I gave a talk at the SWF in Cheltenham and many people who did not get into the room asked for a copy to be provided, so it is up as a TwelvePoint article. I was going to do a blog about the subject but decided to put the key points of the talk and article into a blog. Here it is.
I am suggesting that writing prose is a serious and complementary activity for scriptwriters. There are many reasons for this but the main ones seem to me to be as follows:
• Most of you have probably read more novels than you’ve read scripts and you would certainly have had some training at school and possibly university to write prose probably long before you had any training to write scripts.
• Compared to writing a script, writing prose is relatively straightforward and it does not require the same obsessional adherence to structural templates that scripts need to demonstrate for them to be taken seriously when submitted.
• I believe that one of the great fallacies in the teaching of scriptwriting is precisely that I do not believe we should be teaching ’scriptwriting’. Instead I believe writers should study (and learn to appreciate) storytelling. One of the most important motivations, apart from making money, for a writer should be that he or she is compelled to be a storyteller and after forty years of working with writers, I believe it’s easier to tell the story in prose than in script. As Alexander Mackendrick, the director of The Ladykillers said: ‘Don’t try to work out story in script form; do it in prose first.’
• A great advantage of writing a novel as opposed to a script is that you can describe what characters think and feel, something you can’t easily or acceptably do in a script. In other words, a draft of a novel can be a very extended treatment enabling you to work out the subtleties of character and plot for your proposed feature film. Admittedly it can take many months. As Robert McKee said when asked how long it should take to write a script, it should take about 6 months but you shouldn’t start writing the script for 5½ months.
• Whether you’re able to sell the novel or not, it might be easier to find a publisher for a well-worked-out manuscript taking us into the hearts and minds of the characters, the emotions, the pace and the plot – effectively a template for the film – than to find a producer willing to put up money for the script version. Furthermore, should a producer make you an offer to option your prose document, one of your deal points can be that you have to be given the first crack at the script. If a publisher therefore makes an offer for your novel, whatever you do, do not allow them to control film dramatisation rights; keep those yourself.
• My final argument for the value of investing time in writing a novel as opposed to working in a bar is that all things being equal, by which I mean if your prose writing ability is as good as your scriptwriting ability, novels and therefore novelists tend to make more money than scripts or scriptwriters. This may not be true in Hollywood where silly money can be paid for a script but it is true in Europe, particularly in Britain. You need to remember that in Britain we make about a 100 movies a year but we publish about 100,000 books a year.