Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Page 5 of 5

Adapting the Screenplay

June 4, 2018 /

The previous post tells the story leading up to writing my first novel.

I still loved the story and characters of the Raether’s Enzyme script. Its themes were still important. Advances in technology over the intervening years impacted the plot but (sadly) did not render the core narrative anachronistic. I had a strong foundation that had been workshopped and reviewed. The script was like a super-outline. All I needed to do was adapt it.

The Plan

I stood at my workstation with the screenplay PDF on the right side of my monitor and a novel manuscript template document open in Word on the left. The plan was to make the first draft as direct an adaptation as possible.

  • Lift dialog directly.
  • Grab the best descriptions with minimal modifications.
  • Translate the screenplay’s present tense action to the novel’s past tense.
  • Fortify scene and character descriptions minimally.
  • Defer addressing the impacts of advancing technology.
  • Complete first draft and work from there.

I tracked my daily productivity over the course of the first two weeks. Comparing the number of pages in the manuscript to the number of pages covered in the screenplay allowed me to estimate how long it would take to complete the first draft and how many pages I could expect it to be. Early on, it was looking like I would see two to three pages of manuscript per page of the screenplay and that the process would run for ninety days. I knew that was at best a lower bound, but still hoped it was in the ballpark. With one hundred or so pages of screenplay, the math said the manuscript would be 300 pages. I was worried that the book would come in too slim. I was very wrong.

Divergent Points of View

Before I got into serious trouble, I went off-plan in a happy way. Screenplays are generally written in the third person and the present tense. The tone of the narration, which is being delivered to the filmmakers as scene descriptions and stage directions, is consistent from beginning to end. It matches the overall tone of the script.

The script for Raether’s Enzyme does not stick with the protagonist all of the time. An early scene features a deputy sheriff confronting one of the problems that threaten the protagonist, who is off doing something less interesting. In the course of adapting this scene, it occurred to me that the tone I had been using didn’t fit. The third person narration was sympathetic to the protagonist. It reflected a young person of nerdly disposition who was struggling with depression. The deputy was more mature. She was also harder, more cynical, and more determined. If the tone and word choices gave the deputy’s perspective voice, the reader would see the story through new eyes. If I did this with the villains, I could show the reader how the bad guys were the heroes of their own dark stories. This was exciting.

This resulted in some dramatic tonal shifts between scenes. Early readers flagged cases where I needed to make it clear who the scene was tracking early on.

First Contact

Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.
– Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

With hindsight, the clues were there. What I called the unpacking ratio, the number of manuscript pages for each screenplay page was drifting upwards. I was deviating from the plan.

The screenplay is a brisk thriller. Like many such stories, it moves through the complexities of the characters and the scenario very quickly in the interest of pacing. As I progressed, this seemed unfair to the characters and the world the story presented to the reader. It still needed to move along, but our hyperconnected modern world is wired to change in more extensive and dangerous ways than the world of 2003. As a smart, analytical person, our protagonist needed to react to the enlarged scope of her problem.

I accepted that this required a shift in strategy. I pushed ahead with the unpacking until I reached a critical juncture near the end of the first act. The scene in the screenplay is surprising, psychologically violent, and very short. It unpacked to something more revelatory, truer, and which was ultimately incompatible with the diabolical twist at the end of the second act. Damn. I loved that rug-pull.

Zeno’s Plot Point (with a whiff of spoiler)

Work on the second act proceeded, but I still didn’t have a replacement for my broken twist. It needed to flow naturally from the story before it and I wanted it to lead to the screenplay’s third act. Work became harder the closer I got to this hole in my story. I didn’t want to write anything I’d have to scrap on either side gap. That fear birthed a variation on Zeno’s Paradox of Motion and a perfect rationalization for stepping away from the work to enjoy the Northwest’s glorious summer.

I spent time with my villain wargaming evil schemes. He studied the protagonist, identifying her wants and needs. He found a weakness he could exploit. A new trap was set. I could move forward.

Narrative Complete Milestone

I come from the world of software development. Various old-school development models have points on the project schedule known as milestones. Reaching a milestone is cause for celebration. One such milestone is feature complete. This is where the team has delivered code to implement all the planned features but knows there is work to do on bugs, performance, fit-and-finish, etc. It is acknowledged that early user feedback from the subsequent beta testing may suggest important revisions.

In October 2017, I completed my first draft and declared Raether’s Enzyme narrative complete. The story I wanted to tell was all there, as were various typos, incorrect word choices, incomplete sentences, plot holes and narrative burps. While I made my first editing pass, I had beta test readers who offered to drive over the bumps and give me notes on the story as a whole.

There was much work to do but reaching narrative complete was cause for celebration.

Raether’s Genesis

May 30, 2018 /

In which I recount the origins of Raether’s Enzyme.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Way back in the 20th Century, I lived in Silicon Valley and did the sort of work you’d expect. I enjoyed hanging out with my friend M, who rented a real Eichler house in Mountain View. M is a talented hardware engineer with a strong entrepreneurial streak. We amused ourselves by dreaming up new devices of dubious utility aimed at people with more money than good sense. M’s residual ethics kept us from making millions by actually bringing the gadgets to market. One day, he took a break from suggesting a new Scam-u-tron to declare that we should make a movie.

Understanding the limited resources we had to work with, I spun-up the premise of our low-budget masterpiece. The Bay Area of that era was a hotbed for various self-improvement “technologies”. The Forum and NLP were in their heyday. The whole scene had a cultish vibe to it. In our story, a new mind technology hits town. Using Eureka, you can organize your thoughts and acquire knowledge in a way that reliably builds towards those elusive flashes of insight. Come to our seminar, we’ll show you how. The New Cognition™ may actually work. It may work too well for some people, who slip into a “hypercognitive coma” and emerge…changed.

It wasn’t what M was looking for, so I let it drop. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it really was an alien invasion via SETI or how the story should end.

The Dawn a New Century

Ten years later, I was taking a break from the open bit mines. Before I found a new corporate master, I wanted to try my hand at writing. In all those years, I hadn’t found a way around issues troubling Eureka and renewed efforts were unproductive. It bothered me that I was going back to such old story ideas. Couldn’t I come up with something fresh?

Yes, yes, I could. What I salvaged from Eureka was the format. A novel’s worth of writing was too daunting and I wasn’t clever enough to tackle my themes in a short story. Screenplays are lean, short, and at least comparable to a novel’s narrative payload once the artists and technicians of the film industry work their magic.

My first screenplay was an effects-heavy epic that combined hard science fiction with superheroes. The budget for The Atlantean would have been astronomical. At the time, superhero movies were not mandatory. Even today, no one would greenlight a spec script for a non-existent franchise. I figured that much out after completing the script. There was another problem. The audience for sci-fi superhero stories skews heavily adolescent male. Was there a way to explore the themes of The Atlantean in a genre that didn’t narrowcast? Could it be done on a small budget? Could I tell a superhero story that didn’t require super-sized willing suspension of disbelief?

Raether’s Enzyme was the answer to those questions. It was a techno-thriller with an appealing female protagonist. Its Pacific Northwest setting meant the production could leverage the economies of Canada’s film industry. Raether’s enzyme, the mysterious biomaterial, was a startling world-changer that didn’t dump a bucket of luminous iridescent goo over Science’s head. It felt almost-real, like something that could make headlines in tomorrow’s news.

Two of my early readers testified that they sat down planning to read a few pages and were drawn through the whole script. Where this happened to each of them was…amusing. It gave me hope that I was onto something worth pursuing.

An invaluable resource during this writing process was Dave Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible. Mr. Trottier also offers a script evaluation service. His critique was insightful and constructive. I balked when he suggested that I end the story earlier. He identified a specific point to close it off. During our phone consultation, he convinced me to cut the dénouement. The script and the novel are better as a result.

I submitted the improved script for the second season of Project Greenlight. Greenlight was a fascinating exercise in game theory. Contestants scored each other’s scripts and optionally provided feedback. Higher-scoring scripts advanced to subsequent selection rounds. Players had a choice of strategies. They could be fair and honest or they could work to knock strong players out of the competition to improve their own chances. Raether’s scores were split between people who really liked it, and said so in the comments, and those who silently gave it a minimum score. It sank without a trace.

Further exploration of the “breaking into the industry” process culminated at a big screenwriting conference in Los Angeles. There were so many aspiring writers in one place. We were all so sure that our story was the one The Industry was hungry to tell. The need for high hurdles and brutal gatekeepers became clear. As much as I loved my story, I couldn’t bring myself to move down there and run the gauntlet. I shelved my script and returned to the world of software engineering.

A Novel Idea

Long years of work for my benevolent overlords afforded me another opportunity to step away from gainful employment. It was time to give storytelling another try and see how much value I could create outside of the corporate matrix. Technological disruption created paths around the gatekeepers. Andy Weir and Hugh Howey provided proof that it was possible to connect compelling stories with their audiences. It was time to write my first novel.

I still loved the story and characters of the Raether’s Enzyme script. Its themes were still important. Advances in technology over the intervening years impacted the plot but (sadly) did not render the core narrative anachronistic. I had a strong foundation that had been workshopped and reviewed. The script was like a super-outline. All I needed to do was adapt it.

How hard could that be? Well, that’s a story for another post.

Hello!

May 29, 2018 /

My name is Sean Flynn and this is my blog.

This blog focuses on the stories behind the stories, the truth about the fiction. I reflect on my work so far and journal my adventures in storytelling.

I will not explicitly spoil plot points, but in the course of discussing a story’s history, I may provide enough clues for you to infer important character traits, themes, and events.

If you want to follow the adventure of writing Raether’s Enzyme, start at the bottom of the blog and work your way up.

Thanks for stopping by!

In Medias Res

May 12, 2018 /

It is the Spring of 2018. Raether’s Enzyme is off with the proofreader. I have been over its 117,000 words many times, applying my own eyes and the mechanical expertise of Word and Grammarly until we reached editorial equilibrium. I deeply love the story, characters, and setting. I am at peace with the intricate body of words used to tell the story.  I have the resources to hire someone with the diligence to spot the remaining errors and the objectivity to call shenanigans on my stylistic experiments that don’t pay off. By the time you read this, the job should be done.

Work on the novel began in early 2017 with a blank template document and a screenplay. Borrowing nomenclature from my native software trade, it reached the narrative complete milestone on October 7th, 2017. In the intervening months, I have been fixing known bugs, addressing issues identified by early readers, and attending to general fit-and-finish.

Attending the 2018 Seattle Writing Workshop provided an opportunity to get a professional critique of my literary agent query letter. The feedback was detailed and actionable. It moved the meat of my query from teaser to a nano-scale synopsis. The query is better for the changes.

Before I send my first batch of queries into the world, the experts on the Web say I need to have an author platform in place. It should include outposts in social media and an author blog. So, here we are.

Newer posts »

© 2026 Sean L Flynn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑