interesting was how immediately, and convincingly, those came. Writing Noah just feels far more natural than what I was trying to do, initially, with Finn.

Over the past six months or so I’ve come to think of my original Finn / Garrett narrative as scaffolding: necessary, in order to construct the story that needed to be told, but then able to be taken down and put away. What’s left is Noah, and I suspect she’s all the stronger as a character for having come about organically, almost without my noticing her. I said at the start of this that I’m not good at planning novels. Well, I really tried this time; but it seems that the rule still holds true, because all the material I planned has ended up being thrown away; what grew out of it is what’s now standing, and I’m so much happier with it.

There’s still a little work to be done, so I’ll post updates on how that’s going; but the heavy lifting is out of the way now and the shape of the novel is good, so this tinkering is all about texture, character and polish. More on that in due course.

I was asked over on Goodreads about the differences between writing novels and writing screenplays, and since my thoughts on that became quite a long answer, it seemed sensible to post them here in the blog. So here goes.

On screenwriting and novel writing

I’ve been writing for screen for thirty years now; but before that I wrote novels, and I’m now writing novels again. I think of myself first and foremost as a novelist: just one who happens to have made a career in screenwriting. In a lot of ways they’re deeply dissimilar forms, and it’s not at all the case that ability in the one correlates to ability in the other.

That said, I’ve been increasingly conscious recently of the extent to which the practice of screenwriting has influenced the way I want to write novels. I’ll say something more about that in a moment, but first it’s probably worth outlining the key differences between the two disciplines.

1) Screenplays are collaborative; novels are individual.

This isn’t to say that a screenplay can’t be personal; but it’s necessarily going to become a collaborative process the moment you hand the finished draft to a production company (and, subsequently, a director; and then network executives; and actors; and so on). With a screenplay, the writer is part of a team, all of whom need to be on top form if the end result is to work. A scene can be brilliantly written, but if the direction is insipid or the acting flat-footed you’re still in trouble. Conversely, a good script editor can elevate what you’re trying to write: I’ve had the luck and privilege of working with some excellent script editors and their quiet, behind-the-scenes contribution to the development of a screenplay can’t be overestimated.

By contrast, with a novel, there are really only two collaborators: the writer and the (imagined) reader. (There may of course be an editor at a publishing house in due course; but that comes after the novel is written, rather than during the process.) It’s the job of the writer to use all their skill in pursuit of eliciting in the reader an emotional connection – to the world of the book, to its characters and events, to its themes and preoccupations. It’s a conversation. For me it’s intrinsic to the process of writing to imagine the reader reading: there is a necessary connection there – through which I try to judge whether what I’m writing is likely to connect adequately, to elicit the reactions I want.

But beyond that imaginary level, writing a novel is far more solitary than writing a screenplay; with far fewer interjections from third parties; and, ultimately, both control of the text and responsibility for its quality weigh on the shoulders of the writer alone.

2) Screenplays are governed by structure; novels are a free landscape.

There are structural rules for screenwriting. They’re not entirely immutable, but you stray from them at your peril. They involve things like pacing: in television, it’s important to grip your audience from the off (lest they change channels). If you’re writing for a commercial station with ad breaks, or a streaming service with ad breaks, those need to be reflected in the structure: a “cliffhanger” need not be a plot point – it can be an emotional or character development – but you definitely want to entice your audience back after the break. There are “tentpole moments” throughout a script on which the rest of the structure hangs. And so on, and so on. These are the structural constraints of screenwriting, and they inform it as much as, say, minuet and trio form informs composing a minuet and trio: that is, there’s scope for exploration within, but don’t break the walls.

Novels, I think, have far more latitude in how you choose to express yourself; how you choose to pace things; the investment the reader has already given you when they sit down and open your book. I think there’s some essential goodwill already in place when a reader opens a book: they’ve sought it out, they’re sitting down now to read it, and this, I think, allows you a slower burn if you want it. If we’re generalising, novels tend to ramp progressively and elaboratively; screenplays are a series of twists, changes and hooks designed to propel the audience. (Of course, this may also be true for genre novels; there’s a lot of cross-pollenation both ways.)

There’s more freedom to define your own path with a novel. So long as you’ve got the reader by the hand, I think they’re more willing to be taken along.

3) The way you write screenplays is direct; novels require elision.

This is not about structure: it’s about how you actually put the words on the page. In a screenplay, the descriptive prose passages outlining each scene are not presented to the audience: they’re just guidelines for the director and actors, so that they know how to direct and act the scene. All the audience gets of the screenplay is the director’s interpretation of those instructions (in the form of how the scene ends up being shot), plus the dialogue you’ve given the actors to speak.

What’s the impact of this in practice? Let’s say you have two characters who have met, and who are attracted to each other; but that one of them is hesitant because they have just come out of a failed relationship and are feeling wary and untrusting. They’re conflicted. Conflict is usually interesting to watch, so this is already a promising encounter, whether in a novel or on screen.

If you’re writing this encounter in prose, you might take time to reveal the inner conflict of your character by showing their reluctance; by emphasising hesitations and moments of withdrawal; you might put a great deal of time, care and word-count into making this difficult internal conflict breathe on the page in a way that will stir similar feelings of conflict, hope, denial, frustration and urgency in your reader. It might, bluntly, take a page or two to do this moment justice.

For a screenplay, we might just write: “ELLIE is immediately attracted to SAM, but also conflicted because of her failed relationship with ALEX, so she struggles to open up.” Then you leave the portrayal of those conflicted emotions to the director and actors to workshop, develop, and finally commit to screen. Your instructions have to be clear and concise: trying to implythings in stage directions, rather than saying them out loud in the bluntest way possible, is a recipe for misunderstanding (and, therefore, a scene that ends up not doing what you intended it to do).

So… writing a novel, and writing a screenplay, are really really different in this respect. But having said that…

4) Dialogue connects both.

Dialogue is the only element of screenwriting that actually translates directly to the audience. Your stage directions are, at best, a set of guidelines and springboards for the actors and director to work with. But unless someone is letting the actors improvise (…sigh…) your words should be the words the characters speak on screen. Therefore, getting the dialogue right is vital.

For me, “getting the dialogue right” means, above all else, making it credible. Clunky dialogue is so easy for us to hear, because we know how people speak: we hear them do it all the time. Just like a robot that inhabits the “uncanny valley” of almost but not quite human, clunky dialogue repels us from the world being built on screen. We know bad dialogue when we hear it. (And clunky expositional dialogue is the worst: just look at the glee with which the internet rightly crucified the line from Madame Web “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died”. I mean… ouch.)

I think the same holds true for novels, even though the dialogue there plays out in our heads (unless we’re reading aloud or listening to an audiobook). I would always aim for credibility: to try to get the characters to talk, and sound, as realistically as possible. In my own prose writing, that means including hesitation, derailment, ellipsis, if necessary. When people speak they don’t always produce perfectly-formed sentences or perfectly-formed thoughts; they sometimes stumble their way towards what they mean. Inarticulacy can be emotionally resonant. I always try to “listen back” to my dialogue, either reading it aloud or “reading it aloud in my head”, to check for false notes.

In conclusion

So, there are points of divergance and points of connection between screenwriting and novel writing; but what I find interesting is that, despite them being so dissimilar in form, I do think that being a screenwriter has influenced the way I write novels. (Hopefully for the better, too.) The weird thing is that it’s not a structural influence, but a stylistic one.

For a start, screenplays are always written in the present tense, and this is something I’ve realised that I love in a novel. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for me, present-tense narration (whether 1st or 3rd person) establishes the novel in an ongoing, unfolding moment: which is how human experience unfolds. A novel told in the past feels like a “story” – an account of things already concluded. A novel told in the present feels immediate: we are right there alongside the characters, sharing their experiences right as they unfold. The stakes feel higher, too: if this is the present, then we don’t know what the future holds (whereas if the story has already happened, and is being recounted in the past tense, its ending has already happened). I know, of course, that this is a conceit, but it’s one that works for me and which I’ve realised I greatly prefer. Look, for example, at how vividly Hilary Mantel brings the past to life in the Wolf Hall trilogy, which is historical fiction and by definition buried in the past; but Cromwell’s story is told in the present tense, and thereby reaches the reader as he lives it, moment by moment. It’s magical. I can’t imagine myself not writing in the present tense any more.

I also think I’ve learned concision from screenwriting: the instinct towards it, at least, if not always the practice. In a screenplay, each page of text approximates to one minute of screen time, so that a 120pp script will be 2 hours on screen. It’s a vital rule-of-thumb that allows producers to gauge costs and cuts based simply on page count. (And it’s why screenwriting software enforces a strict 12-point Courier layout, with particular margins, on you: to keep your 21st-century screenplay consistent with the old Hollywood typewriters from which this rule was derived.)

In a screenplay, then, words are at a premium. In a novel this doesn’t apply in the same way, and some readers and writers love to revel in lush, expansive prose, full of sweeping description that wrings every drop from each metaphor. I’ve always favoured leaner writers – Tim Winton springs to mind at once – and a screenwriting career seems to have confirmed in me that I’m happiest when my own style is quite spare. This doesn’t mean that I don’t describe things; it just affects the toolkit I use. So far as possible, I aim for simplicity.

The opposite is true when it comes to elision, though. Earlier I said how important it is when writing a screenplay to make absolutely clear what you mean, for the benefit of the actors and director and network execs and everyone else in the chain of command. Subtlety is then – with any luck – returned to the mix by means of their interpretation and performance. But novels are nuance, characters are nuance, things left unsaid or half-said are the lifeblood of prose. We can trust the reader of a novel to dig a little deeper, and a little more willingly, than we can trust the average actor, director or exec with a stack of scripts on their desk and the phone ringing. So for me, the overwhelming delight of writing a novel is allowing myself to be more indirect, allowing characters to be nuanced and complex in their reactions, leaving room for subtext to breathe in the mind of the reader; and trusting the reader to have the time, grace and goodwill to be open to those processes. These are all the things I miss when screenwriting, even though I’ve learned a great deal from it, and it’s why I’m working on novels at the moment.

This is the very first post here, so – as an 80s geek – I’m honour bound to title it Hello World. More will follow, but for now, this is really just a test to make sure all the little gears and rivets of my website are holding together. Fingers crossed we’ll see each other again soon…

Lark, in the Newest Literary Fiction discussion group, asked about the differences between writing novels and writing screenplays, and since my thoughts on that became quite a long answer, it seemed sensible to post them here in the blog. So here goes.

On screenwriting and novel writing

I’ve been writing for screen for thirty years now; but before that I wrote novels, and I’m now writing novels again. I think of myself first and foremost as a novelist: just one who happens to have made a career in screenwriting. In a lot of ways they’re deeply dissimilar forms, and it’s not at all the case that ability in the one correlates to ability in the other.

That said, I’ve been increasingly conscious recently of the extent to which the practice of screenwriting has influenced the way I want to write novels. I’ll say something more about that in a moment, but first it’s probably worth outlining the key differences between the two disciplines.

1) Screenplays are collaborative; novels are individual.

This isn’t to say that a screenplay can’t be personal; but it’s necessarily going to become a collaborative process the moment you hand the finished draft to a production company (and, subsequently, a director; and then network executives; and actors; and so on). With a screenplay, the writer is part of a team, all of whom need to be on top form if the end result is to work. A scene can be brilliantly written, but if the direction is insipid or the acting flat-footed you’re still in trouble. Conversely, a good script editor can elevate what you’re trying to write: I’ve had the luck and privilege of working with some excellent script editors and their quiet, behind-the-scenes contribution to the development of a screenplay can’t be overestimated.

By contrast, with a novel, there are really only two collaborators: the writer and the (imagined) reader. (There may of course be an editor at a publishing house in due course; but that comes after the novel is written, rather than during the process.) It’s the job of the writer to use all their skill in pursuit of eliciting in the reader an emotional connection – to the world of the book, to its characters and events, to its themes and preoccupations. It’s a conversation. For me it’s intrinsic to the process of writing to imagine the reader reading: there is a necessary connection there – through which I try to judge whether what I’m writing is likely to connect adequately, to elicit the reactions I want.

But beyond that imaginary level, writing a novel is far more solitary than writing a screenplay; with far fewer interjections from third parties; and, ultimately, both control of the text and responsibility for its quality weigh on the shoulders of the writer alone.

2) Screenplays are governed by structure; novels are a free landscape.

There are structural rules for screenwriting. They’re not entirely immutable, but you stray from them at your peril. They involve things like pacing: in television, it’s important to grip your audience from the off (lest they change channels). If you’re writing for a commercial station with ad breaks, or a streaming service with ad breaks, those need to be reflected in the structure: a “cliffhanger” need not be a plot point – it can be an emotional or character development – but you definitely want to entice your audience back after the break. There are “tentpole moments” throughout a script on which the rest of the structure hangs. And so on, and so on. These are the structural constraints of screenwriting, and they inform it as much as, say, minuet and trio form informs composing a minuet and trio: that is, there’s scope for exploration within, but don’t break the walls.

Novels, I think, have far more latitude in how you choose to express yourself; how you choose to pace things; the investment the reader has already given you when they sit down and open your book. I think there’s some essential goodwill already in place when a reader opens a book: they’ve sought it out, they’re sitting down now to read it, and this, I think, allows you a slower burn if you want it. If we’re generalising, novels tend to ramp progressively and elaboratively; screenplays are a series of twists, changes and hooks designed to propel the audience. (Of course, this may also be true for genre novels; there’s a lot of cross-pollenation both ways.)

There’s more freedom to define your own path with a novel. So long as you’ve got the reader by the hand, I think they’re more willing to be taken along.

3) The way you write screenplays is direct; novels require elision.

This is not about structure: it’s about how you actually put the words on the page. In a screenplay, the descriptive prose passages outlining each scene are not presented to the audience: they’re just guidelines for the director and actors, so that they know how to direct and act the scene. All the audience gets of the screenplay is the director’s interpretation of those instructions (in the form of how the scene ends up being shot), plus the dialogue you’ve given the actors to speak.

What’s the impact of this in practice? Let’s say you have two characters who have met, and who are attracted to each other; but that one of them is hesitant because they have just come out of a failed relationship and are feeling wary and untrusting. They’re conflicted. Conflict is usually interesting to watch, so this is already a promising encounter, whether in a novel or on screen.

If you’re writing this encounter in prose, you might take time to reveal the inner conflict of your character by showing their reluctance; by emphasising hesitations and moments of withdrawal; you might put a great deal of time, care and word-count into making this difficult internal conflict breathe on the page in a way that will stir similar feelings of conflict, hope, denial, frustration and urgency in your reader. It might, bluntly, take a page or two to do this moment justice.

For a screenplay, we might just write: “ELLIE is immediately attracted to SAM, but also conflicted because of her failed relationship with ALEX, so she struggles to open up.” Then you leave the portrayal of those conflicted emotions to the director and actors to workshop, develop, and finally commit to screen. Your instructions have to be clear and concise: trying to imply things in stage directions, rather than saying them out loud in the bluntest way possible, is a recipe for misunderstanding (and, therefore, a scene that ends up not doing what you intended it to do).

So… writing a novel, and writing a screenplay, are really really different in this respect. But having said that…

4) Dialogue connects both.

Dialogue is the only element of screenwriting that actually translates directly to the audience. Your stage directions are, at best, a set of guidelines and springboards for the actors and director to work with. But unless someone is letting the actors improvise (…sigh…) your words should be the words the characters speak on screen. Therefore, getting the dialogue right is vital.

For me, “getting the dialogue right” means, above all else, making it credible. Clunky dialogue is so easy for us to hear, because we know how people speak: we hear them do it all the time. Just like a robot that inhabits the “uncanny valley” of almost but not quite human, clunky dialogue repels us from the world being built on screen. We know bad dialogue when we hear it. (And clunky expositional dialogue is the worst: just look at the glee with which the internet rightly crucified the line from Madame Web “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died”. I mean… ouch.)

I think the same holds true for novels, even though the dialogue there plays out in our heads (unless we’re reading aloud or listening to an audiobook). I would always aim for credibility: to try to get the characters to talk, and sound, as realistically as possible. In my own prose writing, that means including hesitation, derailment, ellipsis, if necessary. When people speak they don’t always produce perfectly-formed sentences or perfectly-formed thoughts; they sometimes stumble their way towards what they mean. Inarticulacy can be emotionally resonant. I always try to “listen back” to my dialogue, either reading it aloud or “reading it aloud in my head”, to check for false notes.

In conclusion

So, there are points of divergance and points of connection between screenwriting and novel writing; but what I find interesting is that, despite them being so dissimilar in form, I do think that being a screenwriter has influenced the way I write novels. (Hopefully for the better, too.) The weird thing is that it’s not a structural influence, but a stylistic one.

For a start, screenplays are always written in the present tense, and this is something I’ve realised that I love in a novel. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for me, present-tense narration (whether 1st or 3rd person) establishes the novel in an ongoing, unfolding moment: which is how human experience unfolds. A novel told in the past feels like a “story” – an account of things already concluded. A novel told in the present feels immediate: we are right there alongside the characters, sharing their experiences right as they unfold. The stakes feel higher, too: if this is the present, then we don’t know what the future holds (whereas if the story has already happened, and is being recounted in the past tense, its ending has already happened). I know, of course, that this is a conceit, but it’s one that works for me and which I’ve realised I greatly prefer. Look, for example, at how vividly Hilary Mantel brings the past to life in the Wolf Hall trilogy, which is historical fiction and by definition buried in the past; but Cromwell’s story is told in the present tense, and thereby reaches the reader as he lives it, moment by moment. It’s magical. I can’t imagine myself not writing in the present tense any more.

I also think I’ve learned concision from screenwriting: the instinct towards it, at least, if not always the practice. In a screenplay, each page of text approximates to one minute of screen time, so that a 120pp script will be 2 hours on screen. It’s a vital rule-of-thumb that allows producers to gauge costs and cuts based simply on page count. (And it’s why screenwriting software enforces a strict 12-point Courier layout, with particular margins, on you: to keep your 21st-century screenplay consistent with the old Hollywood typewriters from which this rule was derived.)

In a screenplay, then, words are at a premium. In a novel this doesn’t apply in the same way, and some readers and writers love to revel in lush, expansive prose, full of sweeping description that wrings every drop from each metaphor. I’ve always favoured leaner writers – Tim Winton springs to mind at once – and a screenwriting career seems to have confirmed in me that I’m happiest when my own style is quite spare. This doesn’t mean that I don’t describe things; it just affects the toolkit I use. So far as possible, I aim for simplicity.

The opposite is true when it comes to elision, though. Earlier I said how important it is when writing a screenplay to make absolutely clear what you mean, for the benefit of the actors and director and network execs and everyone else in the chain of command. Subtlety is then – with any luck – returned to the mix by means of their interpretation and performance. But novels are nuance, characters are nuance, things left unsaid or half-said are the lifeblood of prose. We can trust the reader of a novel to dig a little deeper, and a little more willingly, than we can trust the average actor, director or exec with a stack of scripts on their desk and the phone ringing. So for me, the overwhelming delight of writing a novel is allowing myself to be more indirect, allowing characters to be nuanced and complex in their reactions, leaving room for subtext to breathe in the mind of the reader; and trusting the reader to have the time, grace and goodwill to be open to those processes. These are all the things I miss when screenwriting, even though I’ve learned a great deal from it, and it’s why I’m working on novels at the moment.

My slightly OCD plan to work my way around my sitting room bookshelves in strict order, reviewing as I go, has hit a stumbling-block: George Saunders is on the other side of the room from where I've started and it just doesn't seem reasonable not to have him (and Tim Winton, who is beside him) unrepresented in my Goodreads favourites. So my plan is now in ruins, but at least I have a review of Lincoln in the Bardo to share :-)

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Told through a cacophony of competing voices, this is at its heart a meditation on loss and hope. It asks how we can move on from the death of a child (or any loved one); but it asks it in a way that only Saunders could have imagined. It is hugely moving; achingly sad; stylistically courageous. It pushes the boundaries of what we can do with fiction, and it stretches the form of the novel. It's exhilarating and masterful and sometimes ridiculous and funny as well. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Saunders takes as his starting-point the death of Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie, and the (historically attested) fact that his father returned to the cemetery to sit with the boy's corpse. As ever with Saunders, the lens he chooses to turn on this starting-point is fractured and wonky. Instead of following a conventional narrative, we're invited to piece together events from the fragmentary accounts of onlookers: those onlookers being the spirits who inhabit the graveyard where Willie's body is laid to rest, and who have, for one reason or another, failed to 'move on' – are locked here, in this world, as ghosts. In a grotesque (and grotesquely comedic) twist, each ghost takes the a form which somehow reflects its preoccupations; the unresolved issues tying them to the physical plane. And each ghost is in denial, not just of what is wrong with them, but of the fact that they're dead. They are 'sick'. Willie's coffin is his 'sick box'. Denial runs through everything, and the tiny, awful glimpses of truth that sometimes penetrate are like darts of cold sunlight. The ghosts are themselves unreliable narrators, and Saunders draws gleeful attention to historical accounts of the night of Willie's death which differ in details as basic as whether there was a beautiful moon in the sky or whether the night was overcast. In short: you can't trust history, and you can't trust the ghosts either.

As Lincoln repeatedly visits the cemetery over a series of nights, holding a tortured vigil with his dead son, the restless spirits of the graveyard try to urge Willie's own ghost to move on; but the boy, too, is tied here by his father's pain. The interpersonal issues of the graveyard contingent start to impact their attempts to help Willie: these are, after all, people who have been rubbing bony shoulders for decades. At times it's like a bitchy retirement home.

The genius of the novel is to allow what initially seems like a chaos of voices to resolve very slowly, very gradually, towards coherence. We start to feel not just for Lincoln and for Willie, but for the (sometimes monstrous) ghosts who become more and more involved in their story. Saunders is fearlessly inventive and fearlessly ambitious in this book: tackling not just grief and loss but the possibility of redemption, the notion of afterlife, what might constitute atonement, the broad scope of American history... it's an astonishing book told in flashes, each voice unique.

This is a vaunting demonstration of how the form of the novel can still be refreshed, and it is at all times underpinned by Saunders' sense of the resilience of humanity. It is a painful book, but not a bleak one: there is hope here.



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I'm still in the process of working out how to use this blog, and I think the eventual answer will be to try to link it to a personal website, so that I can share some thoughts on the daily process of writing, themes that are coming through in the book I'm working on, and stuff like that. Meanwhile, though, I've just spotted that you can link Goodreads reviews into your blog, and I thought I'd use that to say how super I think Very Cold People is. Here's the review, but I can't recommend this one highly enough.

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Clearly, from the reviews, this one isn't for everyone; but I thought it was simply superb. Manguso's style is laser-sharp, scorchingly focused. Tiny broken epithet-like nuggets of structure, reminiscent of David Markson; but the voice is far more personal in this book. The calm, relentless unpicking of a childhood freighted with strangeness (especially from the narrator's mother) feels at times like a blend of poetry and therapy. Oh, and her other stuff is fantastic, too.

Read it for the astonishingly assured structuring and style; and for the painful nostalgia of a childhood seen through an adult lens that only now understands what was missing. Maybe take some breaks from reading to listen to some boygenius, too, and then just have a good cry ;-)



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Note to self:

• Plumber re bathroom tap.
• Vet says if Jaro licks his hurt paw we have to put the cone on. So, watch to see if he licks his paw.
• Update Goodreads. You've been a terrible author. You joined in 2017 and since then you've done nothing on the site. Get it sorted out, you've read tons of books. Make a list.
• Buy more bananas.