C. S. Lakin - Shoot Your Novel: Cinematic Techniques to Supercharge Your Writing

Shoot Your Novel : Cinematic Techniques to Supercharge Your Writing, by C. S. Lakin

Copyright2014 by C. S. Lakin

Cover designed by Ellie Searl, Publishista

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Ubiquitous Press

Morgan Hill, CA

Books by C. S. Lakin

Writing Craft

Writing the Heart of Your Story: A Guide to Crafting an Unforgettable Novel

Say What? The Fiction Writers Handy Guide to Grammar, Punctuation, and Word Usage

Contemporary Suspense/Mystery

Someone to Blame

Conundrum

Innocent Little Crimes

A Thin Film of Lies

Intended for Harm

Fantasy/Sci-Fi

The Wolf of Tebron

The Map across Time

The Land of Darkness

The Unraveling of Wentwater

The Crystal Scepter

The Sands of Ethryn

The Hidden Kingdom (2015)

Time Sniffers

Praise for Shoot Your Novel

With such an extensive amount of experience in the screenwriting and filmmaking process (since childhood), it comes as no surprise that C. S. Lakin writes with a trustworthy authority and wealth of insight when it comes to the craft of building dynamic scenes within novels. The pace and flow of Shoot Your Novel makes it easy to follow and the various tips and pointers strewn throughout are succinct. Of particular note is the smart curation of novel excerpts, authors, and filmmakers she cites as examples for the tips she suggests. If you have trouble understanding some of the pointers/tips theoretically, the excerpts always make it more clear.

Having myself adapted The War of the Roses for both film and stage (internationally), I can say that I have actually used quite a few of the techniques Lakin discusses, and the one I like the most is the use of portraying "daydreaming" when writing from the POV of a character, effectively blending past, present, and future in one single scene. Well worth the read!

Warren Adler, best-selling novelist of The War of the Roses and Random Hearts

With Shoot Your Novel, Susanne Lakin does something wonderful. While lots of us in the business of helping writers and storytellers recommend adding vivid images to scenes, Susanne goes much further to reveal how employing the tools and techniques of movie directing, editing, and cinematography will give your fiction deeper meaning and greater emotional impact. Her book is an essential tool for any serious novelist... Unique and terrific!

Michael Hauge, Hollywood screenwriting coach

and story consultant, author of Writing Screenplays That Sell

and Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds

Table of Contents

Point and Shoot

So, a man walks into a bar, accompanied by a large piece of asphalt. He goes up to the bartender and says, Ill have a whiskey. He nods at his friend and adds, Oh, and one for the road.

If I told this joke to you and a group of your friends, Im not sure youd laugh as much as Id hope, but one thing I am sure ofyou would each have pictured this playing out in your head, and each would have seen a completely different movie. Maybe you pictured this taking place in a Western saloon, with the man dressed in cowboy boots and wearing a Stetson hat. He probably had a Texan drawl, and maybe was chewing tobacco as he spoke. Maybe one of your friends imagined a Yuppie high-end urban bar, with soft leather upholstery and smelling of expensive Cuban cigar smoke.

However you envisioned this briefly described scene, no doubt your friends saw something wholly different in their minds. Heres the point: if you had watched this in a movie on the big screen, you and your friends would have seen the exact same things. You wouldnt be arguing later whether the piece of asphalt was black or gray or the man was wearing that hat or not. The film itself provided all the details for you, leaving little to your imagination.

Tell It Like You See It

With fiction, though, writers are presented with an entirely different situation. The reader reading your novel will only see the specifics if you detail them. And even if you do, its likely she will still envision many of the scene elements different from what you hoped to convey.

Thats not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, leaving out details and allowing the reader to fill in the blanks is part of the reader-writer relationship. In a way, a novel becomes much more personal than a movie, a little bit of a choose your own adventure quality. Many love novels just for that ability to put themselves into the story, whether it be by relating to a protagonist, seeing people we know in the characters presented, or feeling like we are going through the trials and perils presented by the plot.

The challenge and beauty of the artistic palette a writer uses raises numerous questions:

• How much or how little detail do I (or should I) put in my novel in order to help the reader see the story the way I see it? And how much should I leave to the readers imagination?
• How can I best write each scene so that I show the reader what I want him to see?
• How can I write scenes that will give the emotional impact equivalent to what can be conveyed through a film?

The joke I told was short and didnt give much detail. It had no power or punch, no strong feel of action or movement. I doubt you will remember it a month from now. Other than the man walking and talking and nodding, the scene was stagnant, with little to stir the imagination or evoke emotion. Maybe your own writing feels this way to youoftenand you dont know what to do to make it better. Maybe youve read a dozen books on writing craft and have attended countless workshops at writers conferences and you still cant seem to get how to write powerful, evocative scenes that move your readers. Well, if you sometimes feel like strangling, stabbing, or decapitating your novel because of flat, boring, lackluster scenes, you can shoot your novel instead!

Show, Dont TellBut How?

Sol Stein in his book Stein on Writing says, Twentieth-century readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience for a twentieth-century reader is increasingly visual. The story is happening in front of his eyes. This is even more true in the twenty-first century. As literary agent and author Donald Maass says in Writing 21 st Century Fiction : Make characters do something that readers can visualize.