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.
