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.