Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Deadly Reflections: The Writing Process

This week I’m excited to share with you a look at how Deadly Reflections was made. Every project has its own unique process, and DR’s was pretty interesting. Believe it or not, it first started out as a 156-page screenplay. I wrote it a few years ago when I was writing screenplays pretty regularly. Nothing ever came of it, but I thought the story was really cool and it always stayed in the back of my mind. So when I decided to turn my attention to writing novels, it was an easy decision to tell this story in my first full-length book and hopefully give it more of an audience than it had sitting in my drawer.

Now, you might think that having a completed screenplay to work from would make things pretty easy. But this was not a case of simply retyping the story and changing a few words here and there. As you will see, screenplays are pretty sparsely written and don’t really have a lot to do with traditional prose. The script was a wonderful blueprint to have—the structure and characters were pretty much there—but ultimately it was more of a very detailed outline than anything else, and it was still a lot of hard work to write the book.


STEP ONE: THE IDEA

The very original germ of the idea came when I was working at a place with an all-glass façade. It was late at night and I was alone in the store. I thought I spotted, in the reflection on the glass, some movement in the lobby. But I hadn’t heard anyone come in. (This might sound very familiar. J) I walked over and, of course, no one was there. Now, any writer will tell you that the most common phrase running through her mind is “What If?” And naturally I thought “Well, I know I saw something in the glass…what if the thing I saw could only be seen as a reflection.” I think I even facetiously looked back at the glass to see if I could spot it again. I came up with the entire story that night.


STEP TWO: THE OUTLINE

This is the first thing that was put down on paper. I don’t always make an outline, but I did for this one. As you can see, I didn’t know the title yet.  I also drew silly little doodles in the margins that don’t have anything to do with the story. Those fanged creatures aren’t supposed to be “mirror monsters”—all the monsters I sketch tend to look like that. The first part of the outline is a list of cool things that the monster can appear on. Then I started writing scenes of the story, and I checked them off as I wrote them in the screenplay. Looking at it now, I’m kind of amazed how much I had on day 1 that made it into the finished product.


STEP THREE: THE SCREENPLAY

To demonstrate the rest of the process, I’ll pick two scenes from the book and show you everything that was done on them. The two scenes are First Date (Chapter 9, location 982) and Finding the Box (Chapter 10, location 1250).

FIRST DATE

FINDING THE BOX
You can see how little the screenplay gives you, especially the First Date section. Movies are a visual medium and information can quickly be conveyed with short little shots. Books are different—you have to describe everything you want the reader to “see,” which requires more of a time commitment from both reader and author. Those who have finished Deadly Reflections know how much the First Date chapter in particular was expanded and—I think—enriched.


STEP FOUR: THE HANDWRITTEN DRAFT

FIRST DATE

FINDING THE BOX
Yes, I have messy handwriting. And I tend to second-guess things almost as soon as they’re written, so there are a ton of cross-outs. When something is crossed out and circled it means I didn’t like it initially and then decided it was fine. I’m usually not one to just write and write and go for quantity and worry about fixing it later. I like things to be as perfect as possible before moving on, which results in pages that look like a tornado went through them.


STEP FIVE: THE GALLEY PROOF


FIRST DATE

FINDING THE BOX
An invisible draft occurs when I type the handwritten draft, making changes as I type. After it’s all entered into a word processor, I print out a hard copy of the whole thing and take a red pen to it, making corrections, fixing mistakes, improving the prose. It’s a fun part of the process for me because I get to read the whole thing as a mostly finished story and see if it works. At this point, the changes are mostly cosmetic. With that said, there were still over a thousand emendations in the galley proof.


STEP SIX: THE BOOK

I went right from corrected galley proof to publication, which I admit was not the best move. A few mistakes slipped through, mostly due to errors I made typing the red-mark corrections into the final document. With so many emendations in the galley proof, I should have printed out another hard copy and done another line edit. Luckily, Amazon has made it really easy and seamless to upload new, corrected editions of the book. I’m not saying there are no mistakes in it now, but hopefully they have been mostly weeded out.

I hope you enjoyed this look at the writing process of Deadly Reflections. I’ll be sharing more stuff about the book with you in the near future, including an interview with the cover artist and “deleted scenes.”

Take care,
DHS

Thursday, January 5, 2012

My Bookshelves

As we ease into the new year, I thought I’d share my bookshelves with you. Now, I’ve had a Kindle for the last 3 years. But for the other 24 years of my life, I read what are now known as DTBs or Physical Books. (I’m still not 100% sure whether “DTB” is an affectionate term or a pejorative one.) Since almost all of us have lived most of our lives with these tangible books (apologies to all the 3-year-olds reading this blog), we still have to own shelves to put them on. And if you’re like me and really love to read, you own a bunch of books and space becomes an issue. Well recently I acquired some shelves that not only hold all my books but allow me to arrange them as I’ve never had the chance to before. Check it out:




Yes, they are former Borders bookshelves. Don't hate me.

I used to own the bookshelves you typically see at places like Walmart, the ones that have really deep and tall shelves, requiring you to stack books behind one another. I hated that. I’ve always wanted shelves that were the perfect size for a paperback and allowed all the books to be seen, spines facing out. Which is exactly what these are. It allows me to get totally “High Fidelity” with how the books are ordered. J

I love the Mamet :)

Actually, the order is pretty simple. Everything’s alphabetical by author, exactly like you’d find at a bookstore. (It’s kind of pathetic how happy this makes me. My books had previously been thrown together in a slapdash manner, and now everything’s wonderfully easy to find.) What’s slightly different from a bookstore’s order, however, is that within each author’s section, the books are placed in chronological order. So it goes from the author’s first book (if I have it) to her last (ditto), left to right. Oh, and the author’s novels come first, then short stories, then essays, etc. Autobiographies and interview books and stuff like that are last, generally. But if the author is more well-known for something other than novels (like plays for instance, like good ole Mamet supra) than that thing comes first. Got it? (Maybe it is a more “High Fidelity”-type obsessive ordering than I thought…)


I own a lot of fiction, which is my favorite kind of book. Novels pretty much fill 2 of the 3 bookcases. The third one is filled with graphic novels and books about movies—screenplays, film theory, filmmaker biographies, stuff like that. Those I haven’t really put in order yet. For the movie books, I’ll probably bunch the screenplays together and find some sort of way to arrange the rest of it. The graphic novels will eventually be alphabetical by either title or writer…still thinking about it.

So while we’re talking DTBs, I’ll share some of the most cherished ones on my shelves…

This is an advance galley proof of Infinite Jest that I got on eBay last year for an obscene amount of $ (for me, at least). But I’ve wanted one for years, so I just had to get it. It’s one of my favorite books, and supposedly only about 1000 of these things exist. It’s also signed on the inside, with a little smiley face, which is just extra cool.

Here is a signed first edition of American Gods. These were buried in the displays at bookstores upon the book’s release in 2000. Way back when I was 16, I went into a Barnes & Noble and snagged one and was totally psyched.

An out-of-print book by Pauline Kael—the best movie critic of all time. This massive volume contains a ton of her reviews, and I can spend hours just flipping through it. It’s quite baffling (and a shame) that this book is currently unavailable.

My 1st Edition Curse of Lono was a lot more impressive before Taschen published a handsome oversized edition for a reasonable $60 ($37.79 on Amazon). I still love it though.


This is my dictionary. I think a dictionary tells a lot about its owner. Personally, I’m an OED man. J This is the 2-volume Shorter OED, 5th Edition. Great, great resource for both writer and reader.



This one I’d definitely try to save if there was a fire. It’s a facsimile of the manuscript of one of the greatest novels of all time: The Great Gatsby. Only 2000 of these puppies were made for what I believe was the 50th anniversary of the novel. I love stuff like this for the same reason I love making-of docs and director’s commentaries on DVDs—it shows you the process of how a work of art is crafted. This stately volume allows you to see Gatsby’s creation ab ovo. (J) It is quite astounding to see the novel materialize on the page as Fitzgerald goes about the business of writing an American classic one beautifully handwritten word at a time. When I bought it, there were a bunch of them available in the Amazon marketplace. Now there’s just one, going for 3 times what I paid for mine. I have a feeling that when Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio comes out later this year, we probably won’t see these around anymore.
I hope you enjoyed this tour of my books. They are my most prized possessions and I really feel like they’re a big part of who I am in some way. Everything I’ve read has changed me for the better. I’m sure all you readers out there know what I mean. When I look at all these books, written by authors who have spent countless hours creating lasting and important works of art, I’m not only inspired but extremely honored to be—in my own small way—contributing to the venerable tradition of the written word.
And with that, I bid everyone goodnight.
DHS