Who doesn’t want their novel turned into a movie?

While I wouldn’t say you should write your book with the goal of someone buying it to make a movie, I think it’s valuable to borrow techniques from screenwriters to improve your story.

A movie script is the most structured form of writing you’ll encounter. The three-act structure is tightly adhered to, and as Blake Snyder reveals in his book Save the Cat, certain things happen on certain pages and only on those pages.

The storytelling medium is supremely limited because the writer has 90 to 110 pages, or 90 to 120 minutes to tell the story. In contrast, your book will likely take hours to read. Because of this time compression, screenwriters have certain techniques that we as novelists and non-fiction writers can borrow for our books.

Yes, I said non-fiction writers. Moneyball was written from a book about statistics. Yes, it was baseball, too, but if the author hadn’t done such a cinematic job on his book, it might not have happened. Further, screenwriters can take the principles of a non-fiction book and be inspired to write a script that incorporates them.

First and foremost, for a script, every scene must be essential to the story. A screenplay’s chief structure is the spine of the story, or the dramatic question. Anything that doesn’t hang from the spine has to go.

But that isn’t enough for the screenwriter. Every scene has to do double and triple duty, packing as much into a scene as possible, including plot, character development, foreshadowing, and more. As book writers, we can borrow that double duty for our scenes. We also have more leeway to interpret what hangs from the spine and what doesn’t. I’m not saying you should compress your story, this is a book, not a movie. Borrow the techniques, not the rigidity.

Movies are visually striking. Your scenes should be, as well. That doesn’t mean ever scene must be set somewhere exotic, but you need to paint your scene with just enough unique detail for us to visualize it. The reader will fill in a lot from just a few cues.

Every scene is active, layered with conflict, visual metaphors, and energy. Talking head, just two people chatting, is rare. Consider the scene in Avengers, Age of Ultron, when Steve and Tony are having a tense conversation. They aren’t sitting drinking tea, they are chopping wood with more and more intensity until an angry Captain America rips a big log apart. You can turn off the audio and see what the scene is about. Then Tony has a conversation with Fury as he works on a truck engine. Characters should do something metaphoric as they speak.

Dialog is almost always short and snappy, to the point. Few characters are long-winded. Your dialog should have no small talk, nothing unrelated to the spine.

Strong, clear character arcs are important. Unlike the comic book Tony Stark who never changes, the movie Tony Stark has a vast character arc that includes being selfish, heroic, traumatized, broken, and sacrificially heroic, the complete opposite of where he began. Comic books need to maintain the status quo, movies don’t. Books don’t, even if they are series, the characters should change. If you have a strong character arc, you can include a lost novelist technique of foreshadowing. Again, the Marvel movies are outstanding at this. Every argument Cap and Iron Man have is a foreshadowing of the character’s eventual change.

Finally, the ending is clear, wraps up all major plot points, and leaves us energetically satisfied.

Studying screenwriting will improve your book writing; there are a lot of tricks I haven’t touched on here. You have more freedom, but using the concentrated techniques of a screenwriter can help guide you through your story.

Along the lines of last week’s post, we’re going to look at the flexibility strong writing gives us. There are two schools of thought, literally.

Look at writing programs around the country and you’ll find that most concentrate in one area, such as Technical Writing, Communications (Marketing), Instructional Design, Creative Writing… the only problem with that is that most of those disciplines don’t take a strong writer that long to learn.

The other school of thought is to focus on strong writing the first year, then hit each area of writing for a semester. Pensacola Christian College’s writing program (my daughter is now rolling her eyes because I talk about this program a lot), is just that and it’s the best program I’ve seen.

As someone who hires Instructional Designers, you’d be amazed at how many can’t write.

I’m not saying you have to go to school to learn how to write. I am saying that if you are a very strong writer, you can learn another writing discipline quickly. The reason I like PCC’s approach is because it was mine across 30 years. I began with writing essays and short stories, then in college, papers, and in my major plays where I learned structure and that every kind of writing has its own unique structure. Plays and screenplays have rigid structures, stories and novels, less so, but still structure. It gave me the ability to look for structure, and once you have that, the rest fills itself in.

I continued to learn writing though trial and error after school, a bad novel (with potential), more plays, a couple screen and teleplays. Then working at Boeing, I took a class in Technical Writing and found it easy.  Years later, I learned instructional design in an afternoon. Still later got a certification in copywriting. In all of these, I was at the top of the class. Not just because I’m handsome, but because I had the foundational tools to begin with. Then I worked for a company writing resumes and got the best editing I’d ever received, that served all my other writing.

For a few years, I was a ghostwriter. My theatrical background helped me easily capture someone’s voice. I wrote a dozen books, learning from each of them.

PCC shoved that all into 4 or 5 years. Of course I’m a fan.

I have other friends who wrote newsletters, skits, blogs, and produced a wonderful novel with more to follow (read about her in my forth-coming book around the end of the month (you’ll see an announcement here)).

I’ve spent the last 20+ years making a living with different forms of writing. Typically for a company because I suck at self-promotion. It began with strong writing skills.

If you’re a strong writer, you have amazing flexibility. Having a dream is important, but paying the bills is pretty good, too. I’ve heard someone say if you want to finance a writing career, dig ditches because if you write for your day job you won’t have anything to give your dream. There’s some truth to that. But not always. It might slow you down or it might fire you up, because, hey, I write every day. And I have three books of my own and three strong screenplays. It works out.

Refine your skills and enjoy the suppleness it gives your creative spine!

Much like the American Dream, the Writing Dream can be a bit tricky.

It begins somewhere before, during, or just after the first story, be it a short story, a blog, or a book. You realize it isn’t so hard after all (that first one seems like a mountain, the future like hills. It’s a misperception because they are all mountains but go with it for now). And you begin to dream.

A long time ago, I would have guessed that dream is to have J.K. Rowling’s sales, yet after talking with hundreds of writers, the dream goes all over the place. Some want to use writing to travel, others to burn their high school English teacher (figuratively, not literally).

However, like the American Dream, what you think is the goal may just be a weigh station, or even a lodestone that gets you moving so you can get to where you’re supposed to go.

After a while, once you perfect the craft of writing, things will pop up. Opportunity or distraction? Hard to know. William Goldman was happy being a novelist. He wrote half a doze books and then one got turned into a movie. Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Sir Laurence Olivier, became his fork in the road. He just wanted to write novels, but the studios wanted him to write screenplays. So he did, and became one of the best at it. In fact, he worked on most Hollywood movies in the last 40 years doing rewriting, polishing, or mentoring of screenwriters before his death.

He said he wrote screenplays for money and novels to keep his sanity. Yet he wrote no more novels (too bad, because I love his novels). Was this a slap to his personal Writer’s Dream?

Not at all.

The better you get at writing, the more opportunities arise. Sometimes you have to say the second hardest word, “no.”  Sometimes the number 1 hardest word, “yes.”

How do you tell the difference between what should be yes and what should be no?

Ask yourself a couple questions:

• Will this further my goal?
• Will this give me a new, brighter goal?
• Will this detract from my goal?
• Is this a worthy philanthropic task? Because sometimes you need to do right without reward. It’s just a truism of life.

It also helps to be honest about how focused you are on your goal. If you say no to something, like writing Sunday School curriculum, for example, because you need to focus on your book, but instead eat bon-bons and watch TV, it’s time to honest with yourself. If you do, in fact, work on your book, happily say “no.”

Say “yes” when you can see the next step beyond the request. Is it moving you where you want to go? Are you gaining skill or finding a new application for your writing? Sometimes a detour is helpful. And sometimes the other parts of your life need attention. Turning down PTA meetings to write misses how important your kids are.

Ultimately, keep building the skill to be desired. And don’t be surprised if a new path springs up. Determine what’s important to you. For Goldman, it was money. For you it may be something different.

Your Writer’s Dream can be edited, just like a story.