Everything Is Your Problem: Writing Novels vs. Television
Author and screenwriter Amanda Mortlock discusses the differences between writing novels vs. writing television.
In my novel Strange Bedfellows, my main character lives two lives: Sometimes she is Cleo, a college girl studying to be a vet, and sometimes she is Cat… a cat. Similarly, I live two lives. By day, I am a TV writer on a Network procedural (those are the ones where at the end of the episode the case is closed and by next week everything is mostly reset) and by night, I write novels about angsty college kids. It is a slightly less dramatic dichotomy than changing species, but it is a different mindset.
The biggest difference between writing TV and novels: In a novel, everything is your problem. Anything you want the reader to visualize or understand, you have to account for. Where are they, what do they look like, what are they wearing, where exactly is the door? In TV, there are whole departments for each of those questions. You might give a suggestion, but if you get too specific you run the risk of the thing you described not existing in real life, and the fabrication of it costing the production money. So, ‘a Victorian monstrosity from the nineteenth century, a shambolic Queen Anne disrupting the tidy procession of tasteful neighboring Colonials. Its peeling paint was once a merry shade of Pepto-Bismol but has since mellowed out into a dirty cotton-candy pink,’ gets distilled down to ‘a run-down historical house.’
Part of that is word count. A novel has So. Many. Words. My last episode of TV had just under 9,000 words for an hour-long episode. My novel is around 105,000. Granted, the amount of story in a novel is way more than one TV episode, but after years practicing the most extreme efficiency with words, getting used to the amount of detail a novel wants was a culture shock.
One reason for the level of detail, and the word count is the purpose of the document. A script is a sales tool and a blue print for the final product. It wants to be just descriptive enough to paint a picture and help everyone else do their job, but not so much that it becomes cumbersome. A novel is the whole thing. It has to capture the visuals and sounds and performances of the world and story and characters without having any of those elements to lean on.
Novels can be more experimental with structure; the characters can take side quests, chapter lengths can vary from a few lines to having none at all. Network procedurals are the exact opposite. We write to TV schedules and ad breaks, each page of a script is about a minute of TV, every script in the show has the same number of acts and those acts are around the same length every episode. When you break the mold, it’s a Big Deal, and even then the ways you can do that are pretty limited (a fakeout! A cliffhanger! But still within 43 minutes!).
The difference in format leads to another major difference in the writing: the ability to be internal. If a character has a secret, the prose could tell the reader what that is without any of the other characters finding out. In a script, we would need to see or hear about that secret—either in dialogue, or written down somewhere, or even in a flashback.
The collaborative nature of TV is reflective across every element of the script, even down to voice. A novel does have collaborators; editors, researchers, readers, etc., but the voice of the novel is still the author’s. In TV, your job is to write the voice of the show, which in my case I did not create. I bring my life experience and ideas to the writing, but ultimately my goal is for people who read the script to not know it was me. Which returns us to ‘everything is your problem’—this echoes even in the process of writing. A novel is (generally) written alone, where on a show, there is (usually) a whole room of other writers to offset your anxiety and neurosis. Ten other brains to mine for ideas; to ask, “is this bad?”, and if it is, there are ten other people to share in the blame.
Because of the short installations, there is an urgency to TV that I respond to but other people might hate. We have frequent and quick deadlines—a scene by end of day, an act by next week. We could have as little as six weeks between starting to break an episode and shooting it, and within a few months after that it’s on TV for the world to see. I imagine the closest thing in the publishing world would be the serialized novels of Dickens, where a chapter was due every week. Or in a more modern context, fan fiction writers frantically churning out new chapters to feed the fandoms. In my limited experience, the urgent events of a traditional novel are much further out—months, or even years—and in bigger pieces, usually full drafts. The prolonged timeline could be comforting, or the far-out deadlines could sneak up on you in an alarming way.
Not everyone is cut out for the fast-pace of network TV and inability to control every element, and many would not enjoy the self-drive needed to live in the world of novel writing. But for someone who is maybe a little neuro-spicy like me, working in both worlds keeps me balanced, not divided.
Check out Amanda Mortlock's Strange Bedfellows here:
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