S L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: screenplay

Mammoths, mountains, auroras. AI generated by Juggernaut XL v5

Untitled NaNoWriMo After Action Report

December 2, 2023 /

By the numbers

NaNoWriMo 2023 is OVER! On the afternoon of November 30th, 2023, I crossed the 50,000-word line to complete the writing challenge. Yay me!

50,000 words in 30 days requires an average of 1,667 words per day. I…averaged that much. My daily word count totals were all over the place. Some days, life intrudes on writing. Such as Thanksgiving.

Writing 1,667 words per day is challenging, to be sure, but it’s below the 2,000 words per day of productive, professional authors such as Stephen King. Sorry. I’ll try harder.

What does 50,000 words mean? Publishers look for at least 60,000 words in a commercial fiction manuscript. Beyond that, it goes up by genre. Raether’s Enzyme is rather large for a thriller at 117,000 words. The Gray God is a healthy 85,000-word horror novel. For a new author’s adult science fiction or fantasy novel, 100,000 to 120,000 words is a good target range. For established authors, these rules are relaxed, as the author has an audience who trusts the author to make whatever word count worthwhile. Translating word count to page count is tricky. Format and typography play a big role. So, 50,000 words of Untitled Science Fiction Project is half, or less, of the final manuscript length. Or it would be if I hadn’t cheated.

Per my pre-NaNoWriMo post, I went into the challenge intending to finish my main character autobiographies and begin work on the story in screenplay format. This is what I did. Ha-ha! I cheated and I’m glad I did it! I regret nothing! At the end of the month, I had about 16,000 words of autobiography and 34,000 words of screenplay.

The bios will continue to inform how I write the characters. Portions of them may surface in the manuscript where appropriate.

What does 34,000 words of screenplay mean? In this case, the 34,000 words print out to about 158 pages. The film industry’s rule of thumb is that each page is about one minute of screen time. My incomplete Untitled Science Fiction Project screenplay is already over two and a half hours long. That’s the length of Dune (Part 1), which covers half of the 188,000-word novel.  Yikes! A more charitable comparison might be the adaption of the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes (144,000 words). The story there plays out over fifteen 45-ish minute episodes (approximately 675 script pages). Not an entirely fair comparison, as the show brings in characters and events from later in the book series before it wraps up the Leviathan plot line. The point is that a long script may still fit into a reasonably sized science fiction novel. That’s what I’m telling myself.

Evolution is a process.

Seasoned authors have a process, if not a formula, for writing their novels. My process is still evolving. With more seasoning, it may converge on something I can prescribe. Like so much in this blog, what I’ll do here is describe. You may scratch your head, stroke your chin, or laugh your ass off.  I’m not recommending you try this at home. I did, and time will tell if it worked.

So far, it never starts in the same place. Raether’s Enzyme started with wanting to tackle the themes of a previous superhero screenplay in a form that could be produced with a sensible budget. The Gray God began with a word picture of cultists worshiping a strange god in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Untitled Science Fiction Project was born of a desire to write a story whose movie trailer would have epic music. I want it to be big and fun.

For this project, I’m bringing together my favorite parts of prior processes and tossing in a few new ones.

Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God USFP
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo-ing a screenplay!
Drafting Planning Pantsing Plantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener Scrivener, Campfire
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile TBD. Maybe none.
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit TBD. Probably: Word, Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

 

I’ve decided I love working through the zeroth draft in screenplay format. I got much more of my story fleshed out during this NaNoWriMo than I did working on The Gray God in a previous NaNo. Bonus: It was easier to hit the word count goals. Once I get characters talking, the words just flow by the hundreds. These people just won’t shut up. In a screenplay, dialog can just be CHARACTER NAME followed by what they say.

QILIN taps his specs and casts a new holo that floats above the map. We see a herd of woolly mammoths grazing on the steppes. Snow-covered mountains rise in the background. The image crossfades to a similar scene at night. Now auroras shimmer and dance in the sky.

QILIN

Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!

SPHINX

Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.

QILIN

Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.

SPHINX

That’s how they went extinct the first time.

GRIF

There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?

No dialog tags (said, asked, whispered, etc.). Bits of action to frame the conversation. All those things will come in time, but here we’re trying to keep up with what’s being said. This does result in Tarantino-esque talking scenes that seem to go on forever. That’s okay because I’ll come back and trim things later. For NaNoWriMo, I wanted the words to flow. It was fun and I made progress in refining the characters’ voices.

Where do I go from here?

I plan to continue to work on the screenplay until the story is complete. It is much less expensive to rewrite or discard a screenplay scene than the equivalent scene in novel prose. The completed screenplay is something I can share with very intrepid early readers. This worked for Raether’s Enzyme. Two friends read the whole script in single sittings, and one of those was on the john. If the script can excite readers and pull them through the story, then you have reason to hope the novel will do the same.

For grins, I asked ChatGPT to adapt the scene fragment above into prose.

Qilin tapped his futuristic spectacles, initiating a holographic projection that materialized above the digital map. The hologram revealed a sprawling expanse of steppes, where a herd of woolly mammoths peacefully grazed. Majestic snow-covered mountains provided a stunning backdrop to the scene. The visual seamlessly transitioned to a nocturnal setting, with the same landscape bathed in the soft glow of auroras dancing across the sky.

Excitement bubbled within Qilin as he shared his discovery with the group, exclaiming, “Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!”

Sphinx, ever the voice of reason, countered Qilin’s enthusiasm, “Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.”

Undeterred, Qilin proposed a compromise, “Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.”

Sphinx, with a hint of sarcasm, responded, “That’s how they went extinct the first time.”

Attempting to restore order, Grif intervened, “There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?”

Fear not, dear readers. I will be adapting Untitled Science Fiction Project by hand.

And I’ll let you go early. This post is only 1,267 words long.

Generative AI has been well-trained on a corpus of generic science fiction art.

Get Ready to RUMBLE!

October 31, 2023 /

Na-No-Wri-Mo, here I come!

Right back where The Gray God started from!

At the gym today, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo 2023, the current iteration of the 50,000 words-in-a-month writing challenge. Yes, I am writing this on October 31st, 2023, the day before the challenge begins. As with my previous NaNoWriMo, an important part of my motivation here is to hold my feet to the fire writing-wise. Also, per my previous NaNoWriMo, I’m charging into this without a solid outline. Hey, I’m happy with the results of the last run, so I’m optimistic.

The same, only different

This time around, I’ll be working on Untitled Science Fiction Project. In previous blog posts, I discussed the lengthy worldbuilding phase of this project. Since then, I’ve been working* on character backgrounds in the form of mini-autobiographies, which flesh out the details of their pasts and refine their distinctive voices.

I’ll be working in Scrivener again. It’s a great writing tool. Its ability to break a manuscript into independent scenes makes jumping around the plotline easy. This is especially boon-i-licious when you have scene ideas scattered from beginning to end. You go where the muse takes you to get your precious word count goal for a given day. NaNoWriMo doesn’t require you to produce a coherent product, just 50,000 words of product.

I’ll be sticking to my plan of developing the story as a screenplay. This worked, albeit unintentionally, for my first novel, Raether’s Enzyme. The screenplay format is brisk, lean, and hyper-focused on key story details: character, setting, and plot. A screenplay can serve as a super outline for a novel. You have the essentials, which can then be developed into prose.

Another key lesson from the previous NaNoWriMo is: Always cheat, always win. The best you can hope for in NaNoWriMo is first draft quality. Unless you’re Stephen King, who routinely writes at 2000 words/day. By cheating, I mean counting material that may not make it into the final product. Say, for example, the as-yet-unwritten mini-autobiographies. Those are pure backstories, but I’ll count them. Bits and pieces of them may get woven into the ‘real’ story.

Wish me luck

Please. To the extent I succeed, I’ll have built momentum for Untitled Science Fiction Project. Yay! Getting it to a good state before production and publicity work for The Gray God kicks into gear is the goal. If you have a NaNoWriMo account, you can follow my progress on my NaNoWriMo here. I’ll be posting updates on Facebook and X as the month progresses.

*Of late, my level of work output brings to mind this scene from Office Space.

Peter meets with the Bobs in Office Space.

“Well, I Wouldn’t Say I’ve Been MISSING It, Bob.”

A Game of Edits

March 2, 2020 /

Failing Hard at Experimental Design

When you’re setting up a scientific experiment or exploring an alternative engineering solution, it’s a good idea to fix as many variables as you can so that you can better judge the ones you’re studying. I have utterly failed to exhibit this prudence in the course of writing The Grey God. Many of the writing process variables are in play. Few are fixed. This is not methodical.

  Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo
Drafting Planning Pantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

This post will attempt to tease out the results of my ongoing experimental use of AutoCrit in the self-editing phase of the project.

Gamifying the Editing Process

AutoCrit is a suite of editing and text analysis tools that lives in the Cloud. Its advanced features are accessed via subscription. The free tier includes a text editor that is adequate for composing a novel’s manuscript. Where it gets more interesting is in the ‘Professional’ mode. For $30/month, AutoCrit will dice and slice your text with a variety of statistical and heuristic analyzers and assign your work corresponding quality scores. It will also give you a score relative to your genre and major authors. AutoCrit turns editing into a game.

Gamification is not a new phenomenon. Reframing tasks as games has a long history in education, sales, and other endeavors which include elements of competition or self-improvement. Rewarding people with scores, badges, smiley faces, and thumbs-up add game-like perks to fitness trackers and social media. AutoCrit rewards you with better scores for ‘improving’ your writing.

I put improving in quotes not to disparage what AutoCrit has to offer, but point out that optimizing your score in AutoCrit has notable limitations. The software doesn’t read your story. It can’t judge the depth of characterization, find plot holes, or critique your pacing and structure. What it can do is apply fixed rules and identify patterns that deviate from an analysis published works. It can flag word usage that is considered poor form in commercial fiction.

Working with AutoCrit is like having a precocious six-year-old niece who has taken an interest in your work. You explain to her a few of the rules you’re working with and she takes them to heart. She sits down beside you and starts pointing to the text. “What about that?” “And that?” “Right here, you have an adverb. Adverbs are bad, right?” She really gets into it. You say, “That’s okay, it’s where my character is talking, so it doesn’t need to be right.” She ignores that because she’s on the hunt. You’re just about to politely suggest she go outside and play when she points out something you missed. You realize that what she lacks in nuance, she makes up for in tenacity. Playing the game with her is productive, but it is not without risks.

Applying AutoCrit to The Gray God required exporting the manuscript to a Word .docx file and uploading it into AutoCrit. I parked Scrivener on one side of the screen and the AutoCrit browser tab on the other and worked my way down through the manuscript. The biggest initial finding was that I had an adverb problem. Sure, I didn’t overuse words ending in -ly, but I dropped in ‘just’ all over the place. Things were just outside. Just before. Just it. I used the word in just about every adverbial form it could take. I just didn’t see it until AutoCrit called me out on it and suggested I remove just about a couple of hundred uses. Cleaning that up tightened the writing and improved my score. I got into the game and was happy with the results.

I was so happy that I cracked open Raether’s Enzyme, which had been in lockdown since the proofreader worked on it. The AutoCrit pass took longer than I expected. I corrected passive voice issues. In pursuit of a higher score, I shaved over 3,000 words off the text. The manuscript was leaner and smoother than before. This was good. It was also broken.

The damage resulted from my ignorance conspiring with my greed for a better score. AutoCrit flagged ‘that’ as a (potentially) problematic filler word and recommended an aggressive target for reduction. In the course of lowering my ‘that’ count, I substituted ‘which’ for ‘that’ in numerous places. My score improved. As you might guess, the two words are not entirely interchangeable. I suspected as much and researched ‘that’ vs. ‘which’. Sigh. Yes, there is latitude for using ‘which’ in place of ‘that’, but to be right you should use ‘that’ for restrictive clauses. And you precede ‘which’ with a comma in nonrestrictive clauses. I shouldn’t have made those changes. Now I wonder what else I broke playing the AutoCrit game.

I’ll find out over the next month when the Raether manuscript comes back from the copyeditor. I may reactivate my AutoCrit Pro subscription to see how it scores the changes.

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.

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