How to write

"You put down one word after the other"

Screenplays have been much on my mind recently having just read one by a writer on my Masterclass. Apart from it being a hellish good and thoroughly engaging read, it suggested ways that scenes in a novel could be handled. After all, what is a scene if not action viewed from the perspective of one of the characters? What is that character if not a thinking camera?

As so often happens, no sooner am I focused on one topic than other examples pop up. Last weekend, I wanted some light, high-energy reading and took down Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty - which is about developing a movie script (although I had forgotten that) - and various other things such as debt collecting and killing people. These last two aren’t high on my list of priorities, right at the moment.

Somewhat into the story there is a discussion between the main character, the laid-back Chili Palmer, and the even cooler character Bo Catlett where they talk about writing a movie script. Catlett also offers some pretty solid advice about writing full stop.

“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page you write in ‘Fade out’ and that’s the end, you’re done.”

Simple as that. And you don’t have to worry about commas and spelling because there are “people [who] do that for you” called copy editors.

But back to screenplays. According to the screenplay format you have a camera angle which “sees” the setting of the scene and the characters. Then you have the dialogue between the characters and descriptions of their behaviour. Should you want to move outside this scene you can cut to another camera and another angle. Which is a useful technique for creating tension.

Of course, Elmore Leonard, being a screenwriter as well as a novelist, at one point made use of the screenplay layout in Get Shorty. And because the screenplay Chili and Catlett are discussing is a secondary text commenting on the main narrative (what the academics would call a “metatext”) it fits right into the story.

Then, almost at the end of the novel, the main characters have a meeting and here we only read what they say. So it’s up to the camera in your head to “see” the expressions on their faces, their body language. However, we are told that Chili is dressed in a dark blue suit, and we know that another character (Michael) wears his “beat-up flight jacket” and puts his hand on Karen’s knee and tells her she looks great. We know they’re sitting round a coffee table in a living room but that’s it. What follows is simple dialogue. And you read every word of it.

The long and short of all this was that a scene in a novel I was busy with needed a “cut” to an incoming threat to increase the tension. And, thanks to the Masterclass writer’s script and Chili Palmer’s desire to write a movie, I thought what better way to handle this than to use the techniques of a screenplay!

(Fade out)

Footnote: this went off to the red-pen editor who “added in the commas and shit” and corrected the spelling.