Background to critical commentary

Treatments

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way. (qtd. in Lamott 18)

E. L. Doctorow’s description of writing a novel nicely conveys the leap of faith required when embarking on a lengthy fictional text. The nature of the writing process is not one you can ultimately control: there are no guarantees that you will get where you want to go (presuming you had a destination in mind). Implicit in Doctorow’s analogy, however, is the notion that story development is integral to and occurs during the writing of the creative text itself - as opposed to within a pre-prepared treatment or synopsis. The novel is therefore treated as an exploratory medium, the author simultaneously discovering and narrating his story. Henry James can thus ask of Isabel Archer (in Portrait of a Lady) “Well, what will she do?” (James 53) and Ian McEwan can talk in terms of a novel “earning” its ending.³

If the exploratory nature of prose fiction and the more accommodating form of the novel permits the novelist to work in this ‘organic’ way, the structural imperatives of dramatic forms - radio dramas, stage plays and screenplays – tend to encourage story development prior to and outside of the script itself. Restricted word counts, the requirements of production companies, the nature of dramatic structure: all of these factors contribute to the screenwriter developing the story (either in a treatment or step outline) before ‘adapting’ it into script. There are, of course, exceptions and some screenwriters decline to work in this way. Alan Ball (American Beauty, 1999) and Ronald Harwood (The Pianist (2002), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)) both find that treatments cause the energy to leach out of their writing.⁴

“I don't like to write with an outline, or at least not a very concrete one because if I have to break the story into detail and write it out, then I sort of feel like I've written it, and I am so undisciplined that I never get around to writing the script.” (Ball 18 Mar. 2000)

“[screenwriters] mustn’t write themselves out in the treatment. The excitement of the writing must remain in the screenplay. This is the heart of the matter.” (Wilkinson and Price eds. 16)

Nevertheless, both industry practice and screenwriting manuals (McKee (1999), Field (1984), inter alia) suggest that a treatment - and preferably a scene-by-scene design - should precede work on the script. Even if the screenwriter does not/ is not obliged to produce a formal treatment, his approach is still likely to be less ‘organic’ than the novelist who plunges into the narrative. Discussing his long-term collaboration with screenwriter, Peter Morgan (The Queen (2006), The Damned United (2009), The Special Relationship (2010)), producer Andy Harries described how Morgan plans and builds the entire screenplay in his head, scene by scene, and only then writes the script very quickly (usually in a matter of weeks) a process not uncommon amongst screenwriters.⁵

Learning to harness one’s own creativity is an indefinite art and an intensely personal process, developed through experience and over time, and it is not my purpose, here, to endorse or challenge either mode of working. There are manifestly advantages and disadvantages to both methods. In my own case, faced with a large cast of characters and a multi-stranded story that straddled two centuries, I was unwilling to embark on a narrative journey without being able (to use Doctorow’s analogy) to see further than my headlights. I elected – albeit uneasily- to plot the first two volumes of the trilogy in detail.⁶

Robert McKee, in Story, exhorts screenwriters to resist the temptation of writing the script too soon. Instead, the writer should develop the story, ruthlessly discarding anything that is not of the highest quality; should use a card method to work up a step-outline; should assemble biographical details, thematic notations, snippets of vocabulary and idioms, etc., before pitching the story to friends and colleagues in no more than ten minutes. “Regardless of genre, if a story can’t work in ten minutes, how will it work in 110 minutes? It won’t get better when it gets bigger. Everything that’s wrong with it in a ten-minute pitch is ten times worse onscreen.” (McKee 413-14)

Only then, McKee asserts, with a story that has elicited a positive response from its listeners, should the writer broach a treatment which, for a feature-length screenplay, will be a minimum of sixty to ninety pages long. Writing a script from such a solid treatment should, he insists, be a joy.

McKee believes in the primacy of story. Literary talent, he declares, is common: there are many who write beautifully in the literary sense whereas “pure story talent is rare.” (26-7) When he advises against writing the screenplay too soon it is as if he is warning against the siren-like dangers of form. Not only does he tacitly reject the notion that teasing apart story and form undermines the writer in his effort to reach creative truths, but he seems actively to promote such a disconnection.

John Gardner presents an alternative view of story development:

[…] the novel may bog down because in terms of overall structure – pace, emphasis, and so on – the writer can no longer see the forest for the trees. I’ve often laboured with ferocious concentration on a scene, polishing, revising, and tearing out […] until finally I realise that I have no idea what I’m doing, can’t even recall why it was that I thought the scene necessary. […] It is hard even for an experienced writer to throw away two hundred pages of bad writing [but] I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious novel. (Gardner 1983: 65)

For Gardner, the complex mesh of creative decisions - tone, voice, focalisation, scene design, pace, structure, character, story, plot, theme – are tackled simultaneously. For Gardner, thisThis voyage of discovery - in which the story unfolds and the truth of his characters gradually emerges – is, for him, integral to writing the creative text itself. If you take the view (which I would argue that Gardner does) that form cannot be separated from content, then the novel cannot be ‘rehearsed’ in the form of a treatment.

I would argue that the many who do write treatments are acting on the assumption that story and medium-specific narrative can be separated. I would further suggest that the process of moving from treatment to creative text is, to an extent, one of adaptation. The process of translation / transposition / interpretation - from impression to expression – is, after all, at the heart of creating narratives. Adaptation has been defined as: “[…] an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works. This ‘transcoding’ can involve a shift of medium […] or genre […] or a change of frame and therefore context. (Hutcheon 7-8)

Taking this notion further, I would suggest that divergent approaches to story development reflect differing attitudes to adaptation: some mistrust such a process while others embrace it. It is a question to which I will return throughout this commentary.

Media and the Components of Narrative

Different media teach their own lessons about narrative. As I discuss in greater depth in Chapter Four, I found the novel to be a more generous medium in which to explore characters, while the screenplay encouraged an awareness of narrative structure. It is not difficult to find examples of a ‘cross-over’ of skills across media. In her acceptance speech for a short story prize, Kate Clanchy acknowledged the influence of working with radio drama producers: “ [They] taught me an enormous amount about dialogue and putting together a story, which was a great help when I came to try writing short stories.” (Lea 7 Dec. 2009) Helen Dunmore similarly describes a connection between her poems and her prose fiction: “[…] working as a poet has definitely helped me with the pacing in my novels. I'm very much one for the grip, the pull-through, that narrative energy and propulsion, and I think poetry teaches you about that.” (Crown 24 Apr. 2010)

Jenny Downham, formerly an actor, used improvisation techniques, working with a group of actors, when developing her teenage novel Before I Die and her second, as yet unpublished novel.⁷ In my own case, as I describe in Chapter Four, I developed The Gideon Trilogy, with, as it were, another medium on my shoulder. In hindsight, an awareness of differences in cross-media practices evolved into a search for ways to profit from these differences within my own writing practice. This commentary attempts to put those creative outcomes into a theoretical context in order to better understand the writer-medium-narrative dynamic.

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