A Story is a Story. Write It.

Jeff Cohen

Before I wrote anything pretending to be a novel, I spent 20 years writing screenplays. A lot of screenplays. Way too many screenplays.

I wrote comedies about a scientist splitting herself into two people and about a baseball team managed by online vote. I wrote dramas about a man losing himself in financial problems and a tortured presidential guard searching for the man he believes is the real assassin of Abraham Lincoln. I wrote adventure movies about a comic book writer finding inspiration in space and a father forced to face his small son's demons--literally.

There were a lot more. One of them was about Harpo Marx in Russia. Really. Possibly my best work.

Now, if you go to IMDb.com and search for my name, you'll find it. You'll find eight people with my name. One of them is even a screenwriter. None of them is me. I haven't sold a screenplay. Did have a few optioned, one made it to CBS and the Jim Henson Company (and they were very nice, for the record), but nothing on a screen. Yet. 

So what does that have to do with writing mystery novels?

Everything. Because I learned my craft from writing those eight-bazillion screenplays. I found out about story structure and character development and pacing and dialogue, all through writing for movies or TV (or stereoptocon slides, whatever). 

Storytelling, in any medium, is still storytelling. The key in screenwriting is to show, not tell. Well, waddaya know--that works for novels too! Dialogue has to sound like your characters having a real conversation. And gasp! That happens in books as well.

The three-act structure, that much-maligned device designed to create a roadmap through a story, actually works just as well for a novel as it does for a movie or a stage play. Character "arcs" (which I consider much more trajectories) are useful for any kind of storytelling. Understanding that your characters don't have to be perfect, don't have to be likable, don't have to be wonderful, but sure as hell must be interesting is paramount. And not just for Paramount.

When I wrote my first novel--and I've told you this before--I was certain I didn't know how to write a novel. I was trying to write my umpteenth screenplay, but the first-person perspective was getting in my way. Writing For Whom the Minivan Rolls was supposed to be a clever tool to "break" the story and find the screenplay hiding inside. Instead, it became a book because I had too much fun writing it to stop, and then some lunatic decided he'd publish it. The rest is sociology, or something. (I was an English major.)

All the techniques I'd learned from writing movies were absolutely applicable to my new gig. Now I've written--wait; I wasn't a math major, either--14 novels, 10 of which have been published, and one of which is on its way in November. I'm writing two more now, and procrastinating from them as I write this.

If something works in a story, the medium is not the message--it's the vehicle. I'm writing novels now because I have ideas for novels, I enjoy the form, and enough people seem to like them that I can keep writing them and still pay the mortgage. I don't much write screenplays because I gave them 20 years and made enough money to send my son to day camp for three summers. Which wasn't a bad thing, but now he's 24 and doesn't need day camp anymore (unless by "day care" you mean "a job").

I have not adapted any of my screenplays into novels. Why? Because they're movie ideas, not book ideas. Minivan was a book idea disguising itself as a movie idea, and that's why I couldn't make it work as a screenplay, but it just about wrote itself as a novel.

If you write any kind of fiction, you'd better know how a story is constructed and what the necessary elements are to make it sing. You can apply those tools to any story, in any medium, and they will help. It's not formula and it's not strictly commerce. There's alchemy involved. But the basics of storytelling are universal--a good story is a good story.

Tell yours.

 

P.S. Jon Stewart retruns to the Daily Show in eight days. Thank you for keeping us sane, John Oliver!