I played music all through my childhood and college – music was one of my two majors. I almost never play now, unfortunately; maybe in the future there will be room in my life to let it a little ways back in, because you never completely forget the language.
Because of this, I think the metaphorical frame of music informs a lot of my understanding of writing. I think a lot about rhythm in my dialogue, the pacing of story beats. Since I write across a lot of different forms and genres, it’s important to understand that each has a distinct tempo and customary rhythms. Sometimes it’s good to thwart them, but it helps to first understand and be aware of them.
I have an interesting variety of projects on my plate right now. For about a month there I was working on rewriting an action screenplay for a director. That has been a real education because the modern high-octane genre is not one I’ve spent a lot of time writing in. Taking his draft and some other samples, I realized that modern writing in this area moves terrifyingly fast.
If you think of the story as a progression of “beats” tied to actions that affect the direction of the story, screenwriting has a fast tempo to begin with. Common wisdom these days is that an average scene or beat will top out around 3 pages; and if you’re going to go longer, it had better be for a very good reason.
In these action scripts, though, everything is compressed. If you think of an action sequence as the modern equivalent to a musical number, then you know that the narrative is largely suspended for those minutes so we can enjoy some kinetics. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s one of the great sensory pleasures of cinema and I think writers look down on that at their peril.
So what action film producers expect is a lot of story beats in a lot less time. Now you’re trying to turn over story points in 1-2 pages instead of 3. That affects everything – the mix of dialogue and visuals you use, the number and construction of subplots, how you develop character…you can see why writers often have to resort to familiar narrative arcs and thuddingly-obvious declamations in dialogue – they’re just not getting time to do anything else. Even a scene like Indiana Jones re-entering Marion’s life in Raiders of the Lost Ark would be an indulgence these days – the studio would be wondering if it could be done in four lines of dialogue instead. Basically, in a medium that’s already really, really hard; good action writing is really, really much harder; and I don’t think the form we’re pressured to conform to is necessarily helping the final product.
Nevertheless, I have had to put the action script temporarily on the back burner, because of another project which may or may not lead to an exciting announcement in the weeks ahead. That involves unpacking an old script of mine and prepping a re-write, which is interesting because my outlining methods were much different back then, and now I’m rediscovering the structure of my own work.
But there’s a business-end step I’m still waiting on before I can really dive in, which leaves me in this in-between space where I don’t want to go back to the big action screenplay, but want to keep myself busy.
So I’m working on a new script for Earbud Theater. I finished a rough assembly of Habitat, but that is going to take a lot of editing and effects work which is beyond me, and since everyone involved is on volunteer time that means the timetable for its debut is outside my control. But that doesn’t mean I can’t get another episode in-process; and now that I have one recording session under my belt, I can make my post-production life a lot easier during the writing. Habitat was adapted from a screenplay, and thus has a LOT of scenes. But this new one is going to be an original tailored for the medium, and so I’m letting the tempo adjust a little.
I don’t know if there are hard and fast rules for an audio drama, but I think it gets to be closer to a stage play than a screenplay. Stage plays get to hang around in scenes for much longer – hell, I performed in a production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which is essentially a single unbroken 75-minute scene. I’ve performed in enough Shakespeare to know that he rarely needed more than 10-20 scenes to tell his epic stories; so why would a disposable guns-and-explosions piece need 40 beats’ worth of plot?
I’ve written enough for the stage to know the different muscles involved, and I’m applying them a little bit here and really enjoying the result. I’m letting scenes breathe out to 5-6 pages, enough that there’s still a quasi-cinematic sense of motion and story advancement, but room to really use dialogue and character in a way that a lot of commercial screenwriting doesn’t permit.
This is not to knock commercial screenwriting at all – everything has its place. But I find I function best when I’m able to keep moving from one style to another; so if, as I said, I’ve had to spend a month or so writing super-compressed beats and crazy twisty plots, to stretch out into this audio play practically feels like a vacation.