Article by Kate Willson
While writing a novel or short story, it can be easy to become lost in the story itself. We often become so involved in our main characters' drama, that we lose the characters' voice and storyline in place of our own. Then, before we know it, we become stuck, our characters no longer do or say anything interesting, and we lose focus on our original story altogether.
As frustrating as this common writing crisis can be, there is no better way to get back to the basics of storytelling than to look at our characters from a different point of view. An excellent option is taking a class in screenplay or play writing for film or theatre. Although a completely different medium, working briefly in the realm of theatre and film can be beneficial in many ways for the fiction novelist. The process can help you:
1. Reexamine the story you are already working on.
Select a course that will not only cover the principles of playwriting, but will also allow students to create their own work or receive criticism on existing material. As a fiction writer, you will have the chance to take that plot line that has been circling in your head and work on it in a different context. Even if you are assigned criteria that does not fit in with your story, you can always take elements from your own work and further examine them in class. For example, if your assignment is to write a short scene set at a restaurant, put the main character of your novel in the restaurant and see what happens. Regardless of the specific course guidelines, you as a student can always examine your own work in some way or another.
2. Remind you of your audience.
One of the problems inherent in any composition course is the student's lack of feel for an audience, states Gilman Tracy, Associate Professor of English at University of Southwestern Louisiana. One thing that helps, he claims, is doing playwriting exercises. Students are able to see the cause and effect of their writing on a tangible audience and have the opportunity to feel out nuances in tone, delivery, and timing that they do not have access to while writing on their own. The same method can be applied for fiction novelists. In adapting your own fiction work to a screenplay, you will have the opportunity to consider the reaction of your peers to your storylines and characters in a different context.
3. Refine your characters.
The main difference between a screenplay and fiction writing is the voice of the narrator. A screenplay is written by someone seeing things from the outside. Writers of plays and screenplays can only include things that can be seen and heard on stage or film. They cannot include how the character feels or what the character is thinking; they must instead think of a way to convey that through action and dialogue. Honing this technique as a novelist will make it easier to portray characters through action and reaction rather than relying on omnisciently delving into your main character's inner dialogue. Thinking about what a character is actually doing at all times, and in many different circumstances, leaves novelists with a richer set of characteristics to draw upon in their work and may lead to unexpected insights into their own characters.
4. Think through situations in your story from beginning to end.
Part of the fun of writing and reading fiction novels is the fact that they can jump around from one perspective and storyline to another. Writers can jump from the thoughts of one character to the flashback of another, from present day to the future, then back to the past. While these storytelling characteristics can create valuable and interesting fiction, it can also be tempting, when writing, to forget about the basic progression of the characters in the scenes and rush to the ultimate conclusion.
In the book Acting For the Camera, author Tony Barr discusses an acting technique he calls crossing the bridge. The basic premise is allowing oneself, as an actor, the time to come to a real feeling and then act out of that place. The audience, he claims will always wait as long as the emotion is genuine. Jumping the gun on an action before allowing that emotion to fully arise will, in fact, turn the audience off. Writing in the context of a screenplay forces novelists to create tangible scenes that have a beginning and an end. Writers must think about things like how a conflict starts, what the entire conversation will be, where the characters are, and how it ends. Even if these facts are not included at all in the final work, being forced to hash these things out with every scenario and interaction in the novel gives writers a rock-solid knowledge based of their own story and allows the audience to fully believe every character's experience.
Kate Willson regularly writes on the topic of top online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: katewillson2@gmail.com.
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