Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Special Guest: Harry Connolly on Studying Screenwritng

From 2015...

My friend Harry Connolly has been writing guest blogs to promote his new (awesome) GREAT WAY Trilogy, and knocking it out of the park with each one. All kinds of amazing insight and information on writing that applies to novels, short stories, and screenplays. He should write a book! So my blog is privileged to host this guest blog...

2019: Harry has a new book, the first in a series - and it just came out! ONE MAN: CITY OF THE FALLEN GODS. I just bought my copy and will dive into it soon! The great thing about Harry's novels is that he creates a vivid world that you can disappear into for a couple of hours before bed (that's when I read). A whole world that is not like our own. Check out his new book or his old ones.

INT. BOOKSTORE - DAY: How Studying Screenwriting Made Me a Better Novelist (Mostly)

Way back in the misty dawn of the 1990s, I was a noob author on the internet, looking for advice.

Boy, did I find it.

One of the earliest places I went searching was from pro novelists. Nice people, but none of the advice they gave me seemed all that helpful. I wanted to know how to put together a really great book, and the responses were, essentially: "Try not to be boring."

Now, this is the ultimate advice. Really, there is no better advice than this. "Be interesting" is the only rule of writing. Everything a writer learns about their craft brings them toward this goal.

But I wasn't looking for that. I wanted to talk dialog. I wanted tips on creating characters and conflict. I wanted concrete rules. That's when I found screenwriting.

Now, this was back in the days of Syd Field, who specified actual page numbers where people should put act breaks. It was very, very rigid. Too much so, honestly.

Not that I knew about Field at first. I was just this guy writing terrible fiction. Some actor friends told me to write a script so they could be in it, and gave it a try. Had I ever seen an actual film script before? Nope. Lots of plays (I studied Modernist Drama in college, mainly because plays are so short) but no screenplays. You can imagine how good they weren't.

Then, while bumping around from one message board to another, I discovered Wordplay.

I think just about every person who goes online is searching for a peer group, even if they don't realize it. They seek out a circle of friendly voices who share their interests, enthusiasms, and ambitions. Someone to cheer them on or buck them up. Someone willing to tell them they're full of shit.

Just as important are contrasts. The horror writer has a lot to learn from the kitchen sink drama writer, and vice versa. The woman who wants her name on big budget summer tentpole movies has a lot to learn from the woman writing arch indies. They define themselves and their work by their differences. And they can argue.

God, how we argued. Antagonists, flashbacks, outlining: it was an endless competition of ideas, and while I argued passionately, I was wrong as often as I was right.

But what did I learn in all that back and forthing that I'm still using today?

1) The elegant flourish. There's an early scene in Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run where a movie producer complains about an Ivy League playwright he's hired. The script he turned in had a 20 page scene where a husband and wife argued, bickered, and fought, and the playwright insisted every line of dialog was necessary to establish the man's contempt and the dismal state of their marriage. The producer brought on another writer, a guy with barely a high school education. New guy throws out the argument entirely and writes a new scene: The husband and wife are on an elevator. A pretty young woman gets on, and the man takes off his hat.

That was it, a single moment that encapsulated the situation perfectly. Short, simple, telling. I've been searching for ways to do that in my own writing ever since.

2) Hurry up! One of the first things screenwriters at the time were told was that any dialog over three lines was too long. (And script formatting is really narrow for dialog.) Get to the point without being on the nose, then get out.

The same was true for scenes. Start late and end early. Get to the conflict, then the next, then the next. Anything that didn't move the story forward had to be cut.

Novels can be a digressive form, with characters telling little stories about their lives, or doing the dishes, or stopping for coffee with an old friend. That's not a bad thing, and I certainly don't mind reading digressive books. I don't like writing them, though. I try to keep the story moving, and I inevitably get editorial notes asking me to slow things up and take a little more down time.

3) Be the expert. This was a hard one, because it doesn't mean what a novelist would assume it means. It's not an injunction to study sword-fighting before writing a duel, or to interview a bunch of cops before writing a procedural. That advice ought to be so obvious that nobody should need it. This means to be an expert in your own storyΓÇöto know it inside and out.

In fact, this came from the Wordplay column called You're The Expert; the reason screenwriters are supposed to be experts is to effectively respond to studio notes. That's not an issue for my type of writing, but when I'm stuck on a scene, or unsure what direction the plot should go, I ask myself what a really great would do. How would [extraordinary author] write this scene?

It's a surprisingly effective way to break through a block, and research has confirmed that people are more creative when they imagine themselves to be someone else. Research requires actual expertise, but creatively it helps to have the pretend kind.

What about that "Mostly?" There's one aspect of novel writing that studying scripts didn't prepare me for, and it wasn't what I expected. If you watch the opening of The Godfather, you see an amazing outdoor wedding partyΓÇöthe people, the decorations, the food, all of it. In a script, that's covered by the words EXT. WEDDING PARTY - DAY or whatever. A novelist has to do the work of the art department, the wardrobe department, casting, and all the rest.

But I expected that. What I didn't expect was the profound difference in the way prose text operated. In a script, the text doesn't have a lot of flow because so much of it is instruction. Scene headers, dialog names and parentheticals, "legends", all of them break the flow of the narrative and dialog.

Prose has none of that. Not only is the text very linear, it comes in a flow that's largely unbroken (with the exception of chapter headers or asterisks scene breaks). That task of stringing words together into sentences, then tying sentences together into paragraphs, then arranging paragraphs properly, it a lot like beadwork, and it was the biggest hurdle I faced. While revising first drafts, I found sentences in the wrong order, paragraphs that repeated exposition, unnecessary prepositional phrases, and worse.

Learning to control the flow of text and the transitions between sentences over page after page of prose, instead of in small bursts of narration, was the skill that elevated my game to earn a publishing contract and a career.

Obviously, it isn't absolutely necessary for novelists to study screenwriting; plenty of pros have done well without it. One of the strengths of the novel format is the extraordinary variety of styles and subject matters. Nothing really matters except that one rule I mentioned at the top.

But I'll always be wedded to the stripped-down, full-speed-ahead aesthetic of the script, and I'll always be grateful to the screenwriters (including my host here) who taught me what I needed to know to become a pro novelist.

Now watch me gently segue into a note about my latest, blurbed "Epic Fantasy that reads like a Thriller" by Greywalker author Kat Richardson.

The Way Into Chaos Cover

Have I mentioned that it received a starred review in Publishers Weekly? Bill wrote a review of the entire trilogy. You can also find out more about that first book on my website.

If you want to see the fast-paced style I've been talking about, you can read the sample chapters I've posted on my blog.

Thanks for reading.

BIO: Harry Connolly's debut novel, Child Of Fire, was named to Publishers Weekly's Best 100 Novels of 2009. For his epic fantasy series The Great Way, he turned to Kickstarter; at the time this was written, it's the ninth-most-funded Fiction campaign ever. Book one of The Great Way, The Way Into Chaos was published in December, 2014. Book two, The Way Into Magic, was published in January, 2015. The third and final book, The Way Into Darkness, was released on February 3rd, 2015. Harry lives in Seattle with his beloved wife, beloved son, and beloved library system.

In case you missed any of Harry's other guest blogs...

My Favorite Bit.

Why Talent Is Evil.

My Superpower As A Writer.

It's Dangerous To Go Alone.

Failing On Your Own Terms.

The Most Difficult Part To Write.

Experts Vs. Bumpkins.

Always Blame Yourself!

And the books:

Click covers for more info!

Chaos Magic Darkness











PS: Lancelot Links will be on *Tuesday* this week!

Bill

Wednesday, June 02, 2021

Book Report: Circle Of Enemies

Because Harry is currently writing the next book in this series, I thought I would rerun this. Plus, it's a great beach read!

CIRCLE OF ENEMIES by Harry Connolly.

Though I just finished reading a new short story collection by Lawrence Block, I’ll get to that next Tuesday... because I still haven’t reported on my friend Harry’s latest book CIRCLE OF ENEMIES, which I finished reading a week ago. Took me long enough! But I did a quick rewrite on a script and read some other friend’s scripts and have been working on the Action Book rewrite. I’ve been busy!

“I’m Raymond Lilly, and I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve killed.”




This is the third book in the 20 Palaces series - and the best so far. The first book, CHILD OF FIRE, opens with car thief Raymond Lilly getting out of jail... Ray was waiting for trial, had a crappy public defender, was guilty as hell and figured he was going to do time. But when he goes to trial, his public defender is gone and a high priced uber-slick lawyer is in his place, and the lawyer makes him a deal: If Ray never tells anyone what he saw, the lawyer will work his magic and Ray will walk. Oh, and Ray has to take a job with the organization so that they can keep tabs on him at all times. Ray agrees, and moments later he is walking out of the courtroom a free man. Sounds like the Mafia, doesn’t it? But the twist is - the high priced lawyer works for the 20 Palace Society - a group of sorcerers. What Ray saw was some sort of magic thing... and his new job is the driver for Annalise - a sorceress assassin who tracks and kills anyone who uses magic who is not a member of the society. There’s maybe a good reason for doing this - using magic often opens the door to a dark world where predators live. If those predators escape, they can kill a bunch of people and possibly destroy the world. So only members of the Society are allowed to use magic... Annalise or one of the other assassins kills anyone else, and destroys the predators. Oh, Ray has another job other than driving her around - he’s her “wooden man” - her decoy, her bait. If there is a predator on the loose looking for a human to consume, Ray’s job is to lure it into Annalise’s trap. Um, his life expectancy isn’t very long. Kind of a miracle that he made it to book #3.




Book #3, CIRCLE OF ENEMIES, opens with Ray between assassin gigs working in landscaping in the Pacific Northwest. He comes home, takes a shower... and Melly, an ex-girlfriend (it’s more complicated than that - read the book for the relationship details), appears in his apartment. She’s from his past life as a car thief in Los Angeles... how did she know where he lives? How did she get in? While Ray is wondering all of this, Melly tells him that he killed her, and killed all of his other pals in Los Angeles. That their deaths are *his* fault... and then she just vanishes. A dream?

(Melly’s real name is Carmella - Harry does a great job of giving people realistic nicknames and even creating some confusion when different people have different nicknames for the same person.)

Ray grabs his stuff and drives to Los Angeles to look up his old car thief gang... and discovers that they have been cursed with magic - and have superpowers thanks to predators living inside them... eating them from the inside out. And now Ray is faced with an impossible choice: kill them or call Annalise to come in and kill them. These people are/were his friends! The other part of this is that Ray believes he is responsible for this... and so do some of this ex-pals. Ray tries his best to find some way to solve the problem without killing his old friends, and that requires him to figures out where the magic came from and then find the sorcerer who did this and see if it can be reversed... before his friends die one-by-one when the predators are finished with them.




The reason why I like this series is that it’s a weird combination of a Dash Hammett hard boiled detective novel and H.P. Lovecraft. Violent as hell. I don’t read stuff in this genre (Urban Fantasy) but I get the feeling from looking at some of the other stuff that pops up on Amazon when I search for his books looks more whimsical and “fun” and Harry is dark and violent and hard as nails. In Book #2 GAME OF CAGES Ray is forced to kill a whole bunch of people who have been possessed - and the end of that book is relentlessly violent. Though this book is probably less violent, it is more personal - and people you like die. No punches are pulled. I get the feeling the other popular Urban Fantasy novels are BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID and this is THE WILD BUNCH. And, um, I like THE WILD BUNCH more than BUTCH CASSIDY (which may send me to Screenwriter Hell for admitting). These three books are serious stuff.

THE GOOD STUFF

Kindle version:



Since I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who might want to read it, let me be vague about some of the stuff I liked about it - but still explain why I liked those things.

I really liked that this is Ray dealing with people from his past - that made this more than just an entertaining story. It deals with lost loves and ex-friends and guilt and remorse and every messy friendship situation you’ve ever had. I think that’s what earned this that great review in Publisher’s Weekly.

I think it’s a cool idea to give superpowers to low life small time criminals - because they don’t want to rule the world, they just want to make a few hundred more dollars. They are men (and women) of limited ambition and limited dreams - and they use these new powers in ways that totally fit who they are. Because it’s small time crime, it’s gritty and real and not some crazy Lex Luthor or James Bond villain plan.

The story takes place in Los Angeles, but is centered in the Studio City area where I live - and it’s kind of cool. Harry and I once had coffee in my neighborhood Starbucks in Studio City, and it’s kind of fun to try and figure out what real business gets a fake name for the book.

There’s a totally frightening suspense scene where Ray has to save a kid from being sucked into the world of predators that had me on the edge of my seat.

One of the great things is that Harry creates easy to understand “rules” for his magical elements, and because Ray is just a guy - Ray (narrator) often comes up with a description of these things that uses stuff we can relate to. “Drapes” is a good example.

Harry has *great* chapter ends, designed so that you can not put down the book. This makes it a great read, but also means you will be trapped reading the damned book and not get anything done. One chapter ends with Ray discovering a note threatening to murder a child... hard to just put the bookmark in and set the book down after that.




You’ll have to read the book to understand this - but the most frightening scene to me was when Ray is given some superpowers that have a side effect of maybe removing some of his soul and turning him into more monster than man. This scene works because you *care* about Ray and even though he works for an assassin and sometimes has to kill people himself - he doesn’t take any of that lightly. He does not like killing people - even if they have been possessed by predators within. He’s a thief but not a killer. And now that this has happened, I’m worried about him. Yeah, he’s fiction, but in the world of this series he seems very real.

There’s a great comparison of actual toughness and bravery when Ray works with an ex-soldier Talbot who is the “wooden man” for another sorceress-assassin. The ex-soldier is Mr. Macho and has a pile of guns (Ray doesn’t carry) and the way each reacts to the same situation tells us volumes about both of them. It’s a great way to show character - and expose how a reluctant man of action like Ray is the real hero. The same sort of comparison is used between Annalise and Csilla (Talbot’s boss) to show how Annalise - who seems to care little about collateral damage - really does have a heart. She may be a brutal killer, and she may kill people who get in her way... but she *tries* not to kill anyone who is not a target. Csilla? Um, if the whole human race got in her way, she’d just kill us all. And these are the *good guys*!




CIRCLE OF ENEMIES is just in time to expose the evil behind Google Plus “circles”... and is a fast, action packed read. Because it’s Ray dealing with the people from his past... and the “sins” of his past... the story ends up having strong emotions below the surface. Ray is a man who doesn’t let his emotions show - and he’s damned busy fighting people and *things* from the “Empty Spaces”, but the situations are filled with tough decisions and the regrets and guilt and messy relationships we all have in our pasts. Can Ray save his ex-friends... who are now his enemies?

Makes a great gift for people who like twisted violent stuff!

- Bill

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