I used to read a lot more writing magazines than I do now. Now I’m down to just one and am always amazed at the diametrically opposed advice columns which run over the course of a year. There will be countless interviews and advice snippets from authors with one or two books under their belt stating “read constantly” and “ don’t watch TV.”
Later in the same year you will find snippets from someone like Stephen King or another author with a lot of books that have been turned into movies. Eventually they will be prompted for advice on getting books turned into movies and you will hear something like “ I write very visually, filling in many details just like a movie set” or some such statement. You don’t hear the quotes from people coming out of the theater complaining that the movie sucked compared to the book. Those appear in the newspaper, or on the “At the Movies” type shows. Stephen King is a good example here because he has had some ground breaking books which cratered in the theater.
The truth is, highly detailed stories or characters, are nearly impossible to turn into movies. Stephen King’s books are so captivating to many of their readers, that the movie industry believes they “have” to make a movie out of it. The real problem is it takes a lot of time and money to turn something which was highly descriptive into a movie or mini-series. That descriptive thing doesn’t have to be a book either. It took 10 years to get the A-Team movie done. Why? Institutional memory. Just how many of you reading this have never seen an episode of the A-Team? How many people do you know who recognize the name “Howling Mad Murdock”? How many people associate Mr. T. with the show? Tell the truth now, you’ve all quoted “I love it when a plan comes together.”
One series that I liked, despite being perpetually frustrated with the author for continually getting sidetracked with other projects rather than finishing the series was A Song of Ice and Fire . You HBO watchers would now know it as A Game of Thrones . Highly visual books which provide character detail only when necessary. They had to wait for the Lord of the Rings movies to be done in order to steal wardrobe, sets, and actors. In short, they had to recycle a lot of stuff to cut the costs.
I bring this up because I believe both sets of writing advice, while well meaning, are either unkindly edited, or, just plain wrong. You should watch a lot of TV, but you should watch GOOD TV, not popular TV. Go to Barnes & Noble and buy the entire DVD set for The West Wing . Get a DirecTV subscription and set your DVR for Damages . When you hop over to the USA network, be sure to watch Burn Notice for more background information than you could ever find on your own about the dirty toys and crafts of the spy game. Be sure to hang around for House Meets McGyver, better known as Royal Pains to gather great medical condition information. It’s really kind of amazing. The Hollywood industry leaders view writers just like they view the person who cleans the men’s room, a necessary evil to be paid as little as possible. When you listen to interviews with the actors, especially for Damages, where award winning actors are coming out of retirement to take roles, they all say “writing like this is what an actor lives for.”
So, let me tell you why your book which sold more than one million copies isn’t getting any movie deal offers. You provided too much of the wrong kind of detail. Great writing is almost never commercially viable. Good writing, however, makes you enough money to fund whatever kind of writing you want. Good writing == Good Radio.
I’m not talking about what passes for radio now, I’m talking old time radio. The stuff that was on when radio was all we had. Many people call some of that stuff racist now, and I haven’t heard it all, so I don’t know. I can tell you that one skit of Amos and Andy where the judge asks how he first met the pick pocket on trial is the kind of funny which lasts forever and any reasonably qualified actor could turn into gold. It’s rather nice to see Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry re-using some of that old stuff with all black casts targeted at a mostly black audience because funny is funny and it shouldn’t be lost. How many people actually knew what the perpetually 39 ½ year old Jack Benny actually looked like? How many people laughed until their sides hurt listening to the skit of him trying to convince a car salesman that the candle he used for a headlight also doubled as a cigarette lighter? That skit is funny even today.
Old time radio launched icons many still mimic today. The writers for old time radio “painted the set in the listener’s mind” using the tools of a narrator, actor dialog, and the few sound effects they had at their disposal. Today’s fiction writer has all of those tools, even sound. You have to learn to limit your character descriptions to that which made it work on radio. Jack Benny is a great example here. During the bulk of his radio shows all we knew was that he was a wealthy cheap bastard claiming to be 39 ½ but obviously looking older. That’s all your reader needs. Let their mind fill in all of the details about height, hair color, etc. Unless it has a role to play in you book, or scene, or the character, don’t even describe the clothes. Your characters have now become a casting and wardrobe director’s dream. Paint only the detail your story needs about the set and the scene. Let your reader’s mind flesh out the rest. The director who reads your book will instantly know how to turn it into a movie because they have complete freedom.
When I was writing Infinite Exposure , I was conscious of all these details. Several reviewers have made note that I wire framed characters, hung their flaws out there for all to see, and let their imagination fill in the rest. Unless you were a regular viewer of the series, many of you might not have caught that the Situation Room scene in the final chapter was written to be a direct and blatant rip-off of The West Wing .
I’m not telling you to write spartan. I’m telling you to make the details matter at some point. If you want to describe a 100+ year old wood farm house as smelling of must and dry mold then make it matter by having a character either put their foot through a floor or develop a lung disorder later in the book. Then again, if you are writing a who-dunnit you need to provide a lot of details which have nothing to do with the plot.
