Book to movie script? Andrea Clark smooths a bumpy path...

 HALLIE EPHRON: One of the best things about being a writer  is all the talented and delightful people I get to meet. High up on my list is Andrea Clark. She's had a career writing fiction and screenplays, and now she helps people who have a story idea but need a smart editor's help adapting it for the screen.

It's not a walk in the park.  

Andrea is here today to share to reflect on why.

ANDREA CLARK: When I was five-years old, I thought I could be a figure skater because I’d watched the Winter Olympics.

When I was in grammar school, I thought I could write a novel because I knew the alphabet.

When I eventually did write a novel, I decided to adapt it into a screenplay. Why not? Novels and movies both tell stories, right? Big mistake. Huge.

Writing a novel has as much in common with screenwriting as being an Olympic skater has to do with watching one on TV.

Here’s why.

Kids begin hearing stories shortly after they’re born. They have three acts: put a guy up a tree; throw rocks at him; get him down. (Dead or alive—your choice.)

No one grows up hearing bedtime stories in screenplay format. Screenwriting is as much of a foreign language to a novelist as Dolfin speak.

I should know. I worked for a film and television producer in New York in my twenties and read hundreds of scripts, but when I tried adapting my novel—epic fail. Turning a novel into a screenplay was like forcing my size-enormous thighs into a pair of Spanx.

Emma Thompson, winner of the Academy Award for adapting Sense and Sensibility—she wrote seventeen drafts—says her writing process involves a lot of weeping. People say words like “combine” and “shorten” and pretend it’s advice. Instead, let’s consider why and how Ms. Thompson adapted some scenes in Jane Austen’s novel the way she did.

First, the why. It’s up to the screenwriter to figure out how to efficiently mine the drama of a story, i.e., which scenes and characters can do that best.

In the screenplay, Ms. Thompon wrote a knock-your-socks-off, revelatory scene about how isolating it was to live in the English countryside in the late 1700s.

She chose Elinor to communicate this for several reasons. Elinor is a strict observer of social norms and doesn’t say much. She is also strong; not even the engagement of the man she loves to another woman can break her.

For the how to communicate such isolation, Ms. Thompson chose the scene where Marianne falls ill while at the Palmer’s estate at Cleveland.

The quickest way to reveal the soul of a character is to put her in crisis. So, the writer (a) made Marianne’s fever life-threatening, and (b) left Elinor completely alone with her.

Once the writer separated Eleanor and the dying Marianne in a strange house, away from the others, the script was ready for a new, heartfelt scene that dramatized one of the most difficult challenges of Austen’s world.

The scene takes place at night. As Elinor watches over Marianne, she realizes that if her younger sister dies, she will lose her only confidante and close friend; her life will be one of crushing loneliness.

Kneeling, Elinor lays her head next to her sister’s body. Eyes wide, she stares at a vision of a life she knows she could not survive.

“Beloved Marianne,” she whispers, “do not leave me alone.

Now that’s writing worth weeping over.

HALLIE EPHRON: Which is exactly what we all aspire to write. Hard enough in a novel or short story. But how to do it in a screenplay, harder still.

The good news is that Andrea is offering a developmental editing service to writers like me who are new to screenwriting. So we won't have to match Emma Thompson's 17 versions to get to "good enough," never mind weep-worthy.

 Andrea Clark can be reached at: StoryChefnyc@gmail.com

TODAY'S QUESTION:

Thinking about your favorite novels that have been turned into movies, which have been the most (or least) successful, in your opinion, and if you can please share why. Andrea will be checking in today and adding her insights.

Andrea Clark is a writer and developmental editor with over fifteen years’ experience. She’s the author of a retranslation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker published by Alfred A. Knopf, short stories (New Bedford magazine), and contributions to several humor collections, among them: Book: The Sequel (The Perseus Book Group), and I Remember When Mom: (Andrews McMeel). After graduating from Smith College, she worked briefly at The New Yorker as a typist, one of several over-qualified young women who struggled with Pauline Kael’s handwriting. She left that job to evaluate screenplays and manuscripts for producer David Susskind at MGM in New York. Andrea got her M.F.A. from the Graduate Film and Television program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis film, a comedy entitled “My Divorce,” won an Academy Award in the Student Film Category. Andrea is an alumna of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and the Yale Writers’ Workshop in both Screenwriting and Mystery Writing. She greatly enjoys working with screenwriters and novelists whose goal for their projects is professional consideration. Contact: storychefnyc@gmail.com

The Island Where It Happens

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Nantucket changed my life. Truly. It’s where Jonathan and I met, and my every memory of the place is wrapped in gossamer happiness. So when I heard about Steven Axelrod, who sets his mysteries (from the amazing Poisoned Pen Press) on the island, I was instantly hooked. 

So—welcome Steven! And I laughed and laughed when I heard about his main character--a bad poet! Brilliant.

HANK:  Your protagonist, Henry Kennis, has to be the world's most literate police chief, bar none. How did you decide to create a cop who writes poetry on the side? 

STEVE: First of all, I write poetry myself -- very much like the accessible reality-based verse that Henry composes, which is not really in fashion now. The wife of one of my MFA program professors, a very prominent modern poet, read Nantucket Five-Spot (which was written as my creative thesis) and remarked. "I love the fact that hero is such a bad poet! So charming." I guess I couldn't resist the urge to let some of these "bad" poems see the light of day. 

But it's an appropriate hobby for a detective. Crime solving and poetry require the same leaps of intuition, the same ability to make and recognize odd connections and relationships. Beyond that a poem is a good x-ray of a character's heart and soul. The poems help the reader get to know my Police Chief a little better.  

HANK:  The backdrop of your new book is the backstabbing world of local theater, in this case Nantucket's. The vicious confrontations between the characters who populate this  novel feel quite authentic... Have you yourself participated in local theater and experienced this level of drama?

STEVE: I did a fair amount of community theater acting when I was Henry's age, and I saw my fair share of high drama and low comedy in that milieu. The theater scene on the island seems much more serene these days. But  that's okay -- inventing conflict and setting crazy characters at each others' throats is part of my job description.

HANK:  You spent a portion of your childhood in a Hollywood environment, with your father being the famous writer/director George Axelrod. (Listen to this, reds and readers. His father is  best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch, which was adapted into a movie starring Marilyn Monroe. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and also adapted Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate.  MY total FAVORITE. ) Anyway. So cool! 

STEVE: My Hollywood ties have frayed somewhat over the years though I remain a member of the WGA(w) thanks to a development deal some years ago with a big TV producer. There is currently some interest in the Kennis books as a series from different "content providers" I guess I should call them, to be as vague and cryptic as possible ... but it's hard to tell how serious any of them are. I keep my fingers crossed, though it tends to interfere with my typing.

HANK: I know the feeling!  So--When you prepare for a new novel, do you first outline everything from soup to nuts? Or are you a write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy?

STEVE: I'm a combination of the two. I've always envied writers like Stephen King who apparently just charge into a book and let the plot details sort themselves out, with what Nabokov called "the velocity of intuition". 

HANK: Oh, I’ve never heard that. I love it. Is that what you do? 

STEVE: I tend to be more cautious. I need to know the ultimate outcome before I start -- who done it and why, and at least some of the clues red-herrings and detours that will lead Henry to the culprit. You're always telling two or three parallel narratives in a mystery, with several of those scenarios throwing  suspicion on the wrong people. The links between these versions of reality are the clues, which can be interpreted different ways -- the RACHE written on the wall in blood that Gregson and Lestrade assume to be an almost completed name -- Rachel. But Sherlock Holmes knows it's the German word for revenge.

HANK: Oh, we have to talk. More I cannot say. But wait til you read my new book The Murder List. J  But we digress.

STEVE:  So ... within that macro-structure, the big picture of the novel, I attack the story one chunk at a time, carefully outlining the piece I'm working on and usually emerging from it with only the vaguest idea of where I'm going next. So I read through the notes, refresh my memory about the larger story and start outlining the next bit of the plot. 

This gets simpler as the story goes on. Tales narrow down and pick up speed as they approach their climax and the writing becomes easier as more and more decisions have already been made. 

My father always told me, "If you have a problem with act three, the real problem is in act one." He referred to those final blissful writing days that sweep to the end of the story as "picking the daisies" -- flowers you meticulously planted many pages ago. All that being said, the actual content of each scene remains wildly improvisational. Except for a few essentials, I really have no idea what my characters are going to say to each other, or which way their conflicts will go. 

And that makes every writing day fun.

HANK: We are the same! But you are so eloquent about it. I just freak out and cross my fingers. Last question:

With Nantucket being so tiny, is it a challenge to come up with new plot concepts that don't tread on the ground already covered?

STEVE: I wrote a thriller twenty years ago and my agent at the time warned me "You better know what your next couple of thrillers are going to be. I'm branding you as a thriller guy." That scared me. I had literally used every idea, gimmick, action set-piece and plot device I had ever come up with in that book. I had been pebble collecting for it since high school. Now I was supposed to write another one? I had nothing, and told her so. Maybe I should have faked it -- the book never sold. Anyway, it's just the opposite with Nantucket. The little resort island teems with stories, plots, feuds, grudges, history and conflict. I'm always learning new things, from the existence of secret cock fighting clubs (Which I used on the first page of the new book) to the fact that the dump was built on an Wampanoag Indian graveyard. Spooky! The material seems inexhaustible. 

Nantucket is America in miniature, with all the wealth inequality, immigration issues, opioid addiction, gang crime and bureaucratic malfeasance a crime writer would wish for. The island is experiencing massive tectonic social changes. The larger aim of my books is to chronicle those changes  -- and try to make sense of them.

HANK: Yes, yes, this is so thought provoking! Reds and readers, have you ever been to Nantucket? Would you like to? What’s your image of it? Or where’s one place that changed your life?

 

Nantucket Counterfeit by Steven Axelrod 

The fifth Henry Kennis mystery takes us into the closed, gossip-riddled, back-stabbing world of Nantucket’s community theater.            

Horst Refn, the widely disliked and resented Artistic Director of the Nantucket Theater Lab, has been found stuffed into the meat freezer in his basement. Most of the actors, all the technical crew, and quite a few of the Theater Lab Board members, whom Refn was scamming and blackmailing, are suspects in his murder. The island’s Police Chief Henry Kennis has to pick his way through a social minefield as he searches for the killer.

At the same time, Henry’s daughter’s new boyfriend, football star Hector Cruz, has been accused of sexting her. Carrie knows the offending pictures didn’t come from him, and Henry has to prove it before the boy gets suspended, which means probing into the family secrets of Hector’s father, a firebrand agitprop playwright, who happens to be a prime suspect in Refn’s murder.

Every story is a fiction, every identity proves false, and every statement a lie. The counterfeit bills found at the scene of the crime are the most obvious symbol of the deceptions and distractions that obscure the investigation. The truth lies buried in the past, in Refn’s earlier crimes and the victims who came to Nantucket seeking revenge.

When the culprit has been revealed, the last masks torn off, and final murder foiled—live, on stage, during the opening night of Who Dun It, the eerily prescient opening drama of the Theater Lab Season—Jane says to Henry, “Is everything counterfeit?” He smiles. “Almost.”

Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA, despite a long absence from Hollywood. His work has been featured on various websites, including the literary e-zine Numéro Cinq, where he is on the masthead; Salon.com; and The Good Men Project; as well as the magazines Pulp Modernand Big Pulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

Forensic specialist, screenwriter Jennifer Graeser Dornbush pens a crime novel

HALLIEEPHRON: I met Jennifer Graeser Dornbush at Willamette Writers Conference and knew I'd met a kindred spirit. She writes crime fiction for film, TV, and now novels. 

She was literally born into the forensic life. Her father was a medical examiner and his office was in their home. For decades she went on death investigations, received 360 hours of forensic training through the Forensic Science Academy, and studied current and historical forensic science. Her book, FORENSIC SPEAK, is used by cops, CSIs, and writers of all levels and hailed as the north star to crime writing. 

Now she's out with her first crime novel, THE CORONER, and I'm delighted to welcome her to Jungle Red. 

What inspired you to write THE CORONER, and did the story grow out of personal experience?

JENNIFER GRAESER DORNBUSH: 100%. Long before American television was saturated with CSI and Forensic Files, I was living my own weekly CSI adventure with my family in northern Michigan. My father was a medical examiner for three counties and my mother assisted as his office manager. They ran the office out of our home because the county was underfunded and could not provide him with one.

Dad performed autopsies at the small county hospital morgue, but all the records, paperwork, and photographs were kept in our family office. Samples of blood and  body tissue were stored in a basement freezer, right under the pork chops and frozen beans like some B-rated horror flick. Dinnertime conversations often revolved around the case of the week.

“Let me tell you about an interesting suicide I saw today,” my dad would say. “Oh, and pass the corn, please.” 

Dad investigated an average of 100 deaths a year. Accidents, suicides, natural deaths, and scores of drunk driving fatalities filled Dad’s days and nights and kept food in the cupboards and clothes on our backs. During the 23 years Dad worked in forensics, I had a hands-on education in death investigation. It was as natural as brushing my teeth.

When I started writing I began to tap into my past and discovered that I was drawn to crime stories – from Hitchcock to Fargo to Breaking Bad to Bones. The discovery that I loved this genre surprised me because until this point, I was not a CSI fan and rarely read crime novels. Now, suddenly, I felt deeply connected to my past. And I wanted more! I wanted to know everything.

I hounded Dad and Mom with phone calls, e-mails, and questions. I attended the Forensic Science Academy. From this experience my non-fiction book, FORENSIC SPEAK, was born and continues to be used by writers, professors, and law enforcement alike. I began speaking  about forensics to empower other storytellers with the treasure trove of experiences and knowledge from those decades of death investigation in my family’s home.

THE CORONER harkens to my experiences growing up in a small town and seeing how death investigation works in a rural area. I like to expose the reality that resources in rural areas are often limited and different than they are in big cities. I’m not saying they are not professional. They are. But the elements of staffing, equipment, education, experience, and budget all factor in and vary vastly from county to county.  I think it’s interesting to explore how small communities react when one of their own is taken from them.

No one remains anonymous in small towns. Everyone plays a role. Everyone is affected. Everyone has an opinion and a stake.

  

HALLIE: You’re also the author of an inspirational novel and feature film about an Army widow called God Bless the Broken Road - in theaters September 7th,  and a nonfiction book, Forensic Speak, about how to use the science of forensic investigation to write crime dramas.

How did writing a mystery differ?

JENNIFER: Storytelling is storytelling no matter the genre or format. All genres and formats follow the same story rules and arcs. I find it takes the same amount of time, effort, thought, energy, and research to develop a story whether it’s for book or screen. Creating a screenplay requires the same amount of story work as it does for a novel.

The only difference is that I can write a screenplay in a fraction of the time it takes me to write a novel because most of the backstory and ground work never shows up as words on the page.

Non-fiction is a whole different ball game. It requires a lot less emotional energy. And in that sense, it feels less exhaustive.  I love the challenge and results of all of them.

HALLIE: What was it like, being a little kid and getting to tag along on death investigations?

JENNIFER: One Sunday, when I was eight, my father toted us all over to the local airstrip. A small plane had crashed the night before and Dad wanted to return to the scene in daylight to scour the area for any remaining body pieces. My younger sister and I paired up to help him. Outfitted in our Sunday best, we roamed the damp field that early spring morning in search of brain matter and skullcap. And yes, we found some.

As a  teenager, I was rather grossed out and embarrassed about what my father’s job at M.E. These were the days before CSI and Forensic Files made death investigation exciting and cool. When my friends found out my dad did this, they took great interest, so that lessened the embarrassment on my part. And while I do love the sciences, I always knew my calling was to be on the storytelling side of crime solving.

HALLIE: Do you find yourself having to balance the requirements of storytelling with presenting accurate forensics science?

JENNIFER:  Yes and No. Both storytelling and forensic science are such a part of who I am that I feel like they flow innately from me almost through my subconscious. This is not to say that I don't have to research forensics. I do. It's a huge field of science that is always changing.

I have also studied story structure and character development for most of life and continue to do so. I'm a very strong plotter and learner and researcher. But there also comes that time in the creative process when you've outlined and researched enough to know that the balance is in check… or at least good enough… (done is better than perfect!) Move forward and just write! Trust that internal muse! After you get that first draft on paper, you can fix it in post (as they say in "the biz"). 

HALLIE: Did you plan out the mystery before you started or did you see where you writing took you? 

JENNIFER: I’m a plotter. That comes from my screenwriting training. When I start a new mystery I pretend I’m the investigator and I create a case file for my “case.” From there I create a rough skeleton outline of the mystery plot. After that I flesh out the character’s arcs and emotional journeys, and B, C, and D stories surrounding the case. Then, I create a treatment. Workshop it. Then, a first draft. More workshopping. I’m a collaborative writer. It’s more fun, makes the project stronger, and gets the project done faster.  

HALLIE: I'm so jealous. My writing process is much messier and sadly I fly solo.

You advise writers on how to get the forensics right. What are the three biggest mistakes writers make when writing in the crime genre? How can they best fix them?

JENNIFER:   

Mistakes:

1. Not spending the time, energy, or research to get the forensic facts right. 

2. Thinking that what you see on TV or in movies is correct procedure. 

3. Writing crime scenes that come off at cliche, plastic, or static (in action and dialogue!).

Fixes

1. Get a copy Forensic Speak! There are over 300 forensic terms, plus, a list of  

over 50 resources that will make your crime writing more authentic

2. Make friends with a cop, coroner, toxicologist, or crime scene investigator who can show you the real ropes!

3. Know the correct forensic terms and how to use them. Don't over use terms. Layer in the facts of the case/evidence to keep the plot moving, but center the focus of scenes around character conflict, tension, and emotional needs.

HALLIE: Jennifer will be checking in today, so take advantage of her expertise! Forensics! Plotting! The movie business! Ask away...

ABOUT THE CORONER: Summoned from her promising surgical career first to her estranged father’s bedside, and then his post as medical examiner when his small town needs urgent help with a suspicious death, Emily Hartford discovers home is where the bodies are in this pitch perfect mystery debut.

“If you like small town mysteries, twisty reads or books by Lisa Black or Patricia Cornwell, you'll love The Coroner.”―Karen Harper, New York Times bestselling author of Shallow Grave