I want to welcome Mark Hosack to Books R Us. Mark is the author of the thriller Identity which will be released August 7th by Pocket Star. Thanks for stopping by.
Book vs Script
Back in late 2008, I was beaten black and blue,
gagged and bound to a merry-go-round, and girding myself to take a knife to the
heart. Thomas Jane, the best of the Punishers and star of the TV show
Hung, was standing behind me, wearing a trench coat and fedora, finishing a
cigar. He looked at me, then said, "Bet you never thought you'd end up
here."
He was right.
The director yelled action, the merry-go-round
spun, an assassin (dressed as a catholic school girl), threw a knife into my
chest and Thomas Jane shook me, screaming the lines I wrote for him, "Who
grabbed ya, Sammy?! Who grabbed ya?!"
I don’t get much out before dying, spitting a
mouthful of fake blood down my shirt.
"Give em Hell, Malone" -- It was my
first real film to be produced. Fast forward three years and my first real book,
IDENTITY, is being published on August 7th. The screenplay vs the book. My
experiences writing them were more similar than different—despite my cameo on that
merry-go-round—and I’ll tell you why.
When I began writing books, I wanted to write the
great American novel. So I produced a 120,000 word satiric “masterpiece” and
took it to a weeklong writing conference, quite sure of myself. It was literature. It was about character and
themes—it was very different from a plain old boring nuts and bolts script. But,
as I settled down at the conference and looked to our first lecturer, I heard
him say this:
"I want you to think of your book as a
movie."
Say what?
I’d just spent a year of my life writing literature!!!
I didn't hear much else. I was busy internally
cussing the man out. But what the lecturer said rang true. And as I continued
to write, I realized that films and television have dramatically altered the
way we digest stories—including books. Just look to the classics: could
Melville publish Moby Dick today unscathed? Maybe, but probably not. Of course,
he could upload it to Amazon, but would such a “bloated” book rise to the top?
When it had to keep compete with Fifty Shades of Grey? Ahab is obsessed with a white sperm whale,
but is that sexy enough to get through all the Ishmael stuff?
A screenplay is the blueprint for a movie. It
doesn't include a character's thoughts or unspoken motives--in a script, the
story unfolds by character action and dialogue only. That sort of tapering
pares a story down to its bare mechanics—it makes it very efficient. And
efficiency is gripping. Why? Because something new is presented in each scene,
which keeps us wondering, “what’s going to happen next?” Let’s say we’re
writing a spy thriller, book or script, and our spy, exhausted from killing bad
guys and sleeping with beautiful women all night, sits down on a bench to have
a quick think and ends up falling asleep—realistic enough. A spy’s gotta sort things
out. A spy’s gotta snooze. But we all agree that it’s boring. However, if our
hero sits down to think, falls asleep and
never wakes up because he’s really dead—suddenly, we’ve got ourselves a
compelling scene—and we still managed to get our “realistic” ingredients in. It’s
gripping because it’s physical—it’s
action—and not just an occurrence in the character’s head.
In short, something happened.
The general rule of a script is if a scene
doesn’t progress the plot or central character arc, you cut it. I applied this
mindset when I sat down to write my novel, IDENTITY. Every chapter advances the
plot. In fact, every chapter ends much as I end a scene in a script, with a mini-cliffhanger.
I steered away from asides. If I really wanted one, I kept it, but I also made
it matter. Nothing is extraneous and everything counts. All of this led to the
sale of my first book, which also led me to this general conclusion: efficiency
is king in both screenplays and novels … and Melville can blame movies for that
one.
IDENTITY, Mark's first novel, will be released by
Pocket Star, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on August 7th. You can Pre-order it now for a special sale price of $1.99 at: amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and iTunes.com.
Also, you can win a
free Kindle or Nook Touch by entering our IDENTITY giveaway. Please sign up and help spread the word!
About the Book:
The corporate greed of Wall Street meets the Hitchcockian suspense of North by Northwest in this thrilling debut by screenwriter Mark Hosack.
A secret best told on the run…
One
day Paul Majors is a respectable businessman looking into some
accounting irregularities in his office’s parent company. The next, he’s
wading through a murky world of dark finance, uncovering a vast web of
illegal activities in the CEO’s executive circle, being hunted by a
ruthless corporate assassin
and the FBI, and getting sucked into a
second company’s illicit dealings.
As he travels across the United States to unravel the twin mysteries
he’s caught in, it’s not clear who Paul can trust—or even
who is who.
The woman who seduced him at the hotel bar might be there to help, or
take him out. The government agents change with a chameleon’s ease.
Heck, even Paul’s running around under an assumed name!
In
this corporate shell game of names and motivations, Paul’s got 1,500
loyal employees—and his own life—on the line. But it’s becoming
dangerously clear that Paul himself is not Too Big to Fail…or be killed.
