My big bad difficult secret project
Apr. 2nd, 2019 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakinglight11I've not been talking a ton about this, except with a handful of people I trust here and there. But I recently hit a fairly significant milestone on a writing project I've been working on for a while now, so perhaps it's time to discuss it. For the past several months, I have been seriously working on turning my screenplay Adonis into a full-length novel.
The screenplay is one of my very favorite things I've ever written, and I think there's something truly special about it. I've gotten almost uniformly good feedback from those who have seen it, both from friends and from film industry professionals. But those same professions have basically all said the same thing: "This is really good, and probably nobody's going to feel like they can make it."
That has been... discouraging to hear, to say the least. But I understand it. It would be expensive to make, for one, being a large-scale period piece. Roman epics, even slightly unconventional ones like this, are not really en vogue right now. And the subject matter is transgressive on some levels. Nobody in the film industry is taking risks on any original IP these days anyway.
But I believe in this story. I think it is strong and powerful and meaningful. I love the characters and the world Bernie and I have created. I really want to get it out there somewhere. And a suggestion/response I've gotten from many people who've been exposed to it has been, "Have you ever considered writing this as a book?"
The suggestion always kind of annoyed me. I didn't really WANT to write it as a book. My degree is in screenwriting; that's where my real skill lies. I was resistant to the notion for a very long time— not least because I was very, very doubtful of my ability to write it as well as I wanted to. I had little practice in prose, and even less skill.
But I want this story to go somewhere; I really don't want the low likelihood of production to stop it. And I finally got some real practice in prose writing when I worked for Evil Overlord Games, writing for their interactive visual novel game Susurrus. I generated some actually good stuff for that in the prose form, under tight deadlines, in not-insignificant quantity. So I finally gave in and decided to give it a shot. I started it like two years ago, mostly noodling, still pretty resentful of the fact that I felt I needed to do it. But in the last several months I've gotten serious about it, determined to at the very least puke out a first draft to see if I even could.
It has been... difficult. I have never been more resentful of the challenges of writing prose than in this process. I like to joke, "Wait, I have to TELL you what happens? Like, you don't just, OBSERVE IT and FIGURE IT OUT? HOW PEDESTRIAN." But honestly I kind of do feel that way. I am very good at this point at constructing the shape of a story, then providing a human, believable voice with the right kind of dialogue to suggest how a good actor needs to fill in the rest. I love when the audience divines meaning not by being told it, but by observing the expression in the lines of the actor's face. But in prose, nothing is there unless you convey it with the words somehow, and my words always seem too clumsy or on-the-nose. I like spare, subtext-heavy writing with sketchy but evocative details that invite the reader to fill in the gaps with suggestion, rather than explaining things straight out.
And my prose is currently... not that. It feels so overwrought, overcomplicated, too literal, too formal. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; often I feel like even my casual writing style in this journal tends that way. I kind of hate what I've written so far. It just feels so lousy, way below the kind of ability I feel like I can demonstrate in my preferred forms of writing. I am trying to trust in the drafting process— utilize my usual recommend process of vomiting out a draft, worrying only about making it complete, and planning on going back and revising in stages later. And while I pretty much always hate my first drafts these days, this one feels even worse than is typical. Especially because, unlike my plays or screenplays that seem to be shitty in early form, I have no previous examples of novels I have written to assure myself that I am at least capable of turning them out decently in the end.
But, as I have reminded myself time and again, the only way out is through. I need to just get the draft together without obsessing over the quality. Like everything else I've ever written, I have to make it EXIST before I can worry about making it GOOD. I am managing to push myself. I just broke 40,000 words the other day, which was kind of a benchmark for me as I was under the impression that was the minimum for novel-length. My friend Mark— a writer and artist I greatly admire, who was once my teacher in grad school for the one prose class I took while there —told me that publishers expect adult pseudo-historical books to be more in the 50,000 to 60,000 range, so I'm not really there. But still, I'm not quite finished yet, and progress is progress. It may be the longest single, continuous piece I've ever written.
I still hate it. It is going to need a LOT of editing before it doesn't suck. I'm not sure how I'm going to make that editing happen, as it's burdensome and difficult for people to give you feedback on a long piece, and I can't use my typical strategy of inviting people to a reading dinner. Maybe I'm silly to expect book publishing to be any less cutthroat and treacherous than screenplay pitching, but I figure at least more books tend to get published than movies tend to get made.
So I'm doing it. Giving it my very best shot, even though I'm scared and not optimistic. I've got over 40,000 words now, which is not nothing, and while they mostly suck there are a few I don't hate. I worked pretty meticulously over the prologue, which I posted last year around this time when I first got truly serious about doing this, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the sound of it, and the subtlety and irony I managed to convey. Maybe with a similar amount of care and editing I can make the rest of it up to its level.
Who knows? Maybe after banging myself against the treacherous business of the performative narrative arts, my future lies in the vulgar pedestrian prose world after all. And then it'll get made into a movie many years down the line, when the model for my hero is well and truly too old. And they'll cast some twenty-five-year old underwear model who wants to transition into acting, and rumor will get around that it was written originally for Chris Evans, and as a lark he'll come to the premiere, an accomplished silver-fox movie director. And while I won't get to nail him while he's young and perfect, our later-life hookup will be some consolation still.
I'm a dreamer, you see. It's why I take risks with my art. ;-)
The screenplay is one of my very favorite things I've ever written, and I think there's something truly special about it. I've gotten almost uniformly good feedback from those who have seen it, both from friends and from film industry professionals. But those same professions have basically all said the same thing: "This is really good, and probably nobody's going to feel like they can make it."
That has been... discouraging to hear, to say the least. But I understand it. It would be expensive to make, for one, being a large-scale period piece. Roman epics, even slightly unconventional ones like this, are not really en vogue right now. And the subject matter is transgressive on some levels. Nobody in the film industry is taking risks on any original IP these days anyway.
But I believe in this story. I think it is strong and powerful and meaningful. I love the characters and the world Bernie and I have created. I really want to get it out there somewhere. And a suggestion/response I've gotten from many people who've been exposed to it has been, "Have you ever considered writing this as a book?"
The suggestion always kind of annoyed me. I didn't really WANT to write it as a book. My degree is in screenwriting; that's where my real skill lies. I was resistant to the notion for a very long time— not least because I was very, very doubtful of my ability to write it as well as I wanted to. I had little practice in prose, and even less skill.
But I want this story to go somewhere; I really don't want the low likelihood of production to stop it. And I finally got some real practice in prose writing when I worked for Evil Overlord Games, writing for their interactive visual novel game Susurrus. I generated some actually good stuff for that in the prose form, under tight deadlines, in not-insignificant quantity. So I finally gave in and decided to give it a shot. I started it like two years ago, mostly noodling, still pretty resentful of the fact that I felt I needed to do it. But in the last several months I've gotten serious about it, determined to at the very least puke out a first draft to see if I even could.
It has been... difficult. I have never been more resentful of the challenges of writing prose than in this process. I like to joke, "Wait, I have to TELL you what happens? Like, you don't just, OBSERVE IT and FIGURE IT OUT? HOW PEDESTRIAN." But honestly I kind of do feel that way. I am very good at this point at constructing the shape of a story, then providing a human, believable voice with the right kind of dialogue to suggest how a good actor needs to fill in the rest. I love when the audience divines meaning not by being told it, but by observing the expression in the lines of the actor's face. But in prose, nothing is there unless you convey it with the words somehow, and my words always seem too clumsy or on-the-nose. I like spare, subtext-heavy writing with sketchy but evocative details that invite the reader to fill in the gaps with suggestion, rather than explaining things straight out.
And my prose is currently... not that. It feels so overwrought, overcomplicated, too literal, too formal. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; often I feel like even my casual writing style in this journal tends that way. I kind of hate what I've written so far. It just feels so lousy, way below the kind of ability I feel like I can demonstrate in my preferred forms of writing. I am trying to trust in the drafting process— utilize my usual recommend process of vomiting out a draft, worrying only about making it complete, and planning on going back and revising in stages later. And while I pretty much always hate my first drafts these days, this one feels even worse than is typical. Especially because, unlike my plays or screenplays that seem to be shitty in early form, I have no previous examples of novels I have written to assure myself that I am at least capable of turning them out decently in the end.
But, as I have reminded myself time and again, the only way out is through. I need to just get the draft together without obsessing over the quality. Like everything else I've ever written, I have to make it EXIST before I can worry about making it GOOD. I am managing to push myself. I just broke 40,000 words the other day, which was kind of a benchmark for me as I was under the impression that was the minimum for novel-length. My friend Mark— a writer and artist I greatly admire, who was once my teacher in grad school for the one prose class I took while there —told me that publishers expect adult pseudo-historical books to be more in the 50,000 to 60,000 range, so I'm not really there. But still, I'm not quite finished yet, and progress is progress. It may be the longest single, continuous piece I've ever written.
I still hate it. It is going to need a LOT of editing before it doesn't suck. I'm not sure how I'm going to make that editing happen, as it's burdensome and difficult for people to give you feedback on a long piece, and I can't use my typical strategy of inviting people to a reading dinner. Maybe I'm silly to expect book publishing to be any less cutthroat and treacherous than screenplay pitching, but I figure at least more books tend to get published than movies tend to get made.
So I'm doing it. Giving it my very best shot, even though I'm scared and not optimistic. I've got over 40,000 words now, which is not nothing, and while they mostly suck there are a few I don't hate. I worked pretty meticulously over the prologue, which I posted last year around this time when I first got truly serious about doing this, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the sound of it, and the subtlety and irony I managed to convey. Maybe with a similar amount of care and editing I can make the rest of it up to its level.
Who knows? Maybe after banging myself against the treacherous business of the performative narrative arts, my future lies in the vulgar pedestrian prose world after all. And then it'll get made into a movie many years down the line, when the model for my hero is well and truly too old. And they'll cast some twenty-five-year old underwear model who wants to transition into acting, and rumor will get around that it was written originally for Chris Evans, and as a lark he'll come to the premiere, an accomplished silver-fox movie director. And while I won't get to nail him while he's young and perfect, our later-life hookup will be some consolation still.
I'm a dreamer, you see. It's why I take risks with my art. ;-)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}