Get Published, Part 7 – Write To the Beat of Your Own Drummer

First I was a novelist.  Then I was a screenwriter.  Then I was a novelist again.

Only this time, I actually sold something.

How did that happen?  Because everything I didn’t know about writing novels during the first go-around was discovered during the ensuing process of learning how to write screenplays.

Most of us try to write our first novel based on what we know from the experience of reading them, which is an outside-in process. That’s like trying to fly airplanes by watching them take off and land while sitting next to a runway in a car eating a sandwich. 

Don’t laugh.  The vast majority of first novels are written in precisely this manner.

Only when we discover how poorly that strategy works do we usually attempt, if at all, to learn the craft from the inside-out.  To discover its discipline, where all those pesky principles, rules, criteria and structural guidelines are found. 

Screenwriting, on the other hand, is impossible to approach without first looking at the inherent craft involved.  From Day One the wannabe screenwriter is immersed in an inside-out process, all of it driven by principles, rules, criteria and structural guidelines.

Which brings us to terrific news for anyone seeking to get published:

The basic principles of screenwriting and novel writing are almost identical. 

I mention screenwriting because that’s how I discovered the discipline of storytelling. 

But there are other ways.  You’re reading one of them now.

The primary differences between a novel and a screenplay reside on the page itself in terms of the formatting and in understanding what can’t be written in a screenplay, yet are always implied by it.

And that’s totally liberating for novelists.  Because what can’t be in a screenplay – visual details, thoughts, memories, quick asides, facial expressions, tone of voice, and a long list of other experiential elements that are left to the ways and means of a camera and the actors – can and should be in a novel. 

Novelists have so much more freedom and latitude.  And yet, that freedom and latitude is easily misunderstood and abused.

Because when those elements of story do appear in a novel, they do so within the same structure and criteria that moves a screenplay toward storytelling excellence.

A screenplay exists in a box.  So does a novel.  But with novels, the box is bigger and the sides are softer and more flexible.

So is this freedom librating, or is it dangerous?

The answer depends on your level of understanding of the inherent discipline of the craft. 

The craft of screenwriting defines standards and structures far more succinctly than does the vast majority of how-to-write-a-novel learning out there.

If you can transfer the discipline of screenwriting to novel writing, while taking advantage of the inherent freedom of writing novels, then you are on a path to selling what you write.

Penguin-Putnam bought my first draft of Darkness Bound, a novel based on my screenplay of the same name, which I’d optioned twice but remained unproduced.  They published it in 2000 and upon release it spent the first three weeks of its life on the USA Today bestseller list.

Hang with me here, I’m not bragging.  I’m making a point.  Two, in fact.

A screenplay makes a terrific outline for a novel.  But you don’t need the screenplay itself.  What you need is the underlying story development process, applied in context to the accepted principles, rules, criteria and structural guidelines, that apply to both screenplays and novels.

If you’re an organic writer, someone who refuses to utter the word outline aloud, you need to realize that the process of writing draft after draft in search of your story is nothing other than story development.

A draft by any other name is still, in essence, an outline.  There is no difference between a draft that doesn’t quite work and an iteration of an outline.  None whatsoever. 

The trick is in understanding whether it does, in fact, work.  Or not.

And, like it or not, or even willing to admit it or not, you don’t have to write a draft to develop your story. 

At the end of the day, when you’ve written several drafts and you have the story where you want it – the one you begin submitting to agents – you’ve done the very same thing that a thorough outliner, one who is submitting their polished first draft, has done.

They’re simply two different approaches to story development.  They have precisely the same objectives, and when done properly, both align with the same set of storytelling principles, rules, criteria and structural guidelines.

How does this get you published? 

Answer: it prompts a realization that your development process is the most critical part of the storytelling process.  More critical, in fact, than the writing itself.

Your beautiful words won’t get you published.  Your beautiful story will.

And it won’t be beautiful until you juxtapose what you’ve created against the principles, rules, criteria and structural guidelines of successful storytelling.

Which means, you must understand what they are.  Do you?

You won’t publish until you do.

I’m not suggesting that you write a screenplay as a key part of that process.  That’s an option, of course, and a good one.  But there are many ways to implement an effective story development process.

Including writing a series of drafts if that’s what works best for you.

What I am saying, though, is that – drafter or outliner – the fundamental principles of storytelling (which are inherent to screenwriting and, unfortunately, are less visible in the academia of novel writing) are the most powerful and essential tools in the entire publishing proposition.

My other point today:

Some writers, especially organic writers, fear that the application of principles, rules, criteria and structural guidelines somehow suppresses the creative process and compromises the end product.

That particular fear will kill your publishing dream.

To publish, you need to believe the exact opposite. 

To publish, your story must be wildly original, creative, compelling and fresh in a way that it reinvents whatever genre you are writing in.

But… you need to do all that within a box.  Within the constraints of, and in disciplined accordance with, the principles of storytelling.

If you don’t have complete command of those principles, you won’t publish.  Because your story, however wild and compelling and fresh, won’t fly without them. 

It won’t bear the weight of reader scrutiny and attention span.

The very highest goals of the principles, rules, criteria and structural guidelines are, in fact, to optimize the reader experience by allowing the story to withstand the most critical of scrutiny and the thinnest of attention spans.

Conversely, you can write a story that is indeed in alignment with all of those principles, rules, criteria and structure guidelines, and it can still tank.  Because those stories lack the creative luster and freshness required to get published today.

You need both.  You need to write like an animal, fierce and bold and wild.  You need to stretch and take risks.  You need to write without fear.

And you need to do it within the confines of a cage. 

Because in the end, your story exists for others to observe and experience.  And in any such zoo, a cage is absolutely necessary.

Without a cage, without limits and discipline, what you have is merely chaos.  The kind that usually ends up in disaster.

Write from your heart.  To the beat of your own drummer.

But if you want to publish what you write, realize that any drummer must first pay homage to a rhythm and a cadence.  To structure.  

Any drummer worth listening to understands that what they play always has structure rather than randomness, even within its own chaotic frenzy.

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