Every story of mine starts as a series of images flickering on an internal screen. All of Me began with the image of a boy lost and alone in the dark, talking to the darkness and listening to the multiple voices that spoke back. A story in Washer of the Dead condensed around the image of hanks of hair flying in the dusk air above the roofs of an ancient city. Whisper in the Wind started with the image of a crumbling wall, cracks stuffed with papers that flew free in the wind like sudden butterflies.
Image courtesy: Times of India
As I tease at the meaning of the images a story begins to form around them. I take long walks through the beautiful village of Moira and the story grows with each step. It could end up as a screenplay or a book. The choice is never mine. Each story comes with a particular inbred imperative. Yet the two processes of writing are very different. I tend to work on several projects at any time, bouncing from one to the other as I get bored. But writing a screenplay and a book simultaneously is impossible, because the craft for each is so different that it takes a very deliberate effort and several writing exercises to switch from one to the other.
The first fundamental difference is the one that is discussed endlessly in online forums on writing – are you a pantser or a plotter? Do you see story as a found object or as a carefully constructed one? Stephen King most famously flies by the seat of his pants. He finds characters and then lets them lead him, doing little or no plotting, feeling out the shape of the story as he goes along. I regard him with some envy. Having spent half a lifetime writing for film and television I am now hard wired for plotting.
All screen stories are, above all, careful architectural constructs. In the construction lies the effects that you pull off – the rising tension, the twists and turns, the grand climax. For me, the process involves drawing long graphs across which sprawl the movements of the film, rise and fall carefully traced, character arcs tracked. Even when you type it all up, Final Draft is a hard taskmaster, each page exactly one minute long, your clock ticking even as you hit the keys. There is no question of being a pantser if you are writing for the screen. And if you are writing for television, and only one of the 8 or more writers that can end up working simultaneously on a daily soap – you are an absolute slave to the story outline that is handed to you! A minor change in the episode you are writing could throw off an entire month’s worth of plotting.
Shifting to books, I carry my habit of plotting with me. But there are no graphs. Because books go where films cannot, inside the head of the character. And characters begin to speak up and take over. I find myself led by the characters far more than I ever would be on a film. And what are a whimsical and moody lot they are, making me throw away large chunks of carefully worked plot! Working on Whisper in the Wind, the finicky Parsee protagonist refused to co-operate and be any kind of hero. One evening it suddenly came to me – Blood! He’s afraid of blood. He has haemophilia. And suddenly all the other bits and pieces of story made sense.
In All of Me, the protagonist is a young boy who has been locked away in a dark room for years and has developed multiple personalities he calls The Family. I thought I knew all the family, but, writing a chapter, they suddenly began to whisper uneasily about someone else. None of them dared tell me about him. It wasn’t till a hundred pages later that I learnt that he was the dark twin of the protagonist, the multiple personality locked so deep inside his head that The Family didn’t dare speak of him. I typed a hundred pages literally begging them to let me know who it was!
Being able to show the inside of a character’s head, to speak intimately in their voice, gives books a dimension that films can never have. No matter how finely etched, a character on the screen will always stand outside of us, never whisper directly into our ears. Films have experimented with showing the inside world of a character – but inevitably in an external way, through voice overs, visual point of view, visual metaphors. It is a defining characteristic of story-telling on the page that there is no screen between us and the character, and it is also a characteristic that dominates the entire process.
For me the second element that dominates the process of writing a book is the privileged position of the writer. You are at the heart of it. And you bring to it your own individual style. In your use of word and phrase, the images you describe, the way you unravel your characters – every choice builds your fingerprint style.
When you are writing a screenplay, all you are doing is laying down a detailed blue print. While screenplays belong to certain genres and suggest a certain style of storytelling, the final style is brought to them by the director. A director’s style holds across various films, no matter who the writer is. The writer of a film is only one of many technicians, a very highly privileged one no doubt, but just one of many.
The technicians of a film build a very concrete and complete reality. From the art direction to the costumes, it’s all worked out and all there on screen, well pre-digested. So, films end up engaging what I call the ‘outer eye’. There is a passivity to the viewing experience. Certainly, films can engage your emotion and your mind – but they stay outside of you. Books are far more demanding. You have to take yourself into a book.
The book is only completed when it meets the experiential and emotional world of the reader. The inner eye is engaged – the reader becomes the screen, and the light that illumines the images is the reader’s own, condensed out of the stuff of his own life. And so, even though I enjoy writing for films, it is books that hold my heart. I know they will go out into the world and engage in intense conversations with the inner world of other people.
For a writer the biggest difference between books and films is the actual writing experience. Films are intensely collaborative. You might write the first draft of the screenplay, but after that there will be feedback from directors, actors, and everyone including the spot boy on the set. Never disregard the spot boy’s advice. They have been watching stories being made for twenty odd years and have a keen eye and ear for the whole business. In fact, my attitude is to never disregard anyone’s advice. Wherever the suggestion comes from, if it adds to the film, I fall upon it gleefully and keep the film growing.
Films are also a vastly expensive business and sometimes, just to get the film made, you will be asked to make all kinds of ‘production’ adjustments – rewriting for cheaper locations, to fit in actor’s dates, to just get the damn thing finished in time. Films are a business and it’s all part of the business. It can leave you feeling more like a hustler than a writer. But it takes a village to grow a film and you had better get used to it.
To go from that, to the solitary bliss of a book is indescribable. You are the director, producer, art director and entire crew rolled into one. And you can let it all rip! The finale in Tiger by the Tail featured 250 tigers marching with the Red Army through Tianamen Square. In Boy No.32 I blew up a building, burnt down a warehouse and had a hundred cows stampede through the middle of a film set. Monkey See Monkey Do featured a frantic (entirely silent) fight between a gorilla and tiger that played around the bed of a snoring Queen while a young Prince George watched wide-eyed from his crib. Everything they will never have the budget to do in films? I put it in the books. And I do it in solitary splendor, a mighty God to my created worlds.
Whichever branching path I choose to walk with my story, it always begins the same way. With a series of dream like images that come from a place that is beyond words and construction. I like to think of it as a place where all the stories meet and all the dreamers are united in the great dream that spins the story of us.