The dominant forms of fictional narrative in our culture are the novel, the stage play and the motion picture (including television drama). I have had some experience of all three. I have been writing prose fiction for more than 30 years and think of myself primarily as a novelist. But some years ago I wrote a stage play, The Writing Game, which has had three professional productions; and over the same period I have adapted my novel, Nice Work, Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit and The Writing Game, for television. Drawing upon that experience I want to explore what makes a writer tend towards one narrative medium rather than another, and what draws people to cross over from one to another.
The choice of narrative medium is determined by a combination of factors: innate or genetic talent; personal temperament as formed by personal circumstances; and the wider cultural/historical/institutional context in which the writer operates. On this last point, it is clear that if Shakespeare had been born in the 19th century instead of the 16th century, he would have been a novelist rather than a dramatist, because the Victorian theatre was simply not capable of accommodating a creative genius of that order. A confirmation of that judgement is the case of Dickens-a genius of comparable stature to Shakespeare, who became a great novelist, although his natural bent was towards the theatre. Dickens was addicted to the theatre, loved to act in and produce amateur theatricals and charades, and finally killed himself by enormously successful, intensely theatrical public readings of his own work. In the Elizabethan age, he would have been a dramatist rather than a novelist.
Likewise, the fact that so many British novelists have in the last two decades written original screenplays or screen adaptations of their own or other novelists' work-something very rare in the 1950s and 1960s-has a great deal to do with the expansion of the television networks and their hours of broadcasting, the opening up of British television to independent producers, the shift in taste from studio-based drama (essentially theatrical in its conventions) to the more novelistic, location-based filmed drama, and the success of Channel Four as a commissioner of low budget movies of artistic quality, provoking the other channels to compete in the same area. These developments created a market for screenplays that could not be satisfied by a relatively small cadre of professional television playwrights such as those who dominated the medium in the era of Play for Today.
If such material factors have an effect on individual careers, personal temperament and biography come into play, too. From reading literary biographies it is my impression that novelists are often people who were lonely and isolated in early life-either through being only children or through illness-and were thus thrown back on the resources of fantasy and imagination that private reading affords. They tend to be introspective and depressive; they like to observe rather than participate; in the Freudian sense they are anal-retentive types, hoarders of information, jealously possessive about their work, often perversely reluctant to finish it and let it go.
Playwrights are likely to be more extrovert, exhibitionist, gregarious, manic and oral. But it is hard to draw the profile of the typical screenplay writer in the same way, partly because of the overlap of this role with that of director. People who have a natural bent towards making movies usually want to be directors, writing their own screenplays. Screenplay writers who are not directors rarely begin their careers as such, but move into it from some other kind of writing-novels or stage plays-where they may have been used to much more direct control over their material. In fact, these three forms-novel, stage play, screenplay-may be distinguished according to the diminishing degree of artistic control that the writer has over the work as it is received by the audience.
the novelist's medium is the written word, one might almost say the printed word; the novel as we know it was born with the invention of printing. Typically, the novel is consumed by a silent, solitary reader, who may be anywhere at the time-in bed, on the beach, on a train. I even knew a man who in the 1950s used to read while he was driving across the great empty prairies of America. Nowadays he would have novels on audio-cassettes to listen to-a new form of storytelling that has become hugely popular in the age of the traffic jam. (Whether these artefacts should be categorised as prose fiction or drama remains an open question.) The paperback novel is, however, still the cheapest, most portable and adaptable form of narrative entertainment. It is limited to a single channel of information-writing. But within that restriction it is the most versatile of narrative forms. The narrative can go, effortlessly, anywhere: into space, people's heads, their bodies, palaces, prisons and pyramids, without any consideration of cost or practical feasibility. It can be, if we include the short story under the category of novel, virtually any length. In determining the shape and content of his narrative, the writer of prose fiction is constrained by nothing except purely artistic criteria.
This does not necessarily make his task any easier than that of the writer of plays and screenplays, who must always be conscious of practical constraints such as budgets, performance time, casting requirements and so on. The very infinity of choice enjoyed by the novelist is a source of anxiety and difficulty. But the novelist does retain absolute control over his text until it is published and received by the audience. He may be advised by his editor to revise his text, but if the writer refused to meet this condition no one would be surprised. It is not unknown for a well established novelist to deliver his or her manuscript and expect the publisher to print it exactly as written. However, not even the most well established playwright or screenplay writer would submit a script and expect it to be performed without any rewriting. This is because plays and motion pictures are collaborative forms of narrative, using more than one channel of communication.
The production of a stage play involves, as well as the words of the author, the physical presence of the actors, their voices and gestures as orchestrated by the director, spectacle in the form of lighting and "the set," and possibly music. In film, the element of spectacle is more prominent in the sequence of visual images, heightened by various devices of perspective and focus (close-up, wide shot, telephoto, zoom, and so on), all controlled by the directing and editing process which imposes a uniform point of view on all the spectators. In film, too, music tends to be more pervasive and potent than in straight drama. So, although the script is the essential basis of both stage play and film, it is a basis for subsequent revision negotiated between the writer and the other creative people involved; in the case of the screenplay, the writer may have little or no control over the final form of his work. Contracts for the production of plays protect the rights of authors in this respect. They are given "approval" of the choice of director and actors and have the right to attend rehearsals (and are usually paid expenses for doing so). Often a good deal of rewriting takes place in the rehearsal period and sometimes there is an opportunity for more rewriting during previews before the official opening night. The playtext is not usually published until the acting script has been agreed by all concerned.
In film or television work, on the other hand, the screenplay writer usually has no contractual right to this degree of consultation. Practice in this respect varies very much from one production company to another, and according to the nature of the project and the individuals involved. As a rule, television, at least in Britain, is more friendly towards writers and more apt to involve them in the production and post-production process, than feature films. A friend of mine who adapted his own novel for a feature film made in Hollywood was banned from the set on the ground that he was interfering too much.
In adapting Nice Work for television, Chris Menaul, the director, made it clear that he did not want me present throughout rehearsals. (This was probably because, inexperienced in these matters, I intervened over-enthusiastically at the first rehearsal I attended.) Instead he invited me in at the end of each day to watch a run-through of the scenes the actors had been working on and listened to my comments. I was welcome to observe as much of the shooting as I liked, but at this stage there is very limited opportunity for modifying the script or performances. Although I was also free to observe the fine-cut editing, the director and his editor had already worked out the basic selection and sequence of shots. In the finished product there were many shots and sequences that were in effect new content, added by the director on his own initiative. For example, Vic Wilcox, driving away from his "goodbye" scene with Robyn Penrose in melancholy mood, with Randy Crawford singing of broken hearts on the car's hi-fi, suddenly becomes aware that he is surrounded on the road by Riviera Sunbed vans belonging to the covert business venture of his moonlighting colleague Brian Everthorpe; he is so tickled by the absurdity of the situation that he bursts out laughing. This, the final image of Vic, gives a welcome lift of spirits to his character and the audience. Not only was this Chris Menaul's idea, but I did not even know he had planned it until I saw the rough cut of the final episode.
In short, while the script is going through its various drafts, the writer is in the driver's seat, albeit receiving advice and criticism from the producer and the director. But once the production is under way, artistic control over the project tends to pass to the director. This is a fact overlooked by most journalistic critics of television drama, who tend (unlike film critics) to give all the credit or blame for success or failure of a production to the writer and actors, ignoring the contribution, for good or ill, of the director. In the case of Nice Work, I did feel occasional frustration and resentment at having artistic control taken out of my hands; however, I have to admit that in almost every respect the results justified the director's judgement.
In this area much depends on the authority and experience of the writer, and his relationship with the producer and the director. My own feeling is that without a certain amount of friction between them the result will be uninspired; some conflict and mutual criticism is healthy. On the other hand, unresolved disagreements can have an unhappy effect on the final product. As writer, you may win an argument with your director about a particular scene, but you cannot make him shoot it with conviction if he does not believe in it. No wonder that writers who work mainly in this medium end up wanting to direct their own work (Peter Barnes and the late Dennis Potter). The danger in so doing is that you lose the creative tension of collaboration.
adapting novels for film or television almost always involves a process of reduction, condensation and deletion. This can be very frustrating for the writer, but it can also be illuminating. Working on the script of Nice Work, I was struck by how much of the dialogue and narrative description in a given scene in the novel I could dispense with, while still getting across the same point. This was even more striking in the case of Martin Chuzzlewit. This does not necessarily mean that the dialogue and description of the original were superfluous. It is a matter of the type of attention demanded of the audience by narrative in each medium, and a matter of the type of redundancy each employs.
I do not mean "redundancy" in the usual colloquial sense of material which is unnecessary, but in a technical sense. In information theory, redundancy is the surplus of signal over message. It is essential to human communication because a message with zero redundancy would overload the receiver's capacity to assimilate the information. The repetitions, hesitations, interjections and self-glossing which characterise casual speech are functional. A prepared speech has less redundancy; a literary text still less; and they correspondingly demand more concentrated attention on the receiver's part. But they still contain a good deal of redundancy, and must do so. In a novel such redundancy would include the repeated allusion to certain traits by which characters are identified, as well as speech tags such as "he said" and "she said." Strictly speaking a character trait needs to be described only once, but it assists comprehension if we are constantly reminded of it. And usually we can infer who is speaking in a scene of dialogue from the content and the layout on the page, but speech tags make reading easier.
Stage drama, which consists mostly of speech, imitates and reproduces the redundancy of real speech with various degrees of stylisation. In some modern dramatists, such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, this is taken to an extreme, so that the dialogue seems to consist almost entirely of redundant language, whose function is purely phatic (merely establishing contact between the two speakers), leaving us in the dark as to what is being communicated.
In film, redundancy is mainly on the level of the image. We are shown much more of the landscape of the Western, for example, than we strictly need for the articulation of the narrative. In a film of modern urban life, we see more of people moving through time and space-driving a car, walking down a street -than we strictly need to follow the story. Such sequences are like the repetition of character traits or the speech tags of prose fiction. The pictures tell us what we already know-that this girl is young and vital, that this man is middle aged and affluent-providing intermittent relief from the bombardment of narrative information. Because this redundancy is built into the cinematic image, cinematic dialogue can afford less redundancy. The more repetition, expansion, checking back by the interlocutors and self-glossing there is in filmic dialogue, the more artificial and tedious it is likely to seem, because we will be getting redundancy on two channels at once.
In adapting a novel for the screen there is a natural temptation to dramatise the information supplied by narrative description in the original text by turning it into dialogue, but this should be resisted. Where possible it should be translated into action, gesture, imagery. Much of it can be dispensed with altogether. The novel, at least in the realist tradition, is bound by a code of plausibility based on cause and effect; and because the reader is in control of his reception of the text-can stop, ponder, re-read and check back-this code requires a great deal of explanation, covering of contingencies, anticipation of the reader's objections. Much of this apparatus is unnecessary in film: partly because films do not give their viewers time to think through the logical implications of what is shown; and partly because the presentation of events in them sweeps away the audience's scepticism by its vividness and immediacy. (The video recorder does give the viewer the same control over a film as the reader has over a book, but using the pause and reverse buttons is much more disruptive of the aesthetic experience of film, than stopping and referring back in reading a book.)
what makes a writer such as myself who has specialised in one narrative form experiment with another? There are different reasons, some aesthetic, some materialistic. Writing screenplays is a useful source of supplementary income for a novelist (although writing for television is not particularly well paid), and a successful television serial will boost the sales of the novel on which it is based. These were welcome effects of my involvement in television adaptation, but not the essential motivation for it.
In 1985 I sold the television rights in Small World to Granada and observed the long and complex process of "development," production and post-production which brought it to the screen as a six-part serial in 1988. I did not feel that I had the time available, or indeed the experience, to propose adapting the novel myself, and that task was ably undertaken by Howard Schuman. But I was shown the scripts in various drafts, invited to comment on them, attended rehearsals and made suggestions to Howard and Bob Chetwyn, the director. I got to know the actors and enjoyed talking to them about the project; in due course I observed some of the actual filming. I became fascinated by the whole business of movie-making and determined to get involved myself at the next opportunity. After abortive attempts to adapt Out of the Shelter and How Far Can You Go? I finally had the satisfaction of seeing Nice Work through to a successful production. This experience coincided with my decision to retire from academic life and become a full time writer. In many ways the collaborative activity of making television drama has replaced the collegiate activity of university teaching in my life. Both yield satisfactions, and frustrations, that are absent from the solitary activity of novel writing.
All my ventures into television drama to date have been adaptations of stories-my own or other writers'-that already exist in another form. The challenge is to find ways of translating the story from one medium to another, balancing the claims of the original to be faithfully rendered against the aesthetic requirements and possibilities of the new medium. It is essentially work of a technical, problem-solving kind-creative up to a point, but not as taxing and anxiety-making as writing something from scratch. My stage play, The Writing Game, was an original work, like my novels. It concerns the relationships of three writers who are tutors on a short residential course for creative writing students-relationships of sexual and professional power, possession and rivalry. The play originated in the experience of teaching such a course myself-not because its plot bears any resemblance to what happened on that course, but because it struck me that the bare situation possessed the classic dramatic unities of time, place and action. Indeed it would be true to say that I invented the plot of my play to fulfil the dramatic possibilities inherent in the situation.
Another source of the play was my experience over the last decade of reading my work in public, at literary festivals, bookshop signings and other meet-the-author events which have become a ubiquitous feature of the marketing of fiction in the last 15 years. There is an element of performance in these occasions which I thought would lend itself to incorporation in a play, and provide a way of dramatising what seems inherently undramatic: the silent and private business of writing and reading prose fiction. In the course of The Writing Game, each of the three writers reads from their work to the audience-who stand in, as it were, for the circle of students who are supposed to be listening. I could not have any of my characters read a whole short story or a substantial chapter, as they would have done in real life, because three such readings would take up most of the time available for the whole play; so devices had to be found to limit the duration of the three readings by interruptions of various kinds, which themselves led to further developments in the plot. This is a good example of how the practical constraints of dramatic form affect the narrative content of the drama.
There are two further aspects of writing drama (whether for the stage or screen) which are absent from the novel and which may tempt the novelist out of the workshop inside his head where he has complete control. One is the extra dimension of feeling that can come from performance-the thrilling discovery that your words had more potential expressivity than you were aware of yourself. The second is the possibility of simultaneous communication on several different channels. For all its versatility and flexibility, writing only works on one channel-one word, or word group, at a time. When reading a novel, we cannot take in a line of dialogue and simultaneously observe the reaction of the person it is addressed to. We cannot fuse the description of the hero and of the sunset into which he rides into a single instantaneous image, let alone hear the strains of appropriate music at the same time. But a play or a film, when it works well, can achieve that rich synaesthesia. For the writer that seems worth a certain sacrifice of artistic autonomy and control.
