A Thousand Cuts, my debut novel, originated—as all my ideas do—as the premise for a movie. I have been writing films for thirty-five years and my brain naturally sees story ideas in a cinematic format. But as I started writing the screenplay, something wasn’t working. There was a certain tone and a voice I was striving for that just wasn’t coming across.
It was my attempt to write a movie that Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum would make if they were alive today, a story with a very noir setup but a thoroughly modern sensibility, as well as modern action sequences. The genre wasn’t the issue; I knew I could write noir—one of my favorite movies of my career is a noir, Knox Goes Away, starring Michael Keaton and Al Pacino. But no matter how hard I tried, this one just wasn’t finding its way from my head to the page.
Eventually I realized that it was the format that was holding me back, and I decided to try something new: writing a novel. The learning curve was steep and immediate; after three and a half decades earning my living as a writer, I felt like a newbie again.
Screenwriting is a very precise skill, with a rigid set of parameters to work within. Like prose, it is harder than it looks, which is why every barber and Uber driver in Los Angeles has a screenplay, but very few of them will ever be movies.
Prose is more open and free, but has rules of its own that I was unfamiliar with. It was a little like being a carpenter, then taking my carpentry tools that I had amassed over the years and trying to use them to be a plumber. In the end there were three major differences that required me to retrain my writing brain.
Learning to use interior monologue and narration as opposed to establishing characters visually
Screenwriting is entirely external. You can only put two things down on the page; what the audience sees, and what it hears. That’s it, nothing else. You can’t write, “He’s always been a sad person because when he was seven his father shot his dog”; you can only write, “He has a sad demeanor”, then find ways to bring the dead dog backstory out in visual clues or dialogue. You build character through action; how they enter a room, how they pick up a drink, how they treat waiters and loved ones. Finding visual ways to build character is a lot of the fun of screenwriting, and avoiding having your characters explain everything in dialogue is the biggest challenge.
Now I was asking myself to do the opposite; to write out, in depth, what my characters were thinking and feeling, and to delve into their pasts to explore why they were feeling that way.
I had spent my entire career training myself not to do precisely what I was trying to do now. At first it was daunting; I didn’t know what to do with all that freedom. I had a real fear of overwriting, of being too flowery or—the terror of any writer—boring. Once I overcame my trepidation though, it became liberating, even exhilarating. I have never known any of my characters as well as I know the ones in this book.
How EXT. JUNGLE – NIGHT becomes a half a page of lush description
Description is another area where screenwriting demands brevity. You want to give a sense of where your characters are without being too specific, especially if it is likely to be shot on location. You can say, “The jungle is dense, hot and wet, and through the trees there is a river,” but if you get much more specific than that you are just wasting your time (and everyone else’s). If there is something essential to the scene, like a tree high enough to hang someone from, you want to put that in for the production people, but if you start going on about the types of trees and the shape of the river and the quality of the light filtering through the canopy, you are being self-indulgent and most of your readers will skip over it.
A good rule of thumb I use is that a description of a setting shouldn’t be more than two lines, three at the most. I guarantee it will not look exactly like you envisioned it in your head, because production doesn’t care what was in your head; they care about the director’s vision of the scene and finding the best place to shoot it.
So what a joy it was to realize that in a book you can have exactly what you want! If you want a mountain, create a mountain. If you want to describe how the jungle makes your clothes so wet that they cling to your flesh, how it feels like a living thing slowly closing in on you until you can’t breathe, and how the sounds and smells overwhelm your senses, go for it. Just don’t overdo it or be, you know, boring.
Writing action for the page rather than the screen
I can’t lie, writing action is really fun. For me, it is probably the closest thing to stream-of-consciousness writing. Once you have your characters, your setting, and what is available to them in the location, you can just play.
It’s also weirdly logical; if the hero does this, the villain has to do this; if the gun slides under the sofa, they are both going to go after it. It requires pure imagination, and I find it helpful to close my eyes a lot when I’m writing action, so I can see it unfold. It’s a lot like choreography, and it is one area of screenwriting where you can inject a lot of your own personality. If you’re lucky, you will surprise yourself with how inventive your action is.
But there are also a lot of different kinds of movie action, and they have to be written differently. The reality-based action in something like Heat is a lot different than the physics-be-damned action in a Dwayne Johnson movie. I once wrote a movie for Jackie Chan, and learned pretty early on in the filming that I had wasted a lot of time detailing what happens in the action sequences; Jackie and his guys were going to shoot whatever the heck they wanted to. The action sequences I should have written would have read like this: “They are in a garage. There is a bicycle and a ladder. They fight.”
The main difference I found in writing action for the page rather than the screen is that instead of creating a blueprint for a stunt coordinator to stage, you are writing for your reader, and you want them to have as much fun and be as surprised reading it as you were while writing it. And in some ways you have even more freedom than you do in a movie script. In A Thousand Cuts I have action sequences that go on for pages and hopefully keep the reader riveted, but I also have a sequence where my main character, Max Starkey, is being mugged by two men with a knife and the entirety of the action is this: “He left them alive, and kept the knife.”
In the end writing is writing, and if you are a good storyteller, you can handle any format. Just be sure to have fun doing it. And, of course, don’t be boring.
