Process

      I am pleased to announce that, as of today, I have completed the first phase of my novel, “Furious,” by completing the first draft of the basic story, coming in at 30 single-spaced pages and 17,000 words. Since the standard length for a novel is anywhere from 40-120 thousand words, technically I’m almost halfway there. But only technically; in my process, there is still a very long ways to go. True, I have built with this story the basic foundations, defining essential plot points and characters. But it is still very rough, with some parts that could actually qualify as finished novel pages with complete narrative and dialogue, and other parts that are merely one sentence descriptions of what may become whole chapters; and everything in between.  

      But the time has come to discuss my process, which is quite different from most any other writer I know.  I briefly described this for John a while back but only did so superficially. I’ve always been known as a notorious over-writer and, at least for my screenplays, I often end up cutting up to 80% of my early drafts before producing a polished final. With all the writers groups that I have run, which have been patronized by the whole gamut of professional to semi-pro to gifted amateur to rank amateur, no one has ever understood this. To them, it was a huge struggle just to fill out the 90-130 page length that screenplays and stage plays require. They did not understand how I could write a 500 page first draft when they couldn’t even write 50 pages.  I always took consolation in the fact that there have been a number of celebrated screenwriters – Stanley Kubrick, Francis Coppola, Preston Sturges, all heroes of mine – to name just a few – who also were notorious for writing voluminous first drafts. Preston Sturges used to quip, “Inventing the stuff is easy. Then I have to cut out 90% of it.” 

       For me, at least, inventing the stuff is not easy. That is precisely why I overwrite. I know writers, my former film partner David being one, who cannot write at all without making sure every single sentence is perfect before proceeding to the next. That is something I do not understand. How can a writer possibly try to polish every single sentence of a first draft as they’re writing them since something may come to them 50 pages up the road that will change everything? Arthur Hailey, author of Airport, Hotel and Wheels among others, wrote very much the same way. But he was different. He researched the hell out of his subject and had the whole story already completely formulated in his head before he started writing. But he was known to go through his book one paragraph at a time.  He would write a paragraph, then rewrite and rewrite. He would perhaps write 20 drafts of the same paragraph before he was satisfied with it. Then and only then would he proceed to the next paragraph and each of those paragraphs would become the final polished draft.

        But that is not my process either. Since I’m also a fitness buff, I think the most reasonable analogy would be to resistance training. You start with a certain weight that you can manageably lift 20 times and then gradually increase the weight until you can just barely lift it 20 times. That means that you fatigue the muscle to just before the point of collapse on the 17^th or 18^th rep, then push very hard to squeeze out those last 2 or 3 reps. (Naturally you don’t do this without spending some weeks or months conditioning yourself for that intensity.) Here’s a fact of exercise physiology: (I took a bunch of weight training classes at Cypress College when I was working at McDonnell-Douglas) – You get 80% of your benefit from those last 2 or 3 reps. That means that by driving yourself to the point of complete fatigue, you get 5 times the benefit of simply stopping at your comfort level. 

       I have found the same is very much true of a writing session. As I’ve said, I ran 3 writers groups during the 1990s and the one thing I consistently observed, the one blatant mistake that amateur writers invariably make, is refusing to write unless and until everything they put down is brilliant. The end result was always the same. If they wrote anything at all, which they often did not, they never got more than a few pages into a script. They loved talking about how brilliant and unique their story idea was but they never got to the point that they felt they could start writing. They were in a very common trap. They thought every sentence had to be brilliant before they would put it to paper. They failed to understand that no one can sit down and say, “Today I’m going to be brilliant.  Today I’m going to create a masterpiece.” The creative process quite simply does not work that way.

       For myself, I have found there is only one way to write and that is to simply start putting one word in front of another and repeat until finished. It is not of the slightest important that it be any good. There is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting. And rewriting cannot be done unless you have something to rewrite in the first place. Words have to be on paper first. You make them good later; in fact, you can only make them good later. Like weight lifting, you start slow and gradually work yourself into a fever pitch where your physical juices are now primed for those last few reps where you will get 5 times more benefit. And to extend the analogy further, you put one word in front of another for however long it takes to break through that logjam. You work yourself gradually into a feverish creative pitch. Then the dam breaks and the ideas and beautiful wording just starts pouring out, but unlike the physical metaphor where the big benefit comes in the last few seconds, in the creative application you can continue working at this heightened pitch for 4 to 5 times longer, perhaps hours.  When I’m in the middle of this heightened pitch, I dare not try to edit myself. I’ve worked too hard to let something go that might later turn out to be a gem. So I just hit the keys furiously trying to capture everything that comes into my head before I lose it.

      That is how I end up writing 500 page first drafts of screenplays that are supposed to be 110 pages long. Even when I was writing short pieces for the various newsletters I contributed to, I would frequently write 5 pages and cut it down to 1 for publication. It might take me hours to write the five pages, then ten minutes to cut it down to one. It was the same with the screenplay. It might have taken months (even years) to write the 500 page first draft, but only weeks to cut it down to a length where I could show it to industry professionals. 

        That is why I do not believe overwriting is a bad thing. But unlike Preston Sturges who felt that inventing the stuff was easy, cutting it was hard; I’m the opposite.  Inventing the stuff is the hard part, cutting it, once it’s really in place, is easy.  But I can’t get it to that place without going through this process. 

        I learned a lesson writing “Ash Wednesday” for, even though it got glowing reviews from most of the contests and professionals I submitted to, it became obvious for reasons I’ve already exhaustively explained in prior posts that I’d never sell it. I’d always known that a screenplay is not your own, that creative control ceases the moment it’s sold … and, of course, nowadays there isn’t even that option anymore. I’d always loved the screen format because I always visualized my stories as films that I intended to make myself.  But for 45 years, it’s always been a source of frustration that I can’t share my scripts with anyone outside the business because, by definition, scripts have a unique language that, unlike literature, is not easy to read.  And scripts are not a finished product; only the film is.

        I made the decision after Ash Wednesday that I was going to switch to novel writing.  Not only had people in the film biz always commented to me that my scripts had a distinctly literary flavor, after I finished Ash Wednesday, a number of people commented to me that I was wasting my talents on screenplays, that I should be writing fiction instead. To tell the truth, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at fiction. Since my strengths are writing dialogue and structuring stories, I’ve always written stage plays and screenplays (mostly screenplays as film, not stage, is my first love.) But the truly appealing thing about fiction is that it is an end product in itself, something I can call my own, something I can share. Whether I have the talent to turn the visual language of a screenplay into the poetic language of literature is yet to be seen. But even in writing this story, there was something very exciting about inventing prose. But is it any god? And can I keep it up?

       Anyway, that’s the philosophy of my process. I love the visual language of film and hope I can translate that into the more lyrical language of fiction.  But because I wish to keep the story visual, the mechanics of my process are as follows:

 

1. I will flesh out the story writing a treatment. A treatment, for those of you outside the film biz, is simple a present-tense narrative scene by scene description of how the film will play out. Treatments typically run anywhere from 20 to 60 pages and are commissioned by producers for the writer to flesh out the story before a first draft screenplay is attempted. The value of the treatment is that it forces the writer to keep the story visual.
2. The treatment will then be used as a detailed outline for writing the first draft of the book in screenplay format.
3. Once the characters and plot are worked out in the screenplay, then I’ll be free to focus on literary language for the first draft of the novel. The story, treatment and screenplay forms will allow me to thoroughly explore the dramatic elements before transferring to the literary form.

       So the next step is the treatment. And I’ll be continuing research along the way. Many of the screenplay contests I entered also accept novels and Elizabeth Stevens in Kansas City also offers coverage on novels as, during her four decade career developing properties for the major studios, she quite frequently had to write reports on novels that were being considered for production. Just as she was with Ash Wednesday, she’ll be my first stop after I’m satisfied that I’ve taken “Furious” as far as I can. 

     Even if it never goes anywhere, it’ll be nice to create something that is all my own. It’ll be very nice to create something that others can read.