Surprising absolutely no one but me, apparently, after my months-long hyperfixation reading romance novels at breakneck speeds, I wrote one. I’m now two chapters into a second one. Don’t ask me what I’m doing with them yet, because I don’t know. I’m just trying not to police the muse.
It’s been strange revisiting prose after nearly a decade away from it. I thought I’d categorically left it behind, and was frankly happy to do so. I hated writing descriptions, preferring to focus on dialog and plot, and I enjoyed how comparatively breezy the process of completing a new script was compared to even a relatively short piece of prose. There was also always something vaguely terrifying about being solely responsible for the complete story and its execution, rather than just a piece of it.
But now that I’m a 100k book and two chapters back into prose, I’ve been reminded of the things I’ve kind of missed.
Internal Monologues
I wrote to my friend Amanda in the first month of my romance novel binge that despite my regular frustration with insecure characters in film and TV, I was finding I had a lot more empathy for them in books. I chalked it up to having a clearer sense of their thought process, some of which can be performed and implied on screen but much of which belies translation. Even a script with voiceover (which is largely frowned upon, especially to the extent you’d need it to replicate a first person novel’s internal monologue) can only scratch the surface.
And good lord, is writing internal monologue fun. Especially when the character is actively lying to themselves- a tricky needle thread in first person that I’ve found supremely satisfying.
My favorite romances to read (and, therefore, to write) are split POV first person narratives. As in, the chapters (or sections, depending on the book) alternative the first person point of view character, so you get equal access to the internal machinations of both sides of the love story. Internal monologues become so much more exciting when you get one character silently assuming one thing and you know for a fact from the chapter previous that the other character in fact believes the exact opposite. You can play with the psychology of how terrible miscommunications happen, and how they so often begin with one or both characters being deeply broken by something in their past and in need of patience and support.
You can also dole out backstory a lot more subtly in internal monologue, as you’re untethered from real time like you would be mid-conversation in a script. You can take a few pages break to explain why your character just said that weird thing, or reacted so aggressively to such a benign statement. Speaking of taking a break…
Skipping the play by play stuff
Something that I find tough in scripts, still, to this day, is getting in and out of scenes. Sometimes I don’t want to write out the exact conversation I need to further the story, but there’s very few ways to give your viewers the Cliff Notes version that feels cohesive.
Whereas in prose, I can just stop the conversation wherever I want to and go “we made our plans and left.” That’s it. I don’t need to figure out how to convey that visually, or figure out how to transition into the next scene so it’s clear the plans were made and a person has left the room without literally saying it.
Truly, it was such a relief the first time I got to a scene and realized I was done with a conversation but I still needed to establish a few key details, and I could just summarize in a few sentences. I’m also a big fan of sometimes skipping dialog altogether without being responsible for transcribing it directly.
“Natalie had other ideas, against my protests, and the next thing I heard after the earth-shattering scream she’d let loose on the occasion of her second climax of the night was an earful about yeast infections and vaginal bacteria.”
I did say I was writing romance novels. If that sentence shocked you, that’s on you.
THE POINT is that in a script, I’d need to actually write the earful Natalie yammered about yeast infections, which I did not want to do. I guess a script could have Rowen (the POV character for that particular sentence and Natalie’s love interest in book 1, Good Eye, Natalie Green) recap this sentence to a friend later to avoid having to do it in-scene, but Rowen isn’t the type to kiss and tell, so either I skip this detail (which I didn’t want to do as this is an important Natalie detail and also I think it’s funny) or I literally write her lines about it somehow.
Before anyone goes “well there are ways to creatively blah blah screenwriting blah blah,” I know. I have been writing scripts for a decade. However, there’s something extremely satisfying about not having to be clever and just getting to decide what deserves to be actual dialog and what can just be a quick recap or sentence of exposition.
Character connection
I remarked to Quinn the other night that I’d been having trouble sleeping recently because I kept imagining full scenes I wanted for my new book and not allowing myself to drift into unconsciousness before I’d gotten them right. Though I love my characters from my scripts (Alison Sumner will always be my first love, and not just because I kept our hair the same), there is something inherently different about being their source of origin and being their full-time caretaker.
In a script, I know I’ll only ever be able to claim a fraction of a character. The actor will add their piece, the director will add theirs, and the editor often has skin in the game too. So my script characters are mine, but they aren’t only mine, and the key to being a good screenwriter is accepting that early on, lest you become one of those annoying auteurs who casts people to be your puppets rather than full creative professionals with autonomy and a skillset all their own. And I love the collaborative aspect of filmmaking. I love that Damian’s backstory in Brains (which dramatically influenced future seasons, though devastatingly they’ll never be seen by anyone but me) was in large part invented by his performer. I love that at least a third (if not more) of authorship credit for Alison from Brains, who I wrote AND performed, is due to my director because of a simple request for me to say my lines not in the stuttering way they’d been originally written, but confidently and without guile. A character in a screenplay is raised by the village, and they’re better for it. So I’m always writing with an amount of emotional distance, knowing I want to save some of them for collaborators down the road.
But in a book, they’re mine. And I spend far more time with them (especially because I exclusively write in first person), I decide every thought that flits through their head, I watch them make a mess of their lives and am the only one who can guide them through it. My screenplay characters surprise me all the time, but they’ve never kidnapped me like my prose characters do. I wrote the first chapter of my new book (Good Deal, Meg Carraway) because I was having trouble with the love interest, Cam, and within two sentences, Cam was blabbing to me about a character who I’d imagined at best being in a single chapter. I did not have the reigns as I worked through his New Years Eve at a Denver bar, the same way I didn’t have the reigns in book 1 when the best friend character of Ava showed up unannounced at the end of a scene I didn’t expect her to be in, kidnapping my two love interests and taking them to the High Line for a chapter I hadn’t planned that ended up being a vital turning point for both characters.
Prose characters feel so much more real and complete to me even when I’ve only known them for a few planning sessions, and I forgot how intoxicating that can be. I can’t speak to my script characters out loud in the car when I’m trying to work out their arcs, I think because they don’t feel totally mine. And I kind of missed that intimacy with my made up friends.
I’m obviously still very much working on screenplays and I still very much want to find work as a TV writer, but it’s been enlightening to adventure back to my roots in a genre I’ve never officially written that feels weirdly inevitable.
Inevitable because it’s all about structure. I write mysteries for television and romance for novels, because both of those genres have a layer of predictability I actually find incredibly soothing and creatively fulfilling. The structure’s largely already there, and it’s a fun puzzle to find a new way to interpret it, to put characters I’ve never seen in a familiar composition.
For those curious for an update on my reading adventures, here are some stats (as of June 25, 2022):
New romance books read: 157
Romance books re-read for writing inspiration & while waiting for the library to send me new books from my holds list: 12
Authors read: 50
Historical romances read: 62
Contemporary romances read: 95
Stand out books I recommend:
Beach Read by Emily Henry
The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang
Something Wilder by Christina Lauren
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
Battle Royale by Lucy Parker
Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Bailey
Temp covers courtesy of Canva and me procrastinating from sending an email
