Experiment in Writing: Scripts to Novels

When I wrote "The Sins of the Fathers," I wrote it as an average-length novel. It's about 300+ pages.

I first wrote "Unacceptable Risk" and "American Jihad" as screenplays, however, and they were each somewhere between 90 to 110 screenplay pages.

After I wrote them as screenplays, I thought that I should go ahead and turn them into novels that I could publish as ebooks. I thus went about converting my screenplays to novels.

I could have gone all out and added a lot of description and talked about the color of flowers in the fields and the interior of the cars people were driving and the color of the pants and shirts everyone was wearing and what a convertible looks like and on and on and on and on. 

Instead, I decided to write the novels more like two-hour movies than 700-page books. 

Why? 

Well, a while back I read something about writing in the past and writing today. Someone said that when Charles Dickens wrote about an elephant, he needed to go into great detail about how it looked and felt, etc., because most of his readers had never seen an elephant. Today, however, we don't need to describe every detail of things that our readers see all of the time. It made sense to me.

Since then, I have also read numerous novels that were very long, and I realized that most did not need to be so long to tell the story. I thought, "Wow, if theses novels were more concise, I could read many more great stories instead of reading detailed descriptions of a field of flowers or a cloudy sky."

Then, I thought about the world we live in today where everyone has so many things that are vying for our attention. We can watch movies, play video games, get on Facebook, go for a drive, take our children to the park, read other books, write posts for our blog, write a screenplay or novel, etc. So, I thought, "Why make books so long when we can easily tell the story faster?" 

As a result, my novels "Unacceptable Risk" and "American Jihad" are approximately 120 to 130 pages each - about the length of screenplays. That's short for novels, but they can be read quickly, the stories can be enjoyed, and then the reader can do something else. Not a lot of wasted time. I like this system, and I did the same thing for my next three novels. I wrote them as full stories but with minimal unnecessary detail. 

Please check them out for yourself, and see if this type of writing works. I hope that you'll enjoy the writing and feel that I didn't waste your time but still told a good story.

You can purchase "The Sins of the Fathers" and "American Jihad" for $2.99 each and "Unacceptable Risk" for just 99 cents at
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_aut?_encoding=UTF8&index=books&field-author=Dean+Malchik

Happy reading.

Dean

P.S. My next novel, tentatively titled "The Life and Death of Israel Goldberg," will likely be more than 400 pages but only because it NEEDS to be.

Taking the Marketing Plunge

Over the years, I've completed six novels. Unfortunately, once I finished them, I didn't really have much desire to try to find a publisher for them. I just wanted to write more books.

Now, however, I realize that if I want people to read what I've worked so hard at writing, I had better start marketing my work.

This blog is one attempt to do so.

Three of my books - "The Sins of the Fathers," "American Jihad" and "Unacceptable Risk" - are available at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=dean+malchik for just $2.99 each.

Feel free to buy one or all of them. It's for a good cause. Really.

Dean