Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

This blog brought to you by Florence and the Machine’s High as Hope album. And some of Ceremonials. What The Water Gave Me is fantastic.

Two big thoughts this week. (Not legitimately big, just the two discrete subjects I want to briefly discuss. Discreetly.)

1) The internet can provide some creative inspirations, but that is far outweighed by the sheer amount of time I allow it to steal from me. I am done with that. I shall still post here, my dear friends, but I cannot be online in the way I have been these past few years: relentlessly digesting news of the day and doing nothing with it. And sometimes watching videos by creatives. It has been too much for too long. Basta!

2) I am reading The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne. I’m up to part 23 of 70. It is very well written – so easy to read and digest – a great advert for his editorial skill. I have enjoyed it thus far and sense it will provide me with many new and useful tools to improve my craft. I do not have anything negative to say about it.

But. (Is everything that comes before a ‘but’ false? I don’t think that is a universal rule. But I might be about to prove it?) I can’t help but notice that this book, like Take Off Your Pants!, admits it draws a great deal of inspiration from a bible on screenwriting. Shawn early on admits how much his perspective has been influenced by his acting career and workshops where understanding the scene was highly stressed.

Both The Story Grid and Take off your Pants have great advice within them, I freely recognize that. I employed a lot of TOYP advice in writing The Gardener and The Goddess, and was thankful for it. But why are we taking lessons from another medium? A screenplay is not even a play, let alone a novel. It is a different skill. Plot points to be hit in a 90-120 minute visual aural medium are going to be assimilated by the audience in a radically different way than by a reader over 8 hours and more in a novel. The structuring of visual scenes peopled by actors’ bodies in motion is nothing like a written scene. I get that there are lessons to be learned, positive and negative endings to a scene, for instance, and these can be productively adapted to novel writing, but I begin to wonder if the screenplay and by extension movie as model for the novel is a bit of a blind alley if the lessons are taken too literally, followed too blindly. And because the lessons make so much sense at first blush, the temptation will be to employ them wholesale.

I say that even as I am devouring Shawn’s book at some speed, and have enjoyed his explanation and expansion of how to view genre – it is excellent stuff. He’s had a great career in editing, and is truly an expert in a way I am happy to say I will likely never be. I’m just trying to get better, and think his insights and advice will help me do that.

But I still find myself thinking that the novel as an adapted screenplay is not a novel, it is something else that can be very successful at attracting and keeping readers. I suspect I’m being an old snob, and I really don’t want to be. My fellow writers out there – how do you feel about an advice landscape out there that leans so heavily on screenwriting advice adapted to the novelistic experience?

I am going to use the lessons learned. Some of them, anyway. How many I don’t know – I haven’t digested them all yet! Shawn even has a section stating he is offering a tool, not a formula. The writer, as ever, must use discernment in what they take and what they leave from the advice offered.

The funny thing is that I do agree with many of these lessons learned from another medium. Cross pollination in the arts is a beautiful and fruitful thing, and should never end. So why do I still feel an uneasiness in my gut?

Until next week, my friends. Stay curious, not a screen-slave. Keep learning, but question assumptions and find the answers you can trust. Keep your gut happy.