Novies
Years ago I became fascinated with the screenplay form, and I wrote four movies in quick succession. Then I wondered what I would do with the scripts. Unsolicited screenplays almost never sell to film production companies, but I liked my stories and didn’t want to abandon them. So I set out to convert them to standard prose. I intended to strip them of camera direction and switch to past tense, but halfway through the first conversion I had a kind of epiphany. Nearly everybody grew up watching movies, so we’re all familiar with terms like “close-up,” “slow motion” and “offscreen.” What if I left that terminology in the new versions of the stories and retained the present tense? I tried a conversion that way and liked the result. The prose was engaging and had a sense of immediacy. I converted the other plays in the same way and christened the new form the novie (novel + movie = novie).
When I finished converting my screenplays, I began work on Toomer Davis and Rose Island. It was already blocked out as a play, so I wrote it as a novie but at twice the length of the others. I wanted to test the limits of the new form. Sometime later I wrote The Hunters as a novie because the story called for a big, cinematic presentation.
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