(Today I hand my blog over to Mr Damian McNicholl. Welcome, Damian…)

Writing for the Silver Screen:

With the recent publication of my new novel, Twisted Agendas, an offbeat tale set in London and New York City, it’s time to get cracking on the screenplay of it. You might think it weird that a novelist is tackling a screenplay but it’s not as silly as it sounds. I dipped my toe in the water with my first novel, A Son Called Gabriel, when a film director optioned the rights.

Like most people do when they first begin to write for film, I thought what could be easier than writing something that’s just a bunch of dialog for actors. So I rushed off to a Manhattan bookstore specializing in selling scripts and purchased two, including Barfly starring Mickey Rourke because I liked that film. My head spun after I finished reading them. They were so short yet complicated. How the hell did the screenwriters manage to make the characters and stories so utterly compelling in 120 pages (industry standard practice) and still leave yards of brilliant white space between action and dialog? I wondered. (Film people like to see lots of white space on the page-not because they’re dumb but because each page represents one minute off screen time.)

I had my critics who thought I was crazy adapting my first novel for the screen, that I’d be too emotionally connected to the material to ruthlessly cut, cut and cut again. After I finished the first draft, I almost bought into their logic. I’d tried so hard to be true to my novel that the script was rubbish. A bloated mess of vanilla rubbish. Yet the attempt helped me understand that a movie should not simply be my novel brought to life. I learned I had to pick the essential truths of my novel, use them as the bones and then add muscle layer by layer until a visual and enthralling story emerged.

Flash forward eighteen months of reading about the craft on the Internet and rewriting and my script has become lean and much tighter. Indeed, I ended up taking the film version much further than I ever took the novel. That was a real surprise. And very satisfying. With some trepidation, I entered the script into this year’s Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting that’s organized by the Oscars folks and was joyfully shocked when it reached the Quarterfinals.

Will adapting Twisted Agendas be easier or go faster? I don’t know. It’ll sure be challenging because the story involves four characters vying for screen time: the protagonist Danny, a young fellow who’s fleeing his domineering father and fiancee Susan; Piper, a feisty American ex-pat studying at the LSE whose younger brother died in a fire that resulted in a difficult relationship with her mother; Julia, a posh immigration officer who becomes Danny’s landlady; and Mrs. Hartley, Julia’s elderly next-door neighbor, who writes letters to the Queen Mother as if they’re best friends and who despises Julia. In addition, Julia and Piper are independent-minded and won’t be content to play sidekick to Danny. They’ll take a bit of handling. It’ll be fun.
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About the author: Damian McNicholl was born in Northern Ireland and attended law school at University College, Cardiff. His first novel, ‘A Son Called Gabriel’ was an American Booksellers Association Booksense Pick and Lambda Literary Awards finalist. Damian currently living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and ‘Twisted Agendas‘ is his latest novel.

Desperate to escape his predetermined existence, Danny decides to break out from life in Northern Ireland, and move to London. He then meets Piper, a friendly and outgoing American girl on a quest of her own.

Two very different worlds are thrown together as Danny is willingly absorbed into unfamiliar territory. However, when the Hammersmith Bridge is bombed, Piper disappears without a trace and Danny finds himself the centre of a police investigation, hounded by whispers of the IRA.

Dark and humorous, Danny and Piper s story is one of dysfunctional parenting, clashing motives and twenty-something’s negotiating love and big city life.

As a lover of fiction that tackles dysfunctional families, this darkly delicious narrative captured and held my interest. It was the sharpness of the dialogue that kept me and the authenticity of voice that made me relax into the read. But also the perfectly paced delivery and the balance of dark and light, it all fused to engage. I highly recommend ‘Twisted Agendas‘ to you.