These days publishers are so impoverished that not only do they expect all but the most prominent writers to pay for their own editor and publicist, to blog and flog their book on the internet, but also to provide their own promo videos for YouTube. Consequently agencies and marketing companies spring up overnight, offering their services to indie authors, to edit, package, publicize – on the author’s dime, of course. Extra services include producing promo videos for a fee. One company is even offering to have some out-of-work screenwriter adapt your book into a screenplay, leaving you with the problem of getting an unsolicited script to film producers.
Authors traditionally live hand to mouth. Published writers hence become those who can afford it. It’s almost a reflection of the rich-to-poor gap that afflicts our country. But back to my subject: how can you produce an affordable video to promote your book? You’ve already written the script (see previous post), which cost nothing. Where do you go from here, if your script is more ambitious than titles on a black screen?
Here’s what I did. As it happened, I’d been commuting to Boston each week to teach advanced screenwriting for a few semesters at Emerson College. I got acquainted with the producing, acting, directing and cinematography faculty. When the time came to make my video, I called the cinematography teacher Harlan Bosmajian for a favor, asking him to shoot the promo. He in turn asked some of his students to fill the other camera crew positions. I called the producing teacher and asked her to recommend a talented student. I went with one of the volunteers, Julie Hook, a junior, who put together casting sessions (using student and local actors), location manager, production designer, sound recordist and editor, all from the student body. (I’ve directed 3 films before, so I didn’t need a director.) The equipment came from the school’s stock.
Everyone was happy to work for free, because being part of a commercial production would look great on their “reel.” Their abilities were still in the formative stage, and mistakes on set were made, but YouTube promos are not expected to be slick. I had to rent the van, pay the location fee, and provide pizza for the crew and talent. Thus the video would have only cost a few hundred dollars if I hadn’t insisted on paying everyone a nominal amount each.
My point is, if you live anywhere near a school with a film production program, and you’re willing to take a chance on young developing talent, you can make an affordable video. Putting up a notice on the bulletin boards or online is sufficient to attract able and eager people who want to put their education into practice. And they often have an astounding command of the technology and software. Particularly my 20-year-old editor, Alfonso Carrion, was amazing at rendering the graphics and the animation I needed for the second half of my trailer.
There are books that deal with all the other options, in greater detail, for making book trailers. This was my experience, and I’m very proud of the result. See for yourself:
There was no room for a credits crawl at the end, so I’m printing their names here, with fervent thanks for their contribution.
Producer – Julie Hook
Director of Photography – Harlan Bosmajian
Sound Recordist – Molly Young
Alfonso Carrion - Editor
Electric – Matt Figler
Assistant Camera – Lowell Meyer
Grip – Dan Finlayson
Production Design – Devynne Lauchner
Role of Jane played by – Eliza Earle
Role of Brett played by – Nat Sylva
- Sarah
- I am a restless writer of fiction, film, and music. I scripted such films as 9 and ½ Weeks, Sommersby, Impromptu (personal favorite), What Lies Beneath, and All I Wanna Do which I also directed. Both my documentaries, Marjoe and Thoth, won Academy Awards. Formerly a recording artist, I continue to write music, posting songs on my website. I live in New York with my husband James Lapine. My second novel, the paranormal thriller Jane Was Here, was published in 2011. My latest film, Learning to Drive, starring Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley, came out in August 2015, now available on VOD, DVD, and streaming media. This blog is a paranormal memoir-in-progress, whenever I have spare time. It's a chronicle of my encounters with ghosts, family phantoms, and other forms of spirit.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Saturday, September 3, 2011
HOW TO MAKE A BOOK VIDEO TRAILER Part Two: The Script
(For Part 3 of this series click here.)
Your trailer is an ad for a story. It’s a story that exists on the page only. Though it lacks visuals, it still has a plot, a mood, characters and events. (Note: I’m limiting this topic to fiction). Thus your book offers the same basic experience as a movie. And so this promo should be approached as if you are selling a movie. Studying different types of film trailers will show you the rhythm of the editing, the importance of sound effects and music, and the difference between trailers for drama, thrillers and comedy.
Before you write the script for your trailer, please consider these three points.
Can we agree on one thing? Novels are meant to provoke. You’re prodding a certain response from the reader. What is the reaction you want to provoke in your book? Really think about this. Maybe you want the reader to laugh and have fun, or quiver with fear, be spiritually uplifted, or feel exquisite melancholy. So your trailer should give a hint, a promise, of that experience. For example, when writing my script for the Jane Was Here promo, I wanted to give the viewer the same feeling of eerie creepiness and foreboding that my book does. And accomplish all that in two minutes.
Item two: Obviously you want to create curiosity, too. As in a movie trailer, at the end of two minutes the viewer should want to see more.
Item three: find the movie in the book. Many writers fantasize about their books being made into films. What scenes stand out to you as most dramatic (that don’t contain spoilers)? Is there one scene or moment that can stand alone in representing the whole book? For example, when I wrote my book Jane Was Here, I tried to capture the reader in the early pages with one scene that I knew would awake tantalizing questions. A mysterious young woman calling herself Jane shows up in a small town, knocks on a door, and announces that this is her house. She says she was born and grew up here. Yet she’s never been here before in her life. How is that possible? Who is Jane? What’s she looking for? Why is she so weird? What happened to her in this house long ago? Is she dangerous? Since this scene succeeded in hooking readers in the book, it became the natural choice for the trailer.
If you have more than one scene from the book you want to use, you probably do not have time for both within two minutes. Hence you are now in montage territory. Most trailers are made up of short snatches anyway.
What images and/or sounds best represent your book? Are there motifs? Look how the promo for Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader uses motifs to make you want to know more:
The motifs here are lace, and a key. (Note: black-and-white photography is a clever choice her because it subtly establishes Barry’s book as classy not cheesy. Music videos often do this to make a song seem artier.)
Having pondered the above three points, you’re ready to make a stab at writing the first draft of your trailer script. Let yourself go and don’t worry whether your chosen scene or montage is practical on a budget. Write as if your book has already been made into a movie and you’re giving a taste of the goodies a moviegoer can expect. Avoid static or still images unless you plan to program some camera movement in the editing stage (indicate what kind of moves in your script). Play my trailer below, and you’ll see an illustration that isn’t static because I start close on one detail and then continually pull out until the picture transforms into something different.
Now add the hype.
Repeat the title at least twice, even better three times, to get it in the viewers’ heads. If you have any quotes that reduce to a few words (“gripping,” “hilarious beyond belief”) flash them at intervals.
Plan to show the book cover’s title graphic, too. (A caveat: using the whole cover is a little harder because a book is a vertical oblong and a film image stretches horizontally, so you can’t get the cover to fill the screen. Anyway, you deal with that problem in editing.)
Consider movie-trailer-style voice-over if you know someone or can cast someone with a professional-sounding voice. “A man. A woman. A building on fire. Only one will get out.” Don’t do voice-over yourself unless you are offering a personal narrative, as in a memoir: “The day I found out I had cancer...”
When you have a first draft, it should be like a wish list. Now it’s time to get real. If your book is a historical epic, then maybe you’ve done a montage of battle scenes. If it’s sci-fi fantasy, your scenes or images are heavy in special effects. You know perfectly well that to shoot these would cost millions of dollars.
But don’t rule them out. See if you can translate these scenes into a montage of snippets from other movies. Let’s go back to the example of a battle scene montage. You can grab these images from other war films or archival footage, off DVDs or whatever: quick shots of pounding horse hooves, swords slicing through the air, or explosions and planes taking off, airships landing. Capturing film clips is standard in this YouTube age. Just don’t use iconic or easily recognizable images from famous films, like the blood gushing down the hotel corridor in The Shining. Go to the more obscure B-list movies, or foreign films, or flops. Also don’t show recognizable actors’ faces. This announces you’ve stolen the material, and you want this to look as original as possible.
Suddenly your ambitious first-draft now looks affordable.
If you have a comedy or drama which best engages a viewer by showing a scene or two from the book, then you’re going to have to shoot your trailer with actors in a studio or on location. With Jane Was Here, I chose a two-person scene, with a Victorian house exterior. Very affordable. In the next post I’ll get into the technical production aspect of a trailer shoot. In the meantime, by way of example, below is the final script plus the finished trailer for Jane Was Here.
LOCATION: SMALL TOWN IN NEW ENGLAND. STREET WITH SMALL VICTORIAN HOUSE. NIGHT.
INT. FOYER - HOUSE - 3 A.M. - HOT SUMMER NIGHT
CLOSE-UP ON a frosted, etched PANEL IN THE FRONT DOOR. A
SHADOW APPEARS behind the glass. The SHAPE OF A HEAD comes
closer. A HAND on the pane. Then a knuckle RAP-RAP-RAPS.
CUT TO:
COVER GRAPHIC OVER BLACK:
JANE WAS HERE
A NOVEL BY
SARAH KERNOCHAN
FOOTSTEPS APPROACH. SOUND OF KNOB TURNING....
CUT TO:
SAME ANGLE ON DOOR PANEL as it SWINGS OPEN to reveal:
A YOUNG WOMAN, about 22, standing in the street outside this
decrepit Victorian house. She wears grimy sneakers and
clamdiggers, and carries a small duffel. Pale, thin, with
lank tangled hair, she has the childish face of a waif.
JANE
Hello, sir.
She looks up pleadingly at:
REVERSE ANGLE
BRETT, 28, tall, awkward and a touch nerdy, stands in the
doorway. He's dead tired from being up all night working.
BRETT
(wary)
Hi. Can I help you?
YOUNG WOMAN
I'm Jane.
BRETT
Yes. Are you looking for someone?
JANE
This is my house.
BRETT
I've rented it for the summer. I
don't know the owner, are you
related?
She shakes her head solemnly, speaking in a curiously prim,
old-fashioned manner.
JANE
I don't know anyone in this town.
Yet I feel sure, I was born here,
in this very house. And then...
something happened to me. I can't
remember. Sir, may I come in?
BRETT
(annoyed)
Jane, it's three a.m. Come back in
the daytime.
He starts to close the door, but she pushes against it.
JANE
Please - please! I have nowhere
else to go!
Surprised, he pauses. She gazes up at him desperately.
JANE (CONT'D)
I am looking for myself.
CUE UP SPOOKY MUSIC AND...
CUT TO:
OVER BLACK:
WHO IS JANE?
ANIMATION - LINE CROSSES OUT "IS" AND WRITES OVER IT:
WAS
WHO IS JANE?
CUT TO:
CU 19TH CENTURY WOMAN SEATED BEFORE MIRROR. BEGIN SLOWLY
PULLING BACK...
CAMERA FINISHES PULL BACK. IMAGE IS NOW SEEN AS A DEATH'S
HEAD.
CUT TO:
OVER BLACK: QUOTES FLY TOWARD CAMERA: "EERIE" - "HAUNTING" -
"TERRIFYING" - "KEPT ME UP AT NIGHT" - "SEDUCTIVE" -
"CHILLING" - "NOTHING SHORT OF MAGIC"
CUT TO:
OVER BLACK: ZOOM SLOWLY TOWARD TITLE "JANE WAS HERE"
CUT TO:
RECAP JANE CLOSE-UP:
JANE
I am looking for myself.
CUT TO:
FRONT COVER SHOT. AVAILABILITY, WEBSITE, ETC.
SUPER:
Coming June 2011
MUSIC ENDS.
For Part 3 of this series click here.
Your trailer is an ad for a story. It’s a story that exists on the page only. Though it lacks visuals, it still has a plot, a mood, characters and events. (Note: I’m limiting this topic to fiction). Thus your book offers the same basic experience as a movie. And so this promo should be approached as if you are selling a movie. Studying different types of film trailers will show you the rhythm of the editing, the importance of sound effects and music, and the difference between trailers for drama, thrillers and comedy.
Before you write the script for your trailer, please consider these three points.
Can we agree on one thing? Novels are meant to provoke. You’re prodding a certain response from the reader. What is the reaction you want to provoke in your book? Really think about this. Maybe you want the reader to laugh and have fun, or quiver with fear, be spiritually uplifted, or feel exquisite melancholy. So your trailer should give a hint, a promise, of that experience. For example, when writing my script for the Jane Was Here promo, I wanted to give the viewer the same feeling of eerie creepiness and foreboding that my book does. And accomplish all that in two minutes.
Item two: Obviously you want to create curiosity, too. As in a movie trailer, at the end of two minutes the viewer should want to see more.
Item three: find the movie in the book. Many writers fantasize about their books being made into films. What scenes stand out to you as most dramatic (that don’t contain spoilers)? Is there one scene or moment that can stand alone in representing the whole book? For example, when I wrote my book Jane Was Here, I tried to capture the reader in the early pages with one scene that I knew would awake tantalizing questions. A mysterious young woman calling herself Jane shows up in a small town, knocks on a door, and announces that this is her house. She says she was born and grew up here. Yet she’s never been here before in her life. How is that possible? Who is Jane? What’s she looking for? Why is she so weird? What happened to her in this house long ago? Is she dangerous? Since this scene succeeded in hooking readers in the book, it became the natural choice for the trailer.
If you have more than one scene from the book you want to use, you probably do not have time for both within two minutes. Hence you are now in montage territory. Most trailers are made up of short snatches anyway.
What images and/or sounds best represent your book? Are there motifs? Look how the promo for Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader uses motifs to make you want to know more:
The motifs here are lace, and a key. (Note: black-and-white photography is a clever choice her because it subtly establishes Barry’s book as classy not cheesy. Music videos often do this to make a song seem artier.)
Having pondered the above three points, you’re ready to make a stab at writing the first draft of your trailer script. Let yourself go and don’t worry whether your chosen scene or montage is practical on a budget. Write as if your book has already been made into a movie and you’re giving a taste of the goodies a moviegoer can expect. Avoid static or still images unless you plan to program some camera movement in the editing stage (indicate what kind of moves in your script). Play my trailer below, and you’ll see an illustration that isn’t static because I start close on one detail and then continually pull out until the picture transforms into something different.
Now add the hype.
Repeat the title at least twice, even better three times, to get it in the viewers’ heads. If you have any quotes that reduce to a few words (“gripping,” “hilarious beyond belief”) flash them at intervals.
Plan to show the book cover’s title graphic, too. (A caveat: using the whole cover is a little harder because a book is a vertical oblong and a film image stretches horizontally, so you can’t get the cover to fill the screen. Anyway, you deal with that problem in editing.)
Consider movie-trailer-style voice-over if you know someone or can cast someone with a professional-sounding voice. “A man. A woman. A building on fire. Only one will get out.” Don’t do voice-over yourself unless you are offering a personal narrative, as in a memoir: “The day I found out I had cancer...”
When you have a first draft, it should be like a wish list. Now it’s time to get real. If your book is a historical epic, then maybe you’ve done a montage of battle scenes. If it’s sci-fi fantasy, your scenes or images are heavy in special effects. You know perfectly well that to shoot these would cost millions of dollars.
But don’t rule them out. See if you can translate these scenes into a montage of snippets from other movies. Let’s go back to the example of a battle scene montage. You can grab these images from other war films or archival footage, off DVDs or whatever: quick shots of pounding horse hooves, swords slicing through the air, or explosions and planes taking off, airships landing. Capturing film clips is standard in this YouTube age. Just don’t use iconic or easily recognizable images from famous films, like the blood gushing down the hotel corridor in The Shining. Go to the more obscure B-list movies, or foreign films, or flops. Also don’t show recognizable actors’ faces. This announces you’ve stolen the material, and you want this to look as original as possible.
Suddenly your ambitious first-draft now looks affordable.
If you have a comedy or drama which best engages a viewer by showing a scene or two from the book, then you’re going to have to shoot your trailer with actors in a studio or on location. With Jane Was Here, I chose a two-person scene, with a Victorian house exterior. Very affordable. In the next post I’ll get into the technical production aspect of a trailer shoot. In the meantime, by way of example, below is the final script plus the finished trailer for Jane Was Here.
LOCATION: SMALL TOWN IN NEW ENGLAND. STREET WITH SMALL VICTORIAN HOUSE. NIGHT.
INT. FOYER - HOUSE - 3 A.M. - HOT SUMMER NIGHT
CLOSE-UP ON a frosted, etched PANEL IN THE FRONT DOOR. A
SHADOW APPEARS behind the glass. The SHAPE OF A HEAD comes
closer. A HAND on the pane. Then a knuckle RAP-RAP-RAPS.
CUT TO:
COVER GRAPHIC OVER BLACK:
JANE WAS HERE
A NOVEL BY
SARAH KERNOCHAN
FOOTSTEPS APPROACH. SOUND OF KNOB TURNING....
CUT TO:
SAME ANGLE ON DOOR PANEL as it SWINGS OPEN to reveal:
A YOUNG WOMAN, about 22, standing in the street outside this
decrepit Victorian house. She wears grimy sneakers and
clamdiggers, and carries a small duffel. Pale, thin, with
lank tangled hair, she has the childish face of a waif.
JANE
Hello, sir.
She looks up pleadingly at:
REVERSE ANGLE
BRETT, 28, tall, awkward and a touch nerdy, stands in the
doorway. He's dead tired from being up all night working.
BRETT
(wary)
Hi. Can I help you?
YOUNG WOMAN
I'm Jane.
BRETT
Yes. Are you looking for someone?
JANE
This is my house.
BRETT
I've rented it for the summer. I
don't know the owner, are you
related?
She shakes her head solemnly, speaking in a curiously prim,
old-fashioned manner.
JANE
I don't know anyone in this town.
Yet I feel sure, I was born here,
in this very house. And then...
something happened to me. I can't
remember. Sir, may I come in?
BRETT
(annoyed)
Jane, it's three a.m. Come back in
the daytime.
He starts to close the door, but she pushes against it.
JANE
Please - please! I have nowhere
else to go!
Surprised, he pauses. She gazes up at him desperately.
JANE (CONT'D)
I am looking for myself.
CUE UP SPOOKY MUSIC AND...
CUT TO:
OVER BLACK:
WHO IS JANE?
ANIMATION - LINE CROSSES OUT "IS" AND WRITES OVER IT:
WAS
WHO IS JANE?
CUT TO:
CU 19TH CENTURY WOMAN SEATED BEFORE MIRROR. BEGIN SLOWLY
PULLING BACK...
CAMERA FINISHES PULL BACK. IMAGE IS NOW SEEN AS A DEATH'S
HEAD.
CUT TO:
OVER BLACK: QUOTES FLY TOWARD CAMERA: "EERIE" - "HAUNTING" -
"TERRIFYING" - "KEPT ME UP AT NIGHT" - "SEDUCTIVE" -
"CHILLING" - "NOTHING SHORT OF MAGIC"
CUT TO:
OVER BLACK: ZOOM SLOWLY TOWARD TITLE "JANE WAS HERE"
CUT TO:
RECAP JANE CLOSE-UP:
JANE
I am looking for myself.
CUT TO:
FRONT COVER SHOT. AVAILABILITY, WEBSITE, ETC.
SUPER:
Coming June 2011
MUSIC ENDS.
For Part 3 of this series click here.
UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE SPIRIT WORLD
Up until the time I entered middle school, that murderer of illusions, I believed in spirits of the air, sea, and earth. My family home was a rocky plot on a lagoon, so all three categories were at hand. The stones were enchanted and had names. There was definitely a spirit in each tree: I visited them, making regular tours of the ones whose low branches let me climb them. When I swam, I could feel the Nyads gliding all around me. The wind whispered in a secret language. Later, and not surprisingly, I was introduced to Greek myths and beliefs, which only confirmed my fantasies.
I’ve been a freelance writer since I was 21. Okay, I’ll let you in on the math: that’s 42 years of pushing the pen. I’ve only once (age 18) held a nine-to-five job. Sometimes I was without work, but I kept writing anyway while the wheel turned, until opportunities arose again. I had a blind trust that it would all work out if I hung in there. And it did. Until two things happened...
To read the rest on Huffington Post, click here.
And thanks to the folks at Red Room for hooking me up with HuffPo! This is a really outstanding site for authors, if you like personal service.
I’ve been a freelance writer since I was 21. Okay, I’ll let you in on the math: that’s 42 years of pushing the pen. I’ve only once (age 18) held a nine-to-five job. Sometimes I was without work, but I kept writing anyway while the wheel turned, until opportunities arose again. I had a blind trust that it would all work out if I hung in there. And it did. Until two things happened...
To read the rest on Huffington Post, click here.
And thanks to the folks at Red Room for hooking me up with HuffPo! This is a really outstanding site for authors, if you like personal service.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
HOW TO MAKE A BOOK VIDEO TRAILER Part One: The Author Video
As most authors know by now, a book’s debut must be accompanied by two videos: the author interview and the trailer. The following, which I’ll post in 3 parts, is what I learned from making my own videos for Jane Was Here (both are below). Compared to a trailer, the author interview is straightforward.
Your location should be your living room or workspace. People want to see your real-life environment and not some featureless backdrop. Whether natural or artificial, make sure there’s good light from two sources (one to fill in the shadows created by the other). You can shoot with anything from a DVR to a flipcam or cell phone. Sometimes a down-and-dirty quality has its own charm. You can edit with a simple software program like iMovie.
The one area that might benefit from a more professional approach is sound. USING THE IN-CAMERA MIKE WILL MAKE THE author’s voice sound too distant if you are shooting from a medium (waist-up) angle. Also, if you shoot both medium and close angles (and you should), the sound level will vary, making it impossible to mix in the edit. So invest in a wireless lavalier mike.
And have a mirror on hand to refresh your makeup and pat down stray hairs which will catch the light.
I decided to do a practice run by shooting an interview video for my first book, Dry Hustle, which had just been re-issued as an ebook. I asked a friend to be a one-man crew since he had all the needed equipment. Then it was up to me to produce the “content.” I wrote a script, even though the interview was supposed to seem off-the-cuff. The idea, simply, was to make people curious to read the book. Dry Hustle was a sexy saga about two con-women, so that meant hyping the raunch, and that the novel was based on real characters.
The script also had to be only 2-3 pages long, figuring on a minute per page. You don’t want your video to be longer or it won’t hold the interest of ADD YouTubers.
I’m not an actress, plus my memory is riddled with holes, so I couldn’t expect to memorize and deliver the whole speech from beginning to end without breaking down. I divided my script into short sections and shot each separately as a single take, then shooting the same section in close-up, until I had one decent take in both angles and, if possible, a second take as “safety.” I made a lot of mistakes, but we could cut around them by switching to the other angle.
By the time we made the author video for Jane Was Here I’d learned a lot. For one thing, I now knew I was uncomfortable speaking directly to the lens like a newscaster. For Jane I felt better looking slightly to the side of the lens. It felt more like I was talking to my friend, the only other person in the room. I couldn’t actually look at him because he was standing behind the camera so I would have had to look up, which can look truly strange when you watch the result. I’d advise others to place a friend on a low stool with his or her head positioned on as close as possible to the lens, and eyes on the same level.
I ‘d also learned that, to keep the viewer’s attention, I needed to cut away from my talking head at intervals. Fortunately, Jane Was Here had already garnered some great advance quotes, so I inserted them at regular beats when we edited.
The last improvement was the use of music. Cleverly chosen music is the best way to establish the tone of your book. I grabbed some fragments of a movie soundtrack which sounded a bit like the “Exorcist” theme. By association, it conveyed the creepy, ominous ambience of my novel, which is a paranormal mystery with a horrific ending.
The edit was pretty easy, with the music being the most time-consuming element. We had to use passages where the music was subdued and quiescent for the shots of me talking, and then seamlessly bridge to more muscular spooky music cues whenever we went to the review quotes on a black screen.
The end result cost me nothing. You can judge for yourself whether it succeeds in making you eager to fork up $20 for a hardcover or $9.99 for download. Next post, I’ll talk about my experiences and offer some advice on the really fun part: making the trailer. For Part 2 click here.
Your location should be your living room or workspace. People want to see your real-life environment and not some featureless backdrop. Whether natural or artificial, make sure there’s good light from two sources (one to fill in the shadows created by the other). You can shoot with anything from a DVR to a flipcam or cell phone. Sometimes a down-and-dirty quality has its own charm. You can edit with a simple software program like iMovie.
The one area that might benefit from a more professional approach is sound. USING THE IN-CAMERA MIKE WILL MAKE THE author’s voice sound too distant if you are shooting from a medium (waist-up) angle. Also, if you shoot both medium and close angles (and you should), the sound level will vary, making it impossible to mix in the edit. So invest in a wireless lavalier mike.
And have a mirror on hand to refresh your makeup and pat down stray hairs which will catch the light.
I decided to do a practice run by shooting an interview video for my first book, Dry Hustle, which had just been re-issued as an ebook. I asked a friend to be a one-man crew since he had all the needed equipment. Then it was up to me to produce the “content.” I wrote a script, even though the interview was supposed to seem off-the-cuff. The idea, simply, was to make people curious to read the book. Dry Hustle was a sexy saga about two con-women, so that meant hyping the raunch, and that the novel was based on real characters.
The script also had to be only 2-3 pages long, figuring on a minute per page. You don’t want your video to be longer or it won’t hold the interest of ADD YouTubers.
I’m not an actress, plus my memory is riddled with holes, so I couldn’t expect to memorize and deliver the whole speech from beginning to end without breaking down. I divided my script into short sections and shot each separately as a single take, then shooting the same section in close-up, until I had one decent take in both angles and, if possible, a second take as “safety.” I made a lot of mistakes, but we could cut around them by switching to the other angle.
By the time we made the author video for Jane Was Here I’d learned a lot. For one thing, I now knew I was uncomfortable speaking directly to the lens like a newscaster. For Jane I felt better looking slightly to the side of the lens. It felt more like I was talking to my friend, the only other person in the room. I couldn’t actually look at him because he was standing behind the camera so I would have had to look up, which can look truly strange when you watch the result. I’d advise others to place a friend on a low stool with his or her head positioned on as close as possible to the lens, and eyes on the same level.
I ‘d also learned that, to keep the viewer’s attention, I needed to cut away from my talking head at intervals. Fortunately, Jane Was Here had already garnered some great advance quotes, so I inserted them at regular beats when we edited.
The last improvement was the use of music. Cleverly chosen music is the best way to establish the tone of your book. I grabbed some fragments of a movie soundtrack which sounded a bit like the “Exorcist” theme. By association, it conveyed the creepy, ominous ambience of my novel, which is a paranormal mystery with a horrific ending.
The edit was pretty easy, with the music being the most time-consuming element. We had to use passages where the music was subdued and quiescent for the shots of me talking, and then seamlessly bridge to more muscular spooky music cues whenever we went to the review quotes on a black screen.
The end result cost me nothing. You can judge for yourself whether it succeeds in making you eager to fork up $20 for a hardcover or $9.99 for download. Next post, I’ll talk about my experiences and offer some advice on the really fun part: making the trailer. For Part 2 click here.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
SCREENPLAY VS. NOVEL – PART TROIS
Finishing up from the previous blog, I offer some more differences between writing screenplays and novels.
Very few people will read your script. After friends and partners, you have your agent, manager, executives, producers. Maybe 50-60 people. If it gets produced, then actors, casting agents, designers and technicians will then read it – an average of 100 people. A lot of these people actually hate reading scripts (I know I do). So that’s your reading public.
With a published novel, you can realistically hope that far more than 100 people will read what you wrote. To a screenwriter, this is intoxicating.
You own your novel. You don’t own your script once you sell it.
A novel is quiet. In a typical screenwriter contract, you have 3 months of quiet as you write the first draft and then the noise begins: otherwise called feedback, notes or “thoughts.” Mind you, some notes actually do help the script. But more often they range from unworkable to insane.
With a novel, you can have years of quiet. This may be more solitude than some writers want. I revel in it. There will be changes tactfully requested (instead of demanded) by agent, editor and publisher, but you are still the one to decide to implement their advice or not.
When film professionals read your script, they are deciding whether to do it or not. Your story represents one, ten, fifty, in a few cases a hundred million dollars to be spent. It doesn’t matter how great your writing is, but what’s it going to cost? A page is a minute of screen time. 125 pages are too long. A producer will ask you to cut 20. A director will rewrite the opening – or the whole thing. An actress wants to improvise her dialogue in stead of saying what you wrote, or an actor wants you to make his part bigger than his co-star’s. Everybody’s got a hand in. And then if you don’t succeed in delivering what they want…
When you’re a novelist they can’t replace you with another writer.
Writing Jane Was Here I experienced a kind of autoerotic pleasure from just writing for myself. I could go on at any length, take as long as I wanted, and glory in a wealth of words, knowing there would be no crowd of people waiting to interfere.
Now comes the challenge of enticing readers. Who will spark to Jane, a reincarnation-themed paranormal-mystery-suspense-thriller? Next blog: creating the book trailer.
Very few people will read your script. After friends and partners, you have your agent, manager, executives, producers. Maybe 50-60 people. If it gets produced, then actors, casting agents, designers and technicians will then read it – an average of 100 people. A lot of these people actually hate reading scripts (I know I do). So that’s your reading public.
With a published novel, you can realistically hope that far more than 100 people will read what you wrote. To a screenwriter, this is intoxicating.
You own your novel. You don’t own your script once you sell it.
A novel is quiet. In a typical screenwriter contract, you have 3 months of quiet as you write the first draft and then the noise begins: otherwise called feedback, notes or “thoughts.” Mind you, some notes actually do help the script. But more often they range from unworkable to insane.
With a novel, you can have years of quiet. This may be more solitude than some writers want. I revel in it. There will be changes tactfully requested (instead of demanded) by agent, editor and publisher, but you are still the one to decide to implement their advice or not.
When film professionals read your script, they are deciding whether to do it or not. Your story represents one, ten, fifty, in a few cases a hundred million dollars to be spent. It doesn’t matter how great your writing is, but what’s it going to cost? A page is a minute of screen time. 125 pages are too long. A producer will ask you to cut 20. A director will rewrite the opening – or the whole thing. An actress wants to improvise her dialogue in stead of saying what you wrote, or an actor wants you to make his part bigger than his co-star’s. Everybody’s got a hand in. And then if you don’t succeed in delivering what they want…
When you’re a novelist they can’t replace you with another writer.
Writing Jane Was Here I experienced a kind of autoerotic pleasure from just writing for myself. I could go on at any length, take as long as I wanted, and glory in a wealth of words, knowing there would be no crowd of people waiting to interfere.
Now comes the challenge of enticing readers. Who will spark to Jane, a reincarnation-themed paranormal-mystery-suspense-thriller? Next blog: creating the book trailer.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
SCREENPLAY VS. NOVEL – PART DEUX
Following up on my previous blog, here’s more on the difference between writing novels and screenplays.
Some years after my first novel Dry Hustle was published in 1977, I decided to master the film script form so that I could make a decent living. It was time to settle down to one thing; my twenties were all about trying on as many hats as possible: documentary filmmaker, recording artist, novelist (I even squeezed in a musical). I sold a screenplay pitch to MGM, and off I went. That was 30 years ago, and I’m still working. But in contrast to film people who say, “What I really want to do is direct,” I was often heard to say, “What I really want to do is write – books.”
So I embarked on my new novel Jane Was Here with trepidation. I worried that the terse, mechanical style of scripts had rotted away my ability to flow with the narrative form. And in ‘the business,’ a screenwriter has three months to write a 110-pages first draft, so you don’t spend much time weeding and polishing action prose. But in a novel, you can’t write, “GUNSHOT O.S…PAN TO WOMAN (MARY, 30’s) sticking a pistol in purse. She’s beautiful, sexy: think Natalie Portman.” Instead you have to describe the action in beguiling, original prose, free of the cliches you always dispensed freely because film people are comfortable, even reassured by them. You have to slow down and make use of descriptive language, and suddenly there’s a bewildering array of words to choose from, countless ways to move characters around instead of “She exits.”
Vocabulary: I once used the word “obdurate” in a script. Before submitting it, my manager called me to say I couldn’t use it, no one would know what it means. I felt really sad. I had to consign so many words to this inner oubliette (definitely a taboo word) where they would never see the light of day. Imagine the freedom I felt when writing Jane Was Here: I could release them all from this dungeon. I could now use “adipose,” “nacreous,” “caesura,” “arrant,” and – oh frabjous day! – “obdurate.”
There’s little difference between film scripts and novels in terms of dialogue, although the screenwriter will probably be more efficient. In scripts you have to refine dialogue so that a scene doesn’t go longer than 5 pages at the most. Playwrights and novelists’ characters can yammer on endlessly.
Writing screenplays taught me how to plot. In any writing course I ever took in college, we were never taught how to manipulate the long-form story. I studied with the great Grace Paley, who only wrote short stories. “Life is too short, and Art is too long,” she said. I got the feeling that plot wasn’t necessary and even a bit meretricious (do not ever use that word in a script).
My first novel had a great premise but the plot was mostly episodic, with no real rise and fall to the story. When I turned to writing scripts, it didn’t take long to discover I was woefully deficient in this area. I had to teach myself how to deliver an adventure, with twists, turns, curveballs, “misdirects,” and a satisfying of an ending. It served me very well when it came time to design the mystery-paranormal-suspense-thriller that is Jane Was Here.
And then there’s the length. You’re limited in pages to the screen-time of a feature (100 minutes and up). It’s very manageable. A novel, on the other hand, is harder. It accrues to 200 pages and counting. After 200 you can’t even remember what you wrote before – there’s a point where you feel lost at sea.
But that’s the story of, that’s the glory of, books.
Next blog: Screenplays Vs. Novels - Part Trois.
Some years after my first novel Dry Hustle was published in 1977, I decided to master the film script form so that I could make a decent living. It was time to settle down to one thing; my twenties were all about trying on as many hats as possible: documentary filmmaker, recording artist, novelist (I even squeezed in a musical). I sold a screenplay pitch to MGM, and off I went. That was 30 years ago, and I’m still working. But in contrast to film people who say, “What I really want to do is direct,” I was often heard to say, “What I really want to do is write – books.”
So I embarked on my new novel Jane Was Here with trepidation. I worried that the terse, mechanical style of scripts had rotted away my ability to flow with the narrative form. And in ‘the business,’ a screenwriter has three months to write a 110-pages first draft, so you don’t spend much time weeding and polishing action prose. But in a novel, you can’t write, “GUNSHOT O.S…PAN TO WOMAN (MARY, 30’s) sticking a pistol in purse. She’s beautiful, sexy: think Natalie Portman.” Instead you have to describe the action in beguiling, original prose, free of the cliches you always dispensed freely because film people are comfortable, even reassured by them. You have to slow down and make use of descriptive language, and suddenly there’s a bewildering array of words to choose from, countless ways to move characters around instead of “She exits.”
Vocabulary: I once used the word “obdurate” in a script. Before submitting it, my manager called me to say I couldn’t use it, no one would know what it means. I felt really sad. I had to consign so many words to this inner oubliette (definitely a taboo word) where they would never see the light of day. Imagine the freedom I felt when writing Jane Was Here: I could release them all from this dungeon. I could now use “adipose,” “nacreous,” “caesura,” “arrant,” and – oh frabjous day! – “obdurate.”
There’s little difference between film scripts and novels in terms of dialogue, although the screenwriter will probably be more efficient. In scripts you have to refine dialogue so that a scene doesn’t go longer than 5 pages at the most. Playwrights and novelists’ characters can yammer on endlessly.
Writing screenplays taught me how to plot. In any writing course I ever took in college, we were never taught how to manipulate the long-form story. I studied with the great Grace Paley, who only wrote short stories. “Life is too short, and Art is too long,” she said. I got the feeling that plot wasn’t necessary and even a bit meretricious (do not ever use that word in a script).
My first novel had a great premise but the plot was mostly episodic, with no real rise and fall to the story. When I turned to writing scripts, it didn’t take long to discover I was woefully deficient in this area. I had to teach myself how to deliver an adventure, with twists, turns, curveballs, “misdirects,” and a satisfying of an ending. It served me very well when it came time to design the mystery-paranormal-suspense-thriller that is Jane Was Here.
And then there’s the length. You’re limited in pages to the screen-time of a feature (100 minutes and up). It’s very manageable. A novel, on the other hand, is harder. It accrues to 200 pages and counting. After 200 you can’t even remember what you wrote before – there’s a point where you feel lost at sea.
But that’s the story of, that’s the glory of, books.
Next blog: Screenplays Vs. Novels - Part Trois.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
PAGING 'JANE'
People often ask me what it's like to write a novel after 30 years of writing screenplays. But even more often they ask, "Why?" Why leave a job being paid, and paid well, for writing 100 pages in three months? Sometimes you're even paid a ridiculous sum by the week, hanging around the set until someone needs a quickie rewrite. And how about the thrill of seeing your name writ huge on the screen; of knowing that hundreds of people and beaucoup bucks were employed to manifest your crazy ideas?
Let's be frank. Business is slow now in movieland. An aging writer, and a woman at that, is routinely passed over for any genre except romantic comedy. There's plenty of work in indies - better quality and infinitely more rewarding than studio projects, and even at the low pay scale you can make a good living by saying yes to everything and stacking your plate with assignments.
But there's also a very disturbing new trend right now: a lot of producers ask you to write for free (on spec), and your reps actually encourage you to do it. So if you're going to work for nothing, why not write what you really want to?
And I really wanted to write a novel. The last one I wrote (Dry Hustle) was published in 1977, before I got sidetracked into scriptwriting and documentaries. During all those 35 years, I waited to get the one book idea that would seize me so hard I couldn't not write it, because writing long-form fiction requires not just stamina but mania. Instead, over and over the ideas that sprang to my head were for films. I despaired that I was irreversibly condemned to the movie rut with my one good trick. No matter that people envied me for it. All I had ever wanted since the age of 14 was to write books.
My husband and I routinely spend summers at a family home in Martha's Vineyard. We are not on vacation: there is always a lot of writing to be done. Summer of 2006 was the first time I happened not to have a script job. If I have nothing to write, I have no idea what to do with myself. I'm gloomy, snarky, and captious. I develop weird unconscious habits like squeezing my face.
And then I got the Idea, and the idea was Jane. A crime is committed and remains hidden for 150 years. All those involved have long since died - and been reincarnated in the present. They remember nothing of their past lives. They are all lured as if by cosmic appointment to the town where the crime occurred. In walks the victim, Jane, with a fragmentary memory of what happened in 1853. And karma settles the rest.
I experienced such forward thrust when I got the idea that I couldn't even wait to outline the story. I simply began. The characters coalesced faster than I could write. The plot thickened so rapidly that I myself was rooted to the page, wondering what would happen next. Script jobs interfered. Ordinarily grateful for work, I bristled at being taken away from the book. After three years of only being able to work on Jane Was Here in my spare time, I announced to my reps that I was taking a leave, a dangerous thing to do in the film business because everyone forgets about you. But I finished the book, then went back and rewrote most of it. Blood, sweat and tears? Nah. Pure joy, all the way, every day.
So when people ask "Why?" I say that, like Jane, I'm coming home again.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Reincarnation and Evil
My friend Ron Rosenbaum has written a “single” or short take for Kindle called Rescuing Evil. At $1.99, there is so much profound reflection packed into this essay that one must read it again and again, in my case obsessively. (One also prays that Ron will expand his single into an LP, a third book to join his two masterpieces Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars. And if you want your pants scared off, read his recent How the End Begins, which analyses the prospects for nuclear Armageddon.)
In Rescuing Evil, Rosenbaum explores, among other things, “theodicy,” or the study of the question: How can an omnipotent loving Divinity allow evil to permeate human existence? Ron narrows the discussion further to human complicity, otherwise known as free will: or the “evil intention within human beings, the deliberate, knowing choice to do harm, do wrong, cause suffering.”
It has become customary to point the finger at external factors: the evildoer is actually the victim! Parental abuse is to blame, a cruel environment, poor diet, addiction, an “anger problem.” And then there are folks about whom it’s said, with a mystified shake of the head, that they’re “just born evil.”
Could a baby be born with a propensity toward wrong over right? Are we talking genetics here? Or are we in the realm of reincarnation?
I bring this up because reincarnation is the theme underlying my paranormal-suspense-mystery Jane Was Here (just published in hardcover and ebook). In the story, several characters caused the suffering and murder of young Jane Pettigrew in a small Massachusetts town in the year 1853. They have been reincarnated to the present, to the same town, where they are already atoning for their past misdeeds by leading somewhat wretched lives. They of course have no memory of their past lives, and so think of themselves as ‘unlucky.’ Enter Jane, herself reincarnated, and haunted by a fragmentary memory of her long ago lifetime. She seeks answers, and at the end of the story she gets them. Her presence in the town eventually causes a cataclysmic karmic event that dispatches the guilty and restores the innocent.
I, as the author, was in charge of karma for the duration of Jane Was Here. Therefore the meting of justice is tidy and fair, with no loose threads: mystery solved. But once we exit the blithe play of fiction, the rules of karma become once again baffling.
In a 1945 speech before the Theosophical Society in London, one Lord Dowding declared: “I have some reason to suppose that those who sowed the seeds of abominable cruelty at the time of the Inquisition reaped their own harvest at Belsen and Buchenwald.” The speech caused a furor at the time, understandably. He was suggesting that the victims of the Holocaust were the past-life Christian murderers of heretics and apostates. The wheel of karma neatly regenerated these souls, centuries later, as Jews, the ultimate apostates according to Christians, and they received the same fate to which they condemned others during the Spanish Inquisition.
Reincarnation, tidy and fair, explains the most emblematic wholesale massacre of the 20th century. Except, like a snake eating its tail, this spiritual logic returns us to the same question we began with. Are the Nazis who committed evil destined to return as victims next? Were they in Rwanda, to be cut down by a fresh mob of malefactors, men and women who also chose to commit wholesale evil? And who must then be reborn themselves to be punished by…and so on. The implication is that evil is recycled. How could a loving Divinity permit it?
The Buddhists, who kind of skip God, would say that the soul is a student, sent by divine design into a world of duality. Here good and evil are necessary: they’re in fact an assignment. The soul must face challenge and conflict in order to evolve – or devolve – according to which choices it makes. And return the soul must to planet earth, again and again, until it’s fully enlightened (or its karma is lightened) – at which point it no longer needs lessons in this world of terrifying division.
I don’t have the genius, scholarship, or intellect of Ron Rosenbaum to sift through such questions. I know an abyss when I see one. I prefer mystery fiction over divine mystery; I’ll choose to write a book with the answers in the back.
Jane Was Here is available in hardcover and ebook formats at Amazon and other online bookstores, or by order at your local bookstore.
Ron Rosenbaum’s Rescuing Evil is available for Kindle at Amazon.com.
Friday, July 15, 2011
GODS AND WRITERS
“Do we live in a world where terrible people go unpunished for their misdeeds? Or do the wicked ultimately suffer for their sins?... ‘I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something…I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen.’”
– Vince Gilligan, TV writer, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, speaking about his AMC series “Breaking Bad”
Lately I’ve had to opine a lot about reincarnation, since it drives the plot of my new novel “JANE WAS HERE.” I have to admit, I don’t know tons on the subject, but karmic justice comes perfectly naturally to many authors. There’s an innate wish, both for writer and reader, that all be balanced in the end. Good is rewarded; evil is punished. So we play Supreme Deity with our characters: we design the story so that certain events are foreordained (by us), and then we follow our characters as they make choices and learn lessons. In the movie business, it’s called a character arc. (Martin Scorcese once commented to a mutual friend, “Arc?! The only character who ever had an arc was Noah!”)
In “JANE WAS HERE” I went a step further. I designed a past life for each main character: a previous incarnation in the 19th century. They were all present at the same time in a small New England town, and they were all complicit in some way in a terrible event that resulted in the disappearance of my heroine, young Jane Pettigrew. And whatever evil they’d done would be atoned for, but in the next incarnation: in our present time, when they would be once more convened in the same town for the reckoning.
It’s one of the more satisfying aspects of belief in reincarnation: that people who profit from evil, and have no comeuppance but instead flourish until their death, are then reborn into a life of suffering – specifically the kind of pain they meted out to others with impunity in their previous lifetime. How cool is that? And they have no idea why they’re suffering. But the Supreme Author knows…
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