with Glenn Cooper
We are delighted to welcome novelist and screenwriter Glenn Cooper to Omnimystery News.
Glenn's new thriller is The Tenth Chamber (Lascaux Media; June 2014 trade paperback, audiobook and ebook formats). We asked him how writing screenplays is different from writing novels, and he titles his guest post for us today, "What a Novelist (Me) Learned from a Screenwriter (Also Me)".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Glenn Cooper
Before I wrote my first novel I wrote twenty screenplays. All sorts of screenplays — comedies, action, thrillers, dramas, science fiction. Screenwriting taught me many things, not the least of which was dealing with bone-crushing rejection. I suppose if past was prelude I wouldn't have made the switch to novels because I would have figured that it would be more of the same: sorry, no sale. But I gave it a shot.
As it turned out, there is an impressive list of novelists who have successfully straddled both writing worlds. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, William Goldman, James Agee, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck. I was none of these gents.
Yet I found that screenwriting had taught me some very useful things which gave me a leg up on writing a good novel.
Structure: A screenplay is all about structure. One act hurtles into the next act and the next. And each scene enables the following scene. It's like a chain of box cars on a train. If one car derails, the whole train is toast. In a movie, characters have big flowing arcs which matter. They learn things about themselves on their journey. The way the structure of the story stitches together with the character arcs makes or breaks the film.
Pace: Not every film is pacy but most successful genre films zip along quite briskly, thank you. Slow patches in an action-adventure or a thriller picture or even most comedies are the kiss of death.
Dialogue: You can't have a successful film with wooden, stilted dialogue. Dialogue is pretty much what a screenwriter has at his or her disposal. Action is described baldly, emotions even less so. It's all about what a character says.
Learning how to effectively structure a story, how to inject pace and energy, and how to put realistic dialogue into the mouths of my characters made my entry into the world of writing thriller novels very much easier. Thrillers are often densely plotted but without a tight structure, chaos and confusion easily seep in and make an awful mess of things. Remove pace from a thriller and you've got a rambling waste of space. And insert cardboard, awkward, unrealistic dialogue into your character's mouths and have them endlessly explain plot points to each other in boring speeches, and you've got a very bad book.
I'm not claiming that every good screenwriter can write a good novel, but I do believe that every one of my rejected or non-produced screenplays taught me something which made my eight novels better.
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Glenn Cooper has a degree in archaeology from Harvard and practiced medicine as an infectious diseases specialist. He was the CEO of a biotechnology company for almost twenty years, has written numerous screenplays and has produced three independent feature films. His novels have sold six million copies in thirty-one languages. He lives in Gilford, New Hampshire.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at GlennCooperBooks.com or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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The Tenth Chamber
Glenn Cooper
A Thriller
Abbey of Ruac, rural France — A medieval script is discovered hidden behind an antique bookcase. Badly damaged, it is sent to Paris for restoration, and there literary historian Hugo Pineau begins to read the startling fourteenth-century text. Within its pages lies a fanciful tale of a painted cave and the secrets it contains — and a rudimentary map showing its position close to the abbey. Intrigued, Hugo enlists the help of archaeologist Luc Simard and the two men go exploring.
When they discover a vast network of prehistoric caves, buried deep within the cliffs, they realize that they've stumbled across something extraordinary. And at the very core of the labyrinth lies the most astonishing chamber of all, just as the manuscript chronicled. But as they begin to unlock the ancient secrets the cavern holds, they find themselves at the centre of a dangerous game. One "accidental" death leads to another. And it seems that someone will stop at nothing to protect the enigma of the tenth chamber.
