Conversations in the Book Trade

Thursday, April 11, 2024

The following poem is part of a chapbook that is something of an international artistic first: each of the poems also exists as an authorial moviepoem — that is, a poetic video in which all elements are created (authored) by one person.

I wrote the poem in the late aughts, soon after S and I married. It’s about returning home from work on a bitterly cond winter night but also being (and this is a curious psychological effect that winter has) filled with memories from childhood and adolescence.

Baram 1

While February-riding

My dark silver bike,

A Canadian wind

On a Korean street

Sharp-freshes my cheeks

In the dead of city night.

This cold poverty

Underlying the urban

Is nature,

And it is the gift

Of an objective god.

This cold is timeless

It is pure.

It links cities,

Nations,

And all the times

Of life.

I was twelve

When I first felt this wind.

I mean, consciously.

And now,

Cycling home against it again,

I head toward my wife,

Dimly recognizing

Its unnameable value,

Its heat,

Its love.

- Finn Harvor

Tuesday, April 09, 2024

On the concept of the Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative (April 10/24)

These are sample pages of a novel (entitled The Business Army) written in two forms: as a conventional novel and as a screenplay-novel that includes both illustrations (storyboard roughs) and archival photos.

The idea of the latter version of the novel is to create a cinematic experience in the mind of the reader.

The screenplay novel manifesto 1

This was originally published in 2006, and things have changed since then; for example, I bought Michael Turner’s screenplay cum novel and read it, and consider it an interesting evolution in the novel form. However, I would like to emphasize two things: first, the importance of making any hybrid novel/screenplay project a visually inviting work; the second, the degree to which book people are fond of the traditional novel form needs to be acknowledged by a writer wishing to reach a significant audience. That is, a hybrid novel/ screenplay also needs the belletristic sophistication of a well written conventional novel.

From earlier:

What is a screenplay-novel?

It's a novel. But it's written in the form of a screenplay.

How did you get the idea of writing a screenplay-novel?

Over time, it dawned on me that I treated movies the way I treated novels: I would appreciate their stories in a similar way, and talk about them afterwards the way a person might talk about a novel. In fact, I do this more often with movies ... mainly, I think, because nowadays movie-watchers vastly outnumber novel readers. There are many people you can have a conversation with about a particular movie, even a very serious movie. It's a lot harder to do that about a particular book, especially if it's literary.

One "aha" moment for me was reading the published screenplay of "Out of Africa". My wife had a copy of it, and it was lying around the house. I live in South Korea, and these kinds of scripts are enormously popular here. They're marketed as an English learning tool (English script on one page, with Korean-language "key points" on the other). But as I read the script I found I really enjoyed it in and of itself. And then I thought, if this works as a book form of an existing movie, why wouldn't it work as a book form of a movie that's never been made? In other words, why not use the same combination of stills and script?

And then there's the creative process involved: Unless writing autobiographically, I like imagining scenes as if they were in a movie. My imagination seems to naturally work that way.

Has this idea been done before?

There's a long tradition of writing satire in the form of a screenplay -- you know, some imagined scene, for example, some inane conversation in the White House. And there is a tradition of teleromans in some countries. These are basically comics made of photographs, not drawings.

But there are no examples of a literary novel written in screenplay form that I've seen. At least, this was true when the idea first came to me. Since then, people have given me examples. One was a script by Michael Turner entitled "American Whisky Bar". I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it. But some time after it was published, it was produced by CITY-TV and Bruce McDonald as a live television drama. I saw that broadcast. The broadcast was really more like a 1950s-style televised play than anything else. So I don't know if it qualifies.

Personally, I think people will come up with other examples and this will turn into a long-running debate over who was first. And I doubt it will ever be satisfactorily resolved. Instead, what I'd like to emphasize is I'm calling for the screenplay-novel to exist as a distinct form of novel. In other words, I'm hoping that many serious writers will adopt this way of writing novels -- at least, for some of their work.