Screenplaying

Whenever a novelist’s biography tells me that he’s “working on a screenplay,” my heart falls. I feel pity for the poor fellow who’s no doubt heading for disappointment (most scripts don’t get made) and for the novel, which exerts such a lesser lure than the glamour of the movies that a perfectly good novelist will put off his next book for a chance to write a film.

Having said that, don’t feel sorry for ME. Even though I’m working on a script.

My first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM has been optioned by Michael Desante, a US actor and producer who was born in Bethlehem. As part of the deal, Michael asked me to write the script. I’m in between novels at the moment, so I’ve been busily converting from the page toward the silver screen.

It isn’t such a leap as one might think. Much of THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM is internal, rather than visual – because it’s the story of schoolteacher Omar Yussef’s psychological hesitation in becoming a detective. Yet it’s still a crime novel. And for a long time crime novels have been structured more or less like films.

Probably that’s the result of many crime novelists wanting the Hollywood cash, and therefore modeling their storytelling on films. But essentially it means that the way most of us are accustomed to having a story told is in highly visual, filmic terms.

Even in a fairly psychological/internal novel like THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM, I planned the book with the three act structure common to the movies these days. As Syd Field put it in his book “Screenplay,” a script is 120 minutes/pages long; by page 30 the main character needs to be faced with the dilemma which he’ll spend the next 60 pages investigating, and from page 90 on we’ll see the dilemma resolved.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.