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The Transition from Screenplays to Novels

Seven years before I began writing in earnest, when I actually sat down almost every day for many days in a row and wrote things down, at first in long hand on lined paper, and then after teaching myself to type by using a Word program to format screenplays (painful), I sat in a screenwriting class in college and decided I would never be a writer. The man who was teaching the only creative writing course I ever took spat out commands in his heavy German accent, reminding me of an SS officer from the movies, he was so angry and vehement and strict.

“You MUST have the turning point of your story come on page sixteen and it MUST be written in one sentence on a lined three by five card in sequential order with all the other plot points!” he would bellow, his veins bulging from his neck.

I sat there, a twenty-year-old kid from a small town in Oklahoma who already believed that even though I desperately wanted to be a writer, I probably didn’t have the talent, and something inside me simply froze. I believed this fifty-something man who had worked in Hollywood for two years or something on Gilligan’s Island, I think. He was so certain that this was simply the only way it was done in Hollywood, that one would absolutely never get anything even looked at if it wasn’t written the way he was teaching us. I believed him. He was older. He’d lived there. He knew, right?

I knew that I would never be able to write anything this way, so I gave up. Not only did I not attempt to write another thing for seven years, I also decided I would never live in Los Angeles, believing that I would be devoured whole by demeaning, intimidating, and much more successful people than I if I ever set foot in the place. (I realize now, of course, that my teacher was just conveying his experience in LA, not everyone’s.)

The agony of not writing, of not giving voice to this very insistent, pushy, and passionate creative urge within me, became too great in 1995. For years, I had kept it at bay through reading, watching movies, daydreaming, getting a buzz and blabbing about my ideas, but I had never written more than a few lines of poetry. So when I finally realized that this thing was going to rip me apart if I didn’t follow it, I just surrendered to it and asked it a question. “What do you want me to write?”

“Screenplays,” was the answer I got immediately.

“Are you sure?” I asked again, remembering of course that I would be devoured and all.

“Just write screenplays!” The answer came in a deep, booming voice, a stereotypical and highly impressive voice-of-God kind of thing.

Being devoured seemed less intimidating than ignoring this voice from within me, so I wrote. My first screenplay, written in longhand, was a medieval legend with an adolescent heroine. I read it once, and I never showed it to anyone. I’ve thought more than once about dusting it off since the Harry Potter craze, but I have a hard time going back to things. I did read some of it a while back, believing it must be horrible, but it was actually not bad.

The writing at that point was both exciting and frightening. I had no idea what I was doing, but at least I was doing it. Life is strange and amazing, and as “luck” would have it, I met and fell in love with a woman who worked in the film business in Los Angeles. We met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and being out of work and broke and not wanting to be a movie widow, I begged onto her next film, working in the production office of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, brilliant Baz Luhrman’s avant-garde rock and roll version of the classic. It was an incredible education in filmmaking. Somehow, I’d ended up right in the middle of what I had resisted since college.

After finishing the film in Mexico City, we moved to — where else? — Los Angeles. Venice Beach to be exact. For the first year of living in here, I walked around saying, “I can’t believe I’m here.” It was like something else was in control of things, because in my mind, L.A. was in the “never” category.

I began writing again as soon as we were unpacked. I wrote three more screenplays in three years, finally getting a copy of Final Draft, and making my life much easier. Because I was avoiding writing classes, books, workshops or anything that might freak me out again, I did not even know I was supposed to write what I knew. So I wrote what I didn’t know. I wrote a screenplay about the first woman president and a political action/adventure story set in Tibet with two female protagonists. After killing myself with research on these, I wrote a story about a New York girl running from her past to spend a summer at a friend’s parents’ house in Oklahoma where she falls in love with a local boy.

The writing was the fun part, in a hard work kind of way. Between each of these journeys into the lives of my characters and their worlds, I entered the even stranger world of Hollywood. Because I had been dragged into the film business and to Los Angeles by whatever angels or muses or fairy godmothers I might have, I had contacts. Contacts are the way things happen in the movie business. Mine were thin, but I worked the hell out of them. It was excruciating, but when I finally got someone important to read my stuff, I got enough positive feedback to keep going.

Looking back on it, I realize that not only was screenplay writing a fantastic education in storytelling, the three-act structure, dialogue, character development and the rewriting process, it was also a great way to learn the business of writing. After going through trying to sell a screenplay, the publishing world seemed easy.

After my fourth screenplay, I got the go ahead from the creative beast within that it was time to write a novel. I had always wanted to honor my mother and the women that I grew up around, so when my mom came to visit me from Oklahoma with a friend of hers who told me she was a Christian and a psychic, I had my heroine. During the two years I wrote The Saints and Sinners of Okay County, I got my master’s degree in spiritual psychology, started and lost a business, went through a breakup of a seven-year relationship, started a new one, and lost my home, my dog and almost my sanity. The writing kept me sane. It was like a rudder in my out-of-control life. I would sit down in the middle of the chaos of my life, and everything except the story I was telling disappeared. It told itself. I just had to get myself to the computer and let it come through.

Going from writing screenplays to writing novels was a wonderful experience. It was so freeing to be able to explore my characters, their inner worlds and their environment. I felt so concerned that I was giving too much description, that readers just wouldn’t be interested in these details. But both the freelance editor I worked with and then my agent had me keep adding more. It was delicious, but it was not something screenplays had taught me, so I had to learn it as I went along.

Working with Pamela Lane, a wonderful editor, before I tried to get an agent was essential for me. I wrote the first draft of my novel without letting anyone read it. Once again, I didn’t want anyone telling me how I was supposed to write. She was the first one to read it and the first positive review of it I ever received. Not that there wasn’t work to do. She had to teach me simple things about writing a novel that screenplays don’t have, like point of view and even where to indent paragraphs and dialogue. After five or so rewrites of the entire manuscript under her supervision, I went to the fantastic San Diego State Writer’s Conference, which takes place every January, and I met Bob Tabian among other agents. He read fifty pages, then the entire manuscript and took me on within a few months of the conference.

A few weeks after he sent out the novel to publishers, I got a call from Maureen O’Neal, senior editor at Ballantine Books. It was the stuff of dreams. She loved it and wanted to buy it and publish it in hardcover. It was wonderful and the process of getting published has been fun and exciting.

Writing novels has not killed my desire to write a movie. In fact, between novels, I wrote another screenplay with the same results as the other four, but I think there’s an old saying about perseverance. It’s certainly gotten me this far …