The superstructure

I take notes: ideas, historical perspective, characters, point of view. Very quickly, much of the narrative coheres. When I have sufficient information—the key action, the love stories, the intrigue, the conclusion—I write out a synopsis in shorthand as fast as I can, for comprehension’s sake. With the new novel, Blood’s a Rover, this took me six days. It’s then, after I’ve got the prospectus, that I write the outline.

The first part of the outline is a descriptive summary of each character. Next I describe the design of the book in some detail. I state my intent at the outset. Then I go through the entire novel, outlining every chapter. The outline of Blood’s a Rover is nearly four hundred pages long. It took me eight months to write. I write in the present tense, even if the novel isn’t written in the present tense. It reads like stage directions in a screenplay. Everything I need to know is right there in front of me. It allows me to keep the whole story in my mind. I use this method for every book…I think of the outline as a diagram, a superstructure. When you see dialogue in one of my outlines, it’s because inserting the dialogue is the most complete, expeditious way to describe a given scene…

I set a goal of outlined pages that I want to get through each day. It’s the ratio of text pages to outline pages that’s important. That proportion determines everything. Today I went through five pages of the outline. That equals about eight pages of the novel…I need to work just as rigorously on the outline as I do on the actual writing of the text, in order to keep track of the plot and the chronology. But once I’m writing text, I can be flexible, because the outline is there. Take today: I woke up early, at five-thirty. I worked for a couple of hours, took a break for some oatmeal, shut my eyes for a moment, and went back at it. I was overcaffeinated, jittery-assed, panic-attacky. Sometimes I go until I just can’t go anymore. I flatline and need some peace.

—James Ellroy, to The Paris Review

“Then the crowd rushed forward…”

Note: This post is the twenty-second installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 23. You can read the previous installments here.

Last week, Buzzfeed ran a fun feature in which a few dozen television writers talked about the favorite thing they’d ever written. There’s a lot of good stuff here—I particularly liked Rob Thomas’s account of the original opening of Veronica Mars, which ended up on the cutting room floor—but the story that really stuck with me came courtesy of Damon Lindelof. At this point, Lindelof isn’t anyone’s favorite writer, but few would argue that the finale of the third season of Lost marked a high point in his career, with its closing revelation that what looked like a flashback was actually a scene from the future. It’s a fantastic mislead that viewers still talk about to this day, and the best part is what Lindelof acknowledges as his inspiration:

The final scene of “Through the Looking Glass”—the third season finale of Lost—was stolen from the movie Saw 2.

If you have not seen Saw 2, all you need to know is that Donnie Wahlberg is in it and that the twist at the end involves tricking the audience into thinking they’re watching something unfold in present time, when in fact, it is unfolding in the past. Also, Donnie Wahlberg is in it. Did I say that already?

I love this for two reasons. First, although I’ve never gotten around to seeing Saw 2, I’ve been impressed by its closing twist ever since it was first described to me: I think it would be discussed in the same breath as other great surprise endings if it didn’t reside in such a disreputable genre. (It’s also worth noting that it was originally written by Darren Lynn Bousman as an unrelated spec script, later retooled to serve as a Saw sequel. Bousman went on to direct the next three films in the franchise, which is a lesson in itself: if you come up with a great twist, it can give you a career.) Second, it’s a reminder that you can derive inspiration from almost anything, and that the germ of an idea is less meaningful than its execution. If Lindelof hadn’t spelled it out, it’s unlikely that many viewers would have made the connection. As I’ve noted here before, even a short description of someone else’s idea—as happened with the Doctor Who writer Russell T. Davies and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”—can ignite a line of thought. And when it comes to drawing material from things you’ve seen, you often get better ideas from flawed efforts than from masterpieces. A great movie feels like the definitive version of its story; a misfire makes you think about the other ways in which it might have been done.

For instance, I don’t know how many readers here remember a movie called Dark Blue. It was already a flop when it came out over a decade ago—I’m one of the few who paid to see it in theaters—and it doesn’t seem to have had much of an afterlife on video. Even I don’t remember much about it, although I think I liked it fine: it was a messy, textured cop movie with a nice lead performance from Kurt Russell, who is worth watching in anything. What attracted me to it, though, were two elements. It was based on an original story by James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential, and the idea of a sprawling, contemporary crime saga from Ellroy’s brain was an enticing one. And the premise itself grabbed my attention: a violent police melodrama set against the backdrop of the Los Angeles riots. (Apparently, Ellroy developed the idea for so long that it was originally set during the Watts riots, which says something in itself about the byways a screenplay can take in Hollywood.) In the end, the execution wasn’t quite memorable enough for it to stick in my head. But its core idea, of a plot that intersected unexpectedly with a historical riot in a big city, is one I never forgot. And years later, when the London riots in Hackney coincided with my planning for Eternal Empire, the pieces just fell into place.

And the result, in Chapter 23, is less an homage to Dark Blue than a kind of remake, filtered through the fuzziness of time, or my private dream of what such a scene could be. Since much of the appeal of a sequence like this comes from how closely it hews to actual events, I invested a lot of effort—maybe too much—in putting together a timeline of the riots and assembling visual references. Several moments in the scene essentially put Wolfe and Ilya in the middle of iconic photos and videos from that day. I had to fudge a few details to make it all fit: the prison break in the previous chapter takes place in early morning, so there’s a space of six hours or so in the chronology that is hard to account for. Still, it all hangs together pretty well, and the result is one of my favorite things in this novel. And what would Ellroy say? I’d like to think that he’d approve, or at least tolerate it, since he isn’t above much the same kind of creative liberation: he admits that he lifted the premise of his novel The Big Nowhere directly from the William Friedkin movie Cruising. (Which doesn’t even mention how much Dark Blue, and so many other movies in its genre, owes To Live and Die in L.A.) The cycle of appropriation goes ever on, and it’s a good thing. Until a book or movie executes an idea so expertly that it yanks it out of circulation, everything should be up for grabs. And in the meantime, all a writer can do is take it and run…

The adaptation game

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s question: “Have you ever had a movie (or other media) experience enhanced by a lack of familiarity with the source material?”

There was a time in my life when I took it as an article of faith that if I wanted to see a movie based on a novel, I had to read the book first. When I was working as a film critic in college, this policy made sense—I wanted my reviews to seem reasonably informed—so I devoured the likes of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Bridget Jones’s Diary mere days before seeing their adaptations in theaters. Later, I tackled the original material out of a vague sense of guilt or obligation, as I did with Watchmen, a comparison that did Zack Snyder’s movie version no favors. In almost every instance, though, it meant that I watched the resulting film through a kind of double exposure, constantly comparing the events on screen with their equivalents, or lack thereof, on the page. It’s how I imagine fans of Twilight or The Hunger Games regard the adaptations of their own favorite properties, the quality of which is often judged by how faithfully they follow their sources. And it wasn’t until recently that I gave up on the idea of trying to read every book before seeing the movie, in part because I have less free time, but also because my attitudes toward the issue have changed, hopefully for the better.

In fact, I’d like to propose a general rule: the priority of one version of a story over another is a fact, not a value judgment. This apples to remakes and homages as much as to more straightforward adaptations. After enough time has passed, the various approaches that different artists take to the same underlying narrative cease to feel like points on a timeline, and more like elements of a shared constellation of ideas. I saw The Silence of the Lambs long before reading Thomas Harris’s original novels, later added Manhunter to the mix, and have been having a hell of a good time going back to the books with the cast of Hannibal in mind. I don’t know how I’d feel about these characters and stories if I’d read each book as it came out and watched the adaptations later, but I’d like to think that I’d have ended up in more or less the same place, with each element sustaining and enriching every other. The same is true of a movie like L.A. Confidential, which is less a faithful translation of the book into film than a rearrangement of the pieces that James Ellroy provided, an “alternate life,” as the author himself puts it, for the men and women he had imagined. Would I feel the same way if I’d read the book first? Maybe—but only if enough time had passed to allow me to regard the movie in its own right.

Ultimately, I’ve come to think that out of all the ways of experiencing works of art with a common origin, the best option is to absorb them all, but to leave sufficient space between each encounter. I watched Infernal Affairs long before The Departed, but the earlier movie had faded almost entirely when I saw the remake, and now I find that I can switch back and forth between the two films in full appreciation of each one’s strengths. (The Departed is less a remake than an expansion of the tightly focused original: its bones are startlingly similar, but fleshed out with an hour’s worth of digressions and elaborations, all of which I love.) Occasionally, of course, the memory of one version is so strong that its alternate incarnations can’t compete, and this doesn’t always work to the benefit of the original. A few years ago, I tried to read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather for the first time, and I found that I just couldn’t finish it: Coppola’s movie is remarkably faithful, while elevating the material in almost every way, to the point where the novel itself seems oddly superfluous. This isn’t the case with The Silence of the Lambs, which I’m reading again now for maybe the tenth time with undiminished delight, but it’s a reminder of how unpredictable the relationship between the source and its adaptation can be.

And in retrospect, I’m grateful that I experienced certain works of art without any knowledge of the originals. I’ve enjoyed movies as different as The Name of the Rose and Lolita largely because I didn’t have a point of reference: the former because I didn’t know how much I was missing, the latter because I realized only later how much it owed to the book. And if you have the patience, it can be rewarding to delay the moment of comparison for as long as possible. I’ve loved Eyes Wide Shut ever since its initial release, fifteen years ago, when I saw it twice in a single day. A few months ago, I finally got around to reading Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, and I was struck by the extent to which Kubrick’s movie is nearly a point-for-point adaptation. (The only real interpolation is the character of Ziegler, played by Sydney Pollack, who looms in the memory like a significant figure, even though he only appears in a couple of scenes.) Kubrick was famously secretive about his movie’s plot, and having read the novel, I can see why: faithful or not, he wanted it to be seen free of expectations—although I have a hunch that the film might have been received a little more warmly if viewers had been given a chance to acclimate themselves to its origins. But that doesn’t make him wrong. Stories have to rise or fall on their own terms, and when it comes to evaluating how well a movie works, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

The logline game

In an interview he gave a few years ago to The Paris Review, James Ellroy told a memorable story about the origins of his novel The Big Nowhere:

I was influenced by a bad William Friedkin movie from 1980, Cruising. It has a great premise. There are a string of homosexual murders in the West Village and Al Pacino is a young, presumably heterosexual cop, who goes undercover and is tempted by the homosexual world. What an idea! Hence, The Big Nowhere. A cop in LA in the fifties gets assigned to a homosexual murder case and becomes aroused by the men he’s investigating.

I love this story because it illustrates a point best expressed by a modified version of Ebert’s Law: “A story isn’t about what it’s about, but about how it’s about it.” A movie that bungles an intriguing premise can serve as a source of inspiration for a better storyteller, and if you’re able to exploit the underlying idea more compellingly, it isn’t plagiarism, but a kind of literary transmutation. Ideas, as I’ve said before, are cheap; execution is king.

As it happens, Ellroy’s example is just one of two I’ve recently encountered of authors quietly lifting an idea from another source. The other night, I watched the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok” for the first time. While reading about it afterward, I came across a story about Doctor Who writer Russell T. Davies. When the episode first aired, he liked its logline—the brief summary included in the day’s television listings—so much that he deliberately didn’t watch the episode:

I love the idea so much, I’d rather think about it. Forever. The episode is called “Darmok,” and the synopsis simply says that Captain Picard is trapped on a planet with an alien who can only talk in metaphors. Wow. That sounds brilliant. How does that work? What happens? How does it end? I’ve got no idea—not seen it! But it keeps resonating with me…I’ve been thinking about that story and its potential for almost twenty years!

And while I haven’t seen the Doctor Who episode, “Midnight,” that “Darmok” inspired, I don’t have any doubt that the story is profoundly different from its inspiration. Even if we start in more or less the same place, we end up in an altogether different neighborhood.

I’ve started to take a particularly keen interest in examples like this because the novel I’m writing now originated in similar ways. Fifteen years ago, before Eyes Wide Shut came out, there were countless wild rumors about its plot and content, many of which—Tom Cruise wears a dress! Nicole Kidman shoots heroin!—were absurdly off the mark. (In fact, Eyes Wide Shut is an almost scene-for-scene adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s story Traumnovelle, which Kubrick had been hoping to film for decades, so anyone interested in the plot could have read it in the original novel long before the movie’s release.) Early on, however, there was a widely circulated plot summary that ended up in a lot of places, including Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, saying that Cruise and Kidman played married psychiatrists who have affairs with their patients. Needless to say, this isn’t what the movie is about at all. But that inaccurate logline has stuck in my head for a long time, almost for as long as Davies thought about “Darmok,” and I’m currently writing my own version of it.

And if I’m not particularly concerned about revealing this detail here, it’s because I know that whatever story you—or anyone else—would write from this prompt would have little in common with the one I’m working on now. I’ve sometimes thought that if I were a writer looking for new ideas, I’d browse through the television listings to look for a logline that seemed interesting, and then deliberately not watch the movie. Here are a few culled at random from the thrillers section on Netflix: “Moving to a new town proves even more stressful for a teenager when she learns that the house next door was the site of a double murder.” “Convinced by a mysterious woman that a death row inmate is innocent, two brothers investigate and discover a case marred by betrayal and deceit.” “A detective plunges into a murky sea of corruption when he probes the connection between a rash of murders and a notorious New Orleans mobster.” These are intriguing ideas that could go in any number of directions, and the films themselves represent only one of a huge range of possibilities. If you’re curious, the movies in question are The House at the End of the Street, The Paperboy, and The Electric Mist—but if you haven’t seen them, why not make them your own?

Exley’s wristwatch, or the power of overlapping

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland’s script for L.A. Confidential is one of my favorite screenplays of all time, and one that has influenced my own work enormously. It’s a model of intelligent adaptation, condensing and reimagining James Ellroy’s original novel in consistently ingenious ways. It tells one of the last great complicated movie stories, with three strong protagonists, an abundance of interesting supporting characters, and a dozen interlocking plotlines. Its big set pieces—Exley’s interrogation of the Nite Owl suspects, Jack’s valediction, the shootout at the Victory Motel—are some of the most striking of the last twenty years. Yet one of my favorite scenes in the movie is among its least flashy moments, a quiet sequence that nonetheless sums up the film’s strengths, as well as providing a valuable illustration of one of the most useful narrative techniques I know.

The scene takes place about half an hour into the movie, shortly after Guy Pearce’s Lieutenant Exley has been promoted to detective. He’s seated at his desk one night, going over some casefiles, and smiles at two other officers packing up for the day. (“Punk kid,” one of them whispers to the other as they leave. “Who’s he trying to impress?”) A moment later, Exley puts on his glasses to study the clock across the room, which, compared to his own watch, is two minutes slow. As he crosses the deserted office to correct it, word comes over the radio of a homicide downtown. Exley grabs the radio, knocking over a desk lamp in his haste. He takes the call with studied nonchalance, then rushes out of the frame, muttering, “It’s mine.” Cut to the Nite Owl coffee shop, the scene of the case that will make his career. The entire sequence takes less than a minute—fifty-two seconds, to be precise—and it’s quickly overtaken by the gory images to come.

But this quiet transitional scene contains an incredible amount of information. In a few quick beats, we’re given a sense of Exley’s transition to detective, his diligence, his unpopularity among the other officers, his methodical nature, and his eagerness to make a name for himself. Best of all, these beats all overlap. As the other detectives leave the office, Exley is already putting on his glasses to check the clock on the wall, and the call comes over the radio as he’s crossing the room to fix it. Note that the beats themselves aren’t necessarily brilliant—a character who is such a straight-arrow that his watch is more accurate than the office clock isn’t exactly an earthshaking idea—and if the script had played them one at a time, they would have felt like items being checked off a list. Combined in this way, they’re graceful, brainy, and concise, all without drawing attention to themselves. Now that’s good writing.

When I first saw this scene, fifteen years ago, it made me appreciate how useful overlapping beats like this can be. L.A. Confidential itself does this more than once—as when White and Exley’s big confrontation shades without a pause into word that the Nite Owl suspects have escaped—but this scene provides a neat microcosm of Hanson and Helgeland’s methods. Whenever possible, it’s good to get one plot point rolling before the last one wraps up: it saves time, avoids unnecessary transitions, and lets the story feel like more of a piece. (It can also allow you to elide problematic plot points by presenting them as a fait accompli, as I explain with reference to one of my own scenes in The Icon Thief.) This can be especially useful in movies, which consist, by definition, of assemblages of individual scenes—hence the editing convention, pioneered in the seventies and now a cliché, of having the audio for one scene overlap with the one before it. You can do this in the editing room, but it’s much better to do it in the script. Exley’s wristwatch is a reminder of how elegant and effective it can be.

Fiction into film: L.A. Confidential

Of all the movies I’ve ever seen, Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential has influenced my own work the most. This isn’t to say that it’s my favorite movie of all time—although it’s certainly in the top ten—or even that I find its themes especially resonant: I have huge admiration for Ellroy’s talents, but it’s safe to say that he and I are operating under a different set of obsessions. Rather, it’s the structure of the film that I find so compelling: three protagonists, with three main stories, that interweave and overlap in unexpected ways until they finally converge at the climax. It’s a narrative structure that has influenced just about every novel I’ve ever written, or tried to write—and the result, ironically, has made my own work less adaptable for the movies.

Movies, you see, aren’t especially good at multiple plots and protagonists. Most screenplays center, with good reason, on a single character, the star part, whose personal story is the story of the movie. Anything that departs from this form is seen as inherently problematic, which is why L.A. Confidential’s example is so singular, so seductive, and so misleading. As epic and layered as the movie is, Ellroy’s novel is infinitely larger: it covers a longer span of time, with more characters and subplots, to the point where entire storylines—like that of a particularly gruesome serial killer—were jettisoned completely for the movie version. Originally it was optioned as a possible miniseries, which would have made a lot of sense, but to the eternal credit of Hanson and screenwriter Brian Helgeland, they decided that there might also be a movie here.

To narrow things down, they started with my own favorite creative tool: they made a list. As the excellent bonus materials for the film make clear, Hanson and Helgeland began with a list of characters or plot points they wanted to keep: Bloody Christmas, the Nite Owl massacre, Bud White’s romance with Lynn Bracken, and so on. Then they ruthlessly pared away the rest of the novel, keeping the strands they liked, finding ways to link them together, and writing new material when necessary, to the point where some of the film’s most memorable moments—including the valediction of Jack Vincennes and the final showdown at the Victory Motel, which repurposes elements of the book’s prologue—are entirely invented. And the result, as Ellroy says, was a kind of “alternate life” for the characters he had envisioned.

So what are the lessons here? For aspiring screenwriters, surprisingly few: a film like L.A. Confidential appears only a couple of times each decade, and the fact that it was made at all, without visible compromise, is one of the unheralded miracles of modern movies. If nothing else, though, it’s a reminder that adaptation is less about literal faithfulness than fidelity of spirit. L.A. Confidential may keep less than half of Ellroy’s original material, but it feels as turbulent and teeming with possibility, and gives us the sense that some of the missing stories may still be happening here, only slightly offscreen. Any attempt to adapt similarly complex material without that kind of winnowing process, as in the unfortunate Watchmen, usually leaves audiences bewildered. The key is to find the material’s alternate life. And no other movie has done it so well.

The lure of trashy fiction

Yesterday’s posting on the lure of bad movies, like Birdemic, raises the obvious question of whether the same allure clings to certain trashy books. At first glance, it might seem that the answer is no, at least not the same way: while a bad movie can be polished off in ninety minutes, even the junkiest novel usually requires a somewhat greater commitment, which raises the question of whether this is really the best use of one’s time. Life, it seems, is too short to knowingly waste on bad books, especially when so much good stuff remains unread. (Whenever I read a bad book, I feel as if I need to apologize personally to William Faulkner.) And yet I’ve learned a lot from bad fiction as well. As a writer, it’s useful to know something about every kind of literature, especially when you’re trying to make your mark in a genre that has generated its share of junk. And if you don’t read some trash, as well as better books, you’ll have no way of knowing if you can tell the difference.

The trouble, of course, is that one man’s trashy novel is another man’s masterpiece. The early novels of Thomas Harris, for instance, are hugely important to me, but diminishing returns set in about halfway through Hannibal, and by Hannibal Rising, there’s barely a single interesting page. But this, of course, is a judgment call, and some might draw the line much earlier or later. The same is true of Frederick Forsyth, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, or any other prolific popular novelist. Discriminating between the good (The Day of the Jackal) and the bad (The Negotiator) in a single writer’s body of work is an important part of developing one’s own taste. And sometimes a novelist will surprise you. I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to get into Tom Clancy—The Cardinal of the Kremlin nearly put me to sleep on a recent long bus trip—but I was delighted to discover that Without Remorse is a real novel, vicious, compelling, and with bravura set pieces that recall Forsyth, or even James Ellroy.

And sometimes even literary fiction can benefit from a touch of trash. I love John Updike, and believe that the Rabbit novels are among the essential cultural documents of the last century, but if I could own only one Updike novel, it would be Couples, which even his greatest fans seem to think he wrote at least partly for the money. And yet there’s something weirdly exhilarating about seeing Updike’s extraordinary prose and observational skills applied to blatantly commercial material. Updike can’t help being an artist, even when he’s writing a big sexy novel, and I’d argue that Couples, which isn’t that far removed from Peyton Place, was the novel he was born to write. (His later attempt at a “thriller,” in the form of Terrorist, is much less satisfying, and only comes to life whenever Updike revisits his old adulterous territory.)

But have I ever deliberately set out to read a novel that I knew was bad? Sure. While I haven’t managed to make it through Still Missing, for one, I love reading the bestsellers of yesteryear, embodied in the rows of yellowing paperbacks that line the shelves of thrift stores. The 1970s was a particularly rich era for trash. During my move from New York last year, the only book I kept in my empty apartment was a battered copy of Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, which I enjoyed immensely, especially when I mentally recast all the characters with actors from Mad Men. And I’m a little embarrassed to admit how quickly I plowed through Irving Wallace’s The Fan Club—a terrible book, and much less interesting than Wallace himself, but remarkably evocative of its era in popular fiction. Such books may not be great, but they’re an undeniable part of a writer’s education. (As long as they aren’t all you read.)