Long-Time Writer, First-Time Novelist

I sold my first novel by accident.

I know that's an opening sentence that's going to make people want to hate me, and I apologize in advance, but it's true. I wasn't trying to become a novelist. Here's what happened.

(6 Screenwriting Tips to Improve Your Novel.)

During the pandemic, my usual professional life as a writer and producer of television and theatre came to a crashing halt. I had a show on Broadway; it closed. I had a TV show in production; it shut down. I was left with nothing to do and the same gaping existential fear that everybody else had in those painful years.

For both occupation and solace, I cast around for something I could do alone in my pajamas during lockdown. Here's where you think I'm gonna say: I wrote a pandemic novel. I didn't. That didn't even occur to me. What I did instead was write a series of full-cast Audible Original science fiction short plays called Earworms. Sanjeev Bhaskar, Ming-Na Wen, Jewel Staite, Sarita Choudhury, Adam Campbell, Christina Elmore, Malachi Kirby, and many others brought my stories wonderfully to life, and several of the titles spent happy weeks at the top of Audible's charts.

Then, as the pandemic came to an end, an agent friend suggested to me that these could be repurposed as a short story collection. That seemed like a wonderful idea. I had already written six 30-page scripts, each of which had a cool premise, a surprising twist, and something to say about the world. Each of them surely would be easy enough to translate into a short story. So that's what I did.

Then the agent-friend who had by this time become my book agent, the wonderful Eric Smith of Neighborhood Literary, said he needed four more. Six wasn't enough for a short story collection; he needed 10. I was too lazy to actually write four more stories, so I just produced four more one-pagers: the beginnings of ideas, a little tease of a high concept, and a few lines of dialogue. We put them together in a pack and Eric sent them out to publishers.

This is where things got weird.

We got a call from the editorial director of Amazon Publishing. She was interested, said Eric, but she didn't want to do them as short stories.

Is this some cunning agent double talk, I asked, because how can she be interested in a collection of short stories and not want to publish short stories?

Let's get on the phone with her, said Eric. We'll figure something out.

So we did. Then we did.

The publisher (the wonderful Kjersti Egerdahl), it turns out, was not focused on any of the completed short stories, not on any of the proven ideas that had already done well on Audible. No. Instead, with what I would come to recognize as characteristic insight, she was pointing to one of the one-pagers, a brief sketch I had written about a murder in Edwardian London carried out by a mysterious acrobatic assailant and witnessed by a cat burglar.

This one, she said. I think this one wants to be a novel. Would you write it?

I told you this story was going to make you hate me.

Once again, I'm so sorry. I didn't plan it. It's just what happened, but wait, what happens next maybe will let you hate me a little less.

The truth is that I had harbored dreams of being a novelist decades ago, when I was starting out and before Hollywood and Broadway had claimed me. How hard can it be, I thought? I have plenty of friends who write novels. I write screenplays and plays and graphic novels. It's all sort of the same, right?

Have I mentioned that I am an idiot?

A couple of months later, when deals had been done, I sat down and started to write. I discovered many differences in the process, but the biggest single one was this: Novels need a lot more words than screenplays.

I mean, a lot.

The Big Sleep screenplay has approximately 20,000 words. The Big Sleep novel has approximately 50,000 words. This is not a recent trend: Hamlet, without question the greatest play ever written, clocks in at approximately 30,000 words, whereas Don Quixote, written in the very same decade and regarded as not only one of the greatest but arguably the first modern novel, weighs in at over 400,000.

I had never written something that needed this many words, and I wrote a fairly short novel at the end of the day: about 70,000 words, 212 pages in its paperback edition. But it took me what felt like forever. I wrote every day, four or five hours a day, for six months. I did this even when I was in rehearsals for plays I was opening or on deadline for other work. I wrote on trains, on planes, on vacation, in rehearsal rooms, in the editing suite, in voiceover studios. I wrote in cars, I wrote in notebooks, I wrote at my desktop, I wrote on my laptop.

The issue wasn't just the number of words. It was also what those words did.

I am accustomed to writing dialogue. Dialogue and tersely described physical sequences are 90% of what I write, and of those, I love dialogue. I love the rhythm, cadence, and musicality of language. I say my lines out loud to myself and then have friends read them out. Like the writers I admire most—Aaron Sorkin, Tom Stoppard, Diablo Cody, David Baddiel—I write with an ear for how things sound as much as for what they mean. I like to think that my dialogue could be set to music, and occasionally it has been.

It turns out, though, that you can't write a novel solely made up of dialogue. I discovered this the hard way, when on repeated occasions my editor sent back a chapter, saying: "Yeah, this is a great scene, but to make it a chapter, you need to describe what's happening as they talk."

The first time I got this note, I genuinely didn't understand it. I wrote back and I said, "What do you mean, they're sitting in chairs talking?" Yes, she said, "But what are they doing? What do they look like? What are their facial expressions? What are they doing with their hands? What's the light in the room like? Is it hot or cold, is there sunlight streaming in? What are they thinking?" I looked at the note, baffled. "The director and actors will figure that out," I said.

Then it hit me. I don't have a director. I don't have any actors. There's no camera. There's no set design. There's no costumes. There's just me and this keyboard.

I'm hoping you hate me a bit less right now. It's not kind to hate idiots.

*

Most of the time, as a screenwriter or playwright, your work is the starting point. The screenplay or the playscript is what goes into production. When it's in production, during rehearsal or shooting, and definitely during previews and post-production, things change. If you're there in the process, you get to influence how they change.

You're basically writing for months after you’ve theoretically “finished,” not alone at your desk anymore, but live, in the midst of the action. Rewriting dialogue in rehearsal so it sits better in the mouth of the specific actors inhabiting the roles, quickly scribbling down reshoot scripts to fix problems that happened on set, reordering sequences and sometimes the entire piece in the edit room.

This is normal but if you're not used to it, it's agonizing and requires real endurance and a different mindset. Once you accept it there is joy and challenge, and even moments of transcendence in it, but it also means that emotionally you are never too attached to what you have written. You recognize your work as a blueprint, as a jumping off point, as a trampoline for actors, directors, and designers, and for yourself as a creator.

If you are lucky in your collaborators, your writing gets elevated and ends up existing, in the words of John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, “two feet above the ground,” and, I would add, several feet above the page. Being part of these collaborations is one of the things I love most about working in film and TV and theatre.

Writing a novel is profoundly different in both these aspects. First, a finished novel is in fact, finished. Once you sign off on the copyedits, you‘re done—no reader or reviewer gets to ask you to do rewrites because something doesn’t land with them. Also, writing a novel is, or at least for me, was a lonelier experience, but not entirely so, because what happened is I ended up having a collaboration with my lead character, the singular figure of Balvinder Dev Singh: an outsider in 1905 London, a veteran of the Boer War, an aspiring lawyer, and a part-time cat burglar.

Bal grew out of the literature of the period and out of my frustration that there were never any brown people in it, but he also, in another way, grew out of me. He's my fictional ancestor, a clone of mine who has been sent back to grow up 150 years ago. We share some of the same opinions and characteristics, but he's also his own man, forged by the fires of imperial adventures and by the prejudices of a society that didn't know what to do with him.

I grew to love him like a brother. He taught me things about myself and about what I think about today's world, about the evils of empire and imperialism, and the lies we had both been told about them.

When I finished the book, when I wrote my final words in his voice after six months of living with him, every day, every hour of every day, I closed the file, I sent it to my editor, and I realized it really was finished. That I was saying goodbye to this intense period of creativity and, at least for now, to Bal. Then I did something I had never previously done when finishing a piece of work.

I wept.

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