Our Debts to the Past

Shadows & Ink 2025-04-29

Hey you!

It's me and I'm only a day late…

Just* finished the first** draft of Marshall 8!

*- finished it yesterday afternoon

**- it's only the first screenplay draft, not the whole book... But all will come clear…

Took this photo as I went for a mystery ramble up the hill and found a new route down.

Great fun.

---

INT. KITCHEN - MORNING

A middle-aged man sits at his kitchen table, furiously tapping away at his iPad’s keyboard. Yes, he’s one of those men of a certain age who has a keyboard for his iPad. He looks like he collects vinyl too.

ED
I'm pleased with this. Took me only seven days to execute on it, thanks to my head being clear, and I've got minimal (self-inflicted) editorial notes and even added a new five-chapter chunk to make the ending much better. Still a long way to go with this book, but this is the bulk of it done. It's totted up to about 50,000 words just now in this format, so I'll probably inflate over time to around 100k, which is in line with the other Marshall books -- though the last one was 110k, which was MONSTROUS.

READER
Why on earth are you, a novelist, writing a screenplay?

ED
Have you ever read one?

READER
(Frowns)
Despite being a vessel for you to pretend you're talking to a real reader in the format of a screenplay, no -- I haven't. And of course I can’t put headings in centre format, so we’ll just have to pretend this is a screenplay.

ED
Okay, then. Well, they're pretty straightforward documents. You've probably seen similar stuff when you read Shakespeare at school. Here's an excerpt from ALIENS. Yes, that ALIENS:

(See this at https://www.scriptreaderpro.com/screenplay-example/ and ignore the double spaces after full stops — tut tut)

It basically just gives you a skeleton form of the story. Snappy way of saying when and where we are. Blocks of dialogue (so actors can skim it and see how much screen time they have) and summarised but focused action. And why do I write that? Well, I want to be able to write screenplays, so there's that. Also, there are accelerators in it -- stuff like, if you press CMD-3 it adds the character name (so you don't have to format and capitalise manually). And the app I use is smart enough to detect who's talking in a scene, so if it's Marshall and, say, Elliot, if the last line was Marshall, it'll suggest Elliot -- but I might want it to be Jolene, so I'll type Jo and it'll narrow it down. It tracks characters on a tab and locations on another one. It all just makes things so bloody quick.

READER
And what do I do with it? I mean, what do you do with it?

ED
Well, this will get edited by me, then by James, my primary editor. And I'll have a finalised screenplay -- you could film it. But it's not been optimised for it. The screenplay for Marshall 7 was something like 360pp which is way too long for a film -- minute per page! -- but could be six episodes. But it's really just optimised for a novel, so there'd be cuts you'd do to that (not ending phone calls, etc) but maybe more internal cuts between scenes so redundant visual stuff is missed, stuff that'd enrich a novel, where I'd have Marshall in a location to describe it and bring, say, St Boswell's to life. But then you'd have visual transitions in. So it'd maybe balance out.

READER
I think that makes sense. So you've got it finalised at that point?

ED
I do. And I've got a Word macro, which I coded up in January, which--

READER
Wait, what? A macro?

ED
A macro is some code which Word runs on the text and it performs actions I tell it to. This one tidies and converts the manuscript.

READER
Tidies how?

ED
Main thing it does is to colour code the character's dialogue.

READER
Why do that?

ED
To save my audiobook narrator a ton of prep time. Normally, he goes through the book and colour codes the dialogue per character. E.g. Marshall is blue, Elliot is pink, etc. He doesn't have to do that.

READER
What else?

ED
I'm adding in quote marks around the dialogue so I don't have to. Change CAPITALS to Title Case, where needed, to save me time.

READER
That sounds nifty.

ED
Thank you.

READER
Then what?

ED
Then it's in Scrivener, my app of choice. I'll do two rounds on that. The first is what I call a construction/formatting draft, where I run through it and make it not a screenplay but a novel. It'll be clunky but it'll be a novel. And my Spidey sense will be tingling if there's anything funky going on -- but I hope that's all been snared by the outline or screenplay edits. Then I'll read it and refine it so all the fancy stuff is fancy and there's enough reaction, etc.

READER
Wow. That all sounds impressive.

ED
Thank you.

Ed realises the reader isn’t real and is merely a device he’d created to discuss this nonsense.

FADE OUT

---

Hopefully that was interesting and not too confusing.

The next week is going to be me editing the screenplay and then sending it off. Hopefully get it done by the weekend and then I can move on to the final of the four old book edits. Having this new thing to attack has been brilliant and a real tonic for the soul.

I’ve got a hard deadline with this chunk of work, as I’m going under the knife again on the 27th May to get a second ablation to, hopefully, permanently fix my condition and prevent any more bouts of Atrial Fibrillation. But fingers crossed the recover will be light.

Have a great week.

-- Ed