By Deborah
Valentine
“Why
did you write this? What story do you want to tell?” — Kate Leys
Sounds
so simple, doesn’t it? So obvious. Yet... this succinct two-sentence quote by
the renowned script editor Kate Leys, who has worked on such films as Four
Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and The Full Monty,
is like a finger on the pulse. Why did you write your novel
(or screenplay)? What story do you want to tell? Funnily
enough, this can be surprisingly easy to lose sight of in a mist of pretty
words.
Writing
a screenplay is a completely different discipline from writing a novel, so you
might — quite rightly — ask, why the quote from a script editor?
Because
the basic principle holds true. When you write a script, there are no poetic
narratives, no long drawn-out character descriptions and only the gist of the
action sequences. There are no internal monologues (you can’t, after all, see
one onscreen). It’s a blueprint. You cut back to the spine of the story and,
carefully choosing each word, hope you’ve amassed enough of those precisely
chosen words that your eventual collaborators will illustrate your vision on
film. Okay, they won’t... not exactly. The old adage is when you make a film
there’s three stories: the one the screenwriter wrote, the one the director
filmed and the one after editing the producers released into the cinema. Films
are all about collaboration.
Ah...
but a novel. With a novel, the writer is not just the writer, but set designer,
cinematographer, director, actor, stunt coordinator, et al... you
are the ultimate multi-tasker (or less kindly, megalomaniac). There is poetic
prose, there are lengthy character descriptions and if there’s
action, a blow-by-blow account. And internal monologues? We thrive on them! And
that’s what makes those two sentences from Ms Leys all the more important. It
can be very easy when creating a whole world, a world we may be enamored with,
to start putting in (or ignore taking out during the editing process) things
that don’t serve the story. We can get a bit up our own... well; I’ll leave it
to your imagination to supply the word.
A film
industry friend read a draft of The Knightmare and suggested I
adapt it as a screenplay. ‘It’s cinematic!’ he bellowed. So I did. All I can
say is: Thank you, God. Thank you that I did it pre-publication. Because in
stripping the story to its bare essentials — and changing it to serve the
requirements of the screen — I got back to: What story did I want to tell? Why
did I want to tell it?
No, I
didn’t rewrite the novel to match the screenplay. Again, they are different
disciplines. But it did hook me back into the pulse of the story — it’s very
lifeblood. Even if you don’t want to write screenplays, as an exercise in
storytelling, I recommend trying it. And isn’t it always fun to get out the
stethoscope and play ‘Doctor’?
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