Adam Simcox - Writing Scripts or Writing Books?

This article was originally going to be called ‘How writing scripts taught me how to write a book’, but when I thought about it, I realised it hadn’t, really. The two disciplines have some transferable skills, admittedly; for instance, how strangle-tight structure needs to be. The four feature film scripts I’d written before, though, were for me to direct. They were cook books, instruction manuals for me to methodically follow. A novel has to be more evocative, a call to arms to your heart and soul, not your producer.

No, it was the other skills I picked up through my film career that really helped me shape my debut novel, The Dying Squad, a supernatural thriller about a spectral police force that solves crimes their living counterparts cannot.

First: establish a mood.

Whenever I start a film project – whether it be a feature, a music video, or a commercial – I always create a mood board. This contains dozens of different images that helps get across the tone I envisage to the artist/actors/client. With The Dying Squad, I went one further: I produced a series of trailers. Taking royalty free video and music, the promos helped me create a sense of place and tone, becoming a valuable touchstone to refer back to while writing the novel.

Second: create your soundtrack.

Music is a massively important part of my process, and that’s as true when I’m making a corporate film, as it is when I’m directing a music video. It’s saved me, time and time again when I am struggling with an edit, or a script cul-de-sac. It is a weird, freaky thing, but if I listen hard enough, the music tells me what to do; there’s no problem it can’t solve.

I recently finished writing the second Dying Squad book, and there were two key set pieces I couldn’t crack. Enter, music: I spliced together two music tracks, creating a temp track to write to. For one, I mixed ‘Force Marker’ by Brian Eno (used to brilliant effect in Michael Mann’s Heat) and ‘The Tick of the Clock’ by the Chromatics to create an epic, 23 minute score that I effectively wrote to the beat of.

Similarly, the tense finale at the end of Dying Squad book 2 had absolutely owned me – I just couldn’t get it right. I revisited Seven (a flat out masterpiece of a film, and serial killer movie Ground Zero) and a track near the end, Envy, where Mills and Somerset drive John Doe to the desert, really sparked something in me. I lived with the track for days, listening to it everywhere I went, actually forcing myself not to write, letting the ending percolate. Finally, I sat down to re-write the sequence, and mercifully cracked it. I’d streamed Envy eight hundred and three times by the time I’d finished.

(Which probably earned its composer Howard Shore around 30p.) 

Third: make your characters earn their existence.

People have been kind enough to compliment the pace of The Dying Squad, and that’s a skill honed in the flames of feature film penury. The narrative films I made were self-funded (with the exception of Kid Gloves, which I was able to crowd fund), and so from the start I learned to be hyper-economical. Each scene had to be 100% justifiable, because anything I shot then cut later was the definition of dead money. Crews need to be fed and equipment needs to be paid for; when it’s your (and your credit card companies) money that’s funding it, every penny had to be justified. There’s a residue burn of that when I write a novel: does this scene deserve to exist? Is this character earning their expenses? If the answer’s no, they have to go.

Directing music videos also taught me a ton about pace. I love bringing a narrative element to them, and like any good story, you need a beginning, middle and an end. You also need to get to that end within three minutes; if you can do that, and craft each shot so that it makes you want to watch the next one, then you have got it cracked, pace wise.

Finally: edit with your head, not your heart.

There’s not much difference, nuts and bolts wise, between editing a film, and editing a book. It’s the ability to compartmentalise scenes, rip them up and restructure them, take a jack hammer to convention and reshape it into something new. To have the fearlessness to put the end at the beginning, and the beginning at the end, to kill your darlings and tune out the screams of their (Dying Squad) ghosts.

A lot of this didn’t come easily. Some of it out and out knife fought me to the death. It was those filmmaking skills that allowed me to come out the other side, though, and earn my right to fade to black.

The Dying Squad by Adam Simcox (Gollancz) Out Now

Who better to solve a murder than a dead detective? When Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus storms a Lincolnshire farmhouse, he expects to bring down a notorious drug gang; instead, he discovers his own body and a spirit guide called Daisy-May. She's there to enlist him to The Dying Squad, a spectral police force who solve crimes their flesh and blood counterparts cannot. Lazarus reluctantly accepts and returns to the Lincolnshire Badlands, where he faces dangers from both the living and the dead in his quest to discover the identity of his killer - before they kill again.

 

Books to Look Forward to From Orion Publishing

 

July 2021

Claire Griffith seems to have it all, a thriving career, a gorgeous, successful boyfriend, a glamorous circle of friends. She always knew she was destined for more than the life her deeply conservative parents preached to her. Arriving in Los Angeles as a flat broke teenager, she has risen to become a popular fitness coach and social media influencer. Having rebranded herself as Cleo Ray, she stands on the threshold of achieving her most cherished dreams. One summer day, Cleo and a young woman named Beck Alden set off in a canoe on a quiet, picture-perfect mountain lake. An hour later, Beck is found dead in the water, her face cut and bruised, and Cleo is missing. Authorities suspect foul play and news about Cleo's involvement goes viral. Who was Beck and what was the nature of her and Cleo's relationship? Was Beck an infatuated follower who took things too far? If Cleo is innocent, why did she run? Was it an accident? Or was it murder? As evidence of Cleo's secret life surfaces, the world begins to see just how hard she strived to get to the top- and how fast and far the fall is from celebrity to infamy. The Anatomy of Desire is by L R Dorn. 

The Lying Squad is by Adam Simcox.. Dying is hell... Solving your own murder is purgatory. When Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus storms a Lincolnshire farmhouse, he expects to bring down a notorious drug gang; instead, he discovers his own dead body and a spirit guide called Daisy-May. She's there to enlist him to the Dying Squad, a spectral police force made up of the recently deceased. Joe soon realises there are fates far worse than death. To escape being stuck in purgatory, he must solve his own murder. A task made all the more impossible when his memories start to fade. Reluctantly partnering with Daisy-May, Joe faces dangers from both the living and the dead in the quest to find his killer - before they kill again.

August 2021

The Guide is by Peter Heller and is about a young man escaping his own grief and an elite fishing lodge in Colorado hiding a plot of shocking menace. Kingfisher Lodge, nestled in a canyon on a mile and a half of the most pristine river water on the planet, is known by locals as 'Billionaire's Mile.' Sandwiched between barbed wire and a meadow with a sign that reads 'Don't Get Shot,' the Colorado resort boasts boutique fishing at its finest and a respite for wealthy clients. Now, it also promises a second chance for Jack, a return to normalcy after a young life filled with loss. When he is assigned to guide a well-known singer, his only job is to rig her line, carry her gear and steer her to the best trout he can find. But then a human scream pierces the night, and Jack soon realizes that this idyllic fishing lodge may be merely a cover for a far more sinister operation.

The Manic is by Daniel Cole. In life she was his muse . In death she'll be his masterpiece. 1989: DS Benjamin Chambers and DC Adam Winters are on the trail of a serial killer with a twisted passion for recreating the world's greatest works of art through the bodies of his victims. After Chambers nearly loses his life, the case goes cold due to lack of evidence. The killer lies dormant, his collection unfinished. 2006: DS Marshall has excelled through the ranks of the Metropolitan Police Service, despite being haunted by the case that defined her teenage years. Having obtained new evidence, she joins Chambers and Winters to reopen the case. However, their resurrected investigation brings about a fresh reign of terror, the team treading a fine line between delivering justice and becoming vigilantes in their pursuit of a monster far more dangerous and intelligent than any of them had anticipate.

Now I'm in charge, the gates are my gates. The rules are my rule sIt's an incendiary moment for St Oswald's school. For the first time in its history, a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to girls. Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered. But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She'll bury the past so deep it will evade even her own memory, just like she has done before. After all... You can't keep a good woman down. A Narrow Room is by Joanne Harris.

Another Kind of Eden is by James Lee Burke.. The American West in the early 1960s appears to be a pastoral paradise: golden wheat fields, mist-filled canyons, frolicking animals. Aspiring novelist Aaron Holland Broussard has observed it from the open door of a boxcar, riding the rails for both inspiration and odd jobs. Jumping off in Denver, he finds work on a farm and meets Joanne McDuffy, an articulate and fierce college student and gifted painter. Their soul connection is immediate, but their romance is complicated by Joanne's involvement with a shady professor who is mixed up with a drug-addled cult. When a sinister businessman and his son who wield their influence through vicious cruelty set their sights on Aaron, drawing him into an investigation of grotesque murders, it is clear that this idyllic landscape harbors tremendous power-and evil. Followed by a mysterious shrouded figure who might not be human, Aaron will have to face down all these foes to save the life of the woman he loves and his own. 

Shirley Steadman, a 70 year old living in a small town in the North East of England, loves her volunteer work at the local hospital radio. She likes giving back to the community, and even more so, she likes getting out of the house. Haunted by the presence of her son, a reluctant Royal Navy officer who was lost at sea, and still in the shadow of her long dead abusive husband, she doesn't like being alone much. One day, at the radio station, she is playing around with the equipment and finds a frequency that was never there before. It is a pirate radio station, and as she listens as the presenter starts reading the news. But there is one problem - the news being reported is tomorrows. Shirley first thinks it is a mere misunderstanding - a wrong date. But she watches as everything reported comes true. At first, Shirley is in awe of the station, and happily tunes in to hear the news. But then the presenter starts reporting murders - murders that happen just the way they were reported. Half Past Tomorrow is by Chris McGeorge. 

If we remove all our natural impulses, how long do we have before our true personalities bite back? Trapped inside a secure hospital after what may not be her first suicide attempt, Mya Dala's only contact with the outside world is a TV screen. One day it starts to show videos of her sweet, gentle boyfriend Marco - hand-in-hand with her doppelganger. Convinced she has been replaced by a perfect clone, Mya plots how to get back to Marco with the help of a violently troubled inmate known as the Madboy. But as she plans her escape, her memories of Marco become conflicted. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a long-forgotten version of Marco is emerging...Has his personality been replaced - or is this all in her head? A clever speculative thriller for fans that asks whether one day technology could perfect our brains, just as plastic surgery perfects our bodies. And whether we should let it.. Replace You is by Andrew Ewart.

Running from her past, Rachel answers an advert to be a live-in assistant to glamorous and eccentric author Dorothy Winters. But behind the closed doors of Dorothy's house, she quickly discovers that nothing is as it seems. When Dorothy's manuscript throws up striking similarities to events in Rachel's own life, she becomes convinced that the pasts he's tried to hide is catching up with her.Then the phone calls start. The parcel arrives. The blood shows up in the bathroom.And Dorothy's friend disappears.Terrified of being blamed for murder, Rachel has nobody left to turn to. Because who can she believe when she doesn't even trust herself...? The Vacancy is by Elizabeth Carpenter.

September 2021

The Shadowing is by Rhiannon Ward. When well-to-do Hester learns of her sister Mercy's death at a Nottinghamshire workhouse, she travels to Southwell to find out how her sister ended up at such a place. Haunted by her sister's ghost, Hester sets out to uncover the truth, when the official story reported by the workhouse master proves to be untrue. Mercy was pregnant - both her and the baby are said to be dead of cholera, but the workhouse hasn't had an outbreak for years. Hester discovers a strange trend in the workhouse of children going missing. One woman tells her about the Pale Lady, a ghostly figure that steals babies in the night. Is this lady a myth or is something more sinister afoot at the Southwell poorhouse? As Hester investigates, she uncovers a conspiracy, one that someone is determined to keep a secret, no matter the cost...

November 2021

A missing child. Ten years ago, the disappearance of firearms police officer Jonah Colley’s young son almost destroyed him. A gruesome discovery. A plea for help from an old friend leads Jonah to Slaughter Quay, and the discovery of four bodies. Brutally attacked and left for dead, he is the only survivor. A search for the truth. Under suspicion himself, he uncovers a network of secrets and lies about the people he thought he knew — forcing him to question what really happened all those years ago. No one is safe. And there are some very dangerous people watching him... The Lost is by Simon Beckett.

December 2021

We are all Liars is by Carys Jones. We're best friends. We trust each other. But... We are all liars. Allie, Stacie, Diana, Emily and Gail have been by each other's sides for as long as they can remember. The Fierce Five. Best friends forever. But growing up has meant growing apart. And little white lies have grown into devastating secrets. When Gail invites the increasingly estranged friends to reunite at her Scottish cabin, it could be the opportunity to mend old wounds and heal the cracks in their friendship. But when a freak snowstorm rocks the cabin and one of the girls is found dead on the ice, their weekend away becomes a race against time - and each other - to get off the mountain alive. And in the end, whose story can you trust, when everything was founded on lies to begin with?