Writing Right

A little while ago, I started writing a regular fiction thing. I hesitate to call it a book, though all the other things like that I ever started ended up being books. Unpublished ones, don’t get your hopes up. But I was tired of what I saw as the limitations of the movie format, and wanted to go back to my roots, what I nostalgically saw as “pure” storytelling, with all the naïve idealism I can pour into the phrase.

Feh. Feh, and bah. I am now thoroughly screwed. While I have a nice little story going, just unrealistic enough that I don’t feel guilty not turning it into a treatment, I find myself having enormous trouble writing it. I’ve been infected by the scripting process. The differences didn’t seem like much when I went from fiction to film, but trying to reverse the process is killing me.

Remember a few posts ago when I said I used names in fiction dialogue to make it easier to follow? Now I “hear” the lines (a useful skill professionally) and they sound unnatural to my mental ear. But if I take the names out, then it’s all “he said”/”she said” which looks unwieldy on the page. I never had this problem before.

And the dialogue itself is tough. I’m conditioned to keeping it under a third of a page (one page = one minute, screen time, about) only when all the audience sees (why didn’t I say “reader” just then, Dr. Freud?) is ink and paper, then that’s not enough to advance the plot.

There’s more. Fictional characters, when you can’t see them, have to be more clearly defined but quickly enough that the story isn’t bogged down by long descriptions. Rex Stout was a genius at that. I used to be fairly good, now I’m accustomed to keeping them vague so the casting people have a broader range of possibilities. This is useful in a script, but it’s quicksand in a story.

Fortunately I’m going back to script work this week, so all this will soon be moot.