with Ross Browne

John Robert Marlow joined The Editorial Department as a book editor in 2006. In 2007, he helped launch TED’s Screen Division. He now serves as Director of Development for the Book and Screen Divisions. Ever mindful of the commercial synergy between books and screenplays, John has been instrumental in improving TED's service offerings in both arenas. A published novelist and optioned screenwriter, John has quickly become an especially valuable resource for novelists, screenwriters—and those who aspire to success in both fields.

RSB: Tell me a little bit about what the term 'development' really means to you. and why you've chosen to focus on it so heavily in your work with TED

JRM: “Development,” at its best, is the process of bringing out or developing a story’s fullest potential. Sometimes that means making a good story great. More often, it means taking a promising story with flawed execution and bringing it up to a level where it can be presented to agents and publishers. Occasionally, it means taking a mess of a story with a brilliant concept, stripping away everything but the concept, and starting over.

RSB: Your approach to this has roots in both New York and Hollywood, and has been very well received in connection to both books and screenplays. What do you see as the main differences in the development perspectives of the book and film industries?

JRM: You don’t see a great deal of development in the book world, because agents and publishers tend to reject manuscripts that are not already in near-publishable form.

The function of agents and publishers is to sell something that people will buy. It’s not their job to make you a better writer, or help transform your not-quite-there manuscript into something salable. There are too many manuscripts to choose from, and too little time to work in-depth with every promising author, hoping things will turn out right.

These people are running a business, and if they spend too much time on “fixers,” they’ll be out of business. When you’re in a position to pick the cream of the crop, you do. It saves time, it saves money, and it ups the bottom line. That’s just the way it is.

When you are lucky enough to find an editor who’ll take the time to work with you—and there are some editors who still do this—it often takes months for them to get back to you with each set of notes, simply because they’re so busy. It might take a year or more to complete the process. The upside is that you get to decide which notes to do, and which to ignore.

Hollywood, on the other hand, rarely shoots a script that hasn’t undergone moderate to extensive development. The reason is simple. While it may cost a publisher $50,000 to put a midlist novel in bookstores—and that includes the author’s advance—screenplays often sell for $200,000 or more, and a film costing tens of millions is considered modest.

It literally costs a thousand times more to create a middle-of-the-pack, $50 million movie than it does to put out an average novel. Some movies—Dark Knight and Avatar being recent examples—cost in the neighborhood of $250 million.

This means two things. First, it means the people putting up the money are very, very concerned about making mistakes. That, in turn, makes them willing to invest additional time and money in the development process—often far more than a publisher would dream of spending to buy, print, distribute and advertise a book.

So you’ve got a fairly sophisticated development process at work. Sometimes, it works like a dream. Producer Julie Richardson—who recently optioned a script of mine—found Collateral when it was fifteen pages, and helped develop it into a script that persuaded Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith and director Michael Mann to sign on.

Things don’t always go so well. You can look at any bad movie and see the result. It’s not called “development hell” for nothing.

RSB: What do you think goes wrong in these cases? What's the weak link in the development chain?

JRM: When things go bad, the reason is almost invariably the same: too many people involved in the process. When you’ve got a writer executing story notes from ten different executives, a couple of actors, a producer and the director—each of whom may have a unique conception of what the movie should be, and none of whom are professional writers—the result can be less than ideal, confused or chaotic, even downright disastrous.

When that starts to happen, the person with the least amount of power—typically the writer—is replaced. And then the second writer is replaced. And then the third. So now you’ve got two, three, maybe half a dozen writers trying to incorporate everyone’s thoughts into a single, cohesive whole. And that’s not always possible.

Eventually everyone realizes things are not working and the whole project gets scrapped. Or no one realizes things are not working and a bad movie gets made. Or, less commonly, someone who has the power to override everyone else gets involved, transforms the script into an accurate representation of his or her vision—and makes that movie. If the vision is a good one, you get a good movie. If not…not.

So development is a valuable process that can go very right, or very wrong. In my opinion, the greater the number of people involved in the development process—people whose input must be accommodated—the more likely it becomes that things will go badly. Writing was not meant to be done by committee.

On the other hand, having fewer people involved isn’t all that much better if you have to wait eight months for a reaction.

RSB: So you're here to help TED take the best of the Hollywood and New York development processes and make them available to writers in both mediums, without the too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen phenomenon messing things up?

JRM: Having been through the development process myself as both novelist and screenwriter, I know the writer’s concerns firsthand. So when I began working with other writers to improve their work, I brought that perspective with me. I wanted to offer the best of both worlds:

Intensive, Hollywood-level development for novels and screenplays, not by committee but one-on-one between two writers. The development guy—me, in this case--acting as advisor, with the client having final say over what happens in the story.

RSB: Other than cutting down the number of people—and therefore conflicting opinions—involved, how is that different for the client, and why is it superior to simply getting notes from a book editor or script doctor?

JRM: Instead of spending hours writing up notes—which contain only one person’s thoughts—and weeks or months sending emails back and forth, trying to work things out, I want to get on the phone with the client and bounce ideas off each other in marathon brainstorming sessions—a long-distance version of the Hollywood “story meeting.”

Because notes are all about “I think this,” and “I think that.” Which is fine if your work is almost ready for prime time and all you need are a few solid pointers from someone more experienced: this scene has to accomplish x; that character needs to do y on page 47 instead of page 200; Bob’s still driving the green Ford on p237 when his ex-wife shoved it off a cliff 50 pages earlier; that kind of thing.

But when a story faces major challenges—when it’s more than a hop, skip, and a jump to the finish line—you need something more comprehensive and also more adaptable. Because any substantial revision or rewrite means big changes, and every change you make ripples out into three or five or ten other things that now have to be altered, and so on. So notes no longer do the job, because they’d have to be infinitely branching to cover all possibilities.

What’s really needed is two creative minds riffing on story. “I think this,” becomes “What do you think of this?” “No that’s crap. What about this?” “Well I kind of like that—but what if we torqued it around a bit and did this?” “Wow I like that—and then we can do this, this, and this!”

It moves so much faster, you come up with things you’d never have thought of alone or exchanging written notes, and it’s fun! It’s something you look forward to.

And that’s my favorite part of this job—because now instead of telling writers what’s wrong with their stories, I’m actively helping them to create something new and better: a more refined, more fully developed version of their initial concept or story.

Still, you can’t just get on the phone and start talking about random scenes. You need a roadmap for discussion, and a blueprint for the next draft.

RSB: And that's where TED's “DEVELOPMENTAL OUTLINE” PACKAGE comes into play?

JRM: Exactly. We start with whatever the client has. Usually that’s a completed manuscript or screenplay, but it could also be something shorter—anything from an unfinished work to a concept and a couple of character ideas or plot twists. It can also be longer; some authors come through the door with multivolume series in manuscript form.

Assuming it’s a completed draft, we prepare an outline of significant events, and then get on the phone. The client and I go through the outline from start to finish—adding, changing, deleting; whatever the two of us agree works best for the story the author wants to tell. When we reach the end, we have a new—and better—outline.

We then do the same thing with that outline, step by step, start to finish, taking things up another notch. And we continue to do that with each new draft until everyone is happy with the result.

Because each time you go through it, new things come to mind. Even after the story is pretty much there, you can refine what you have and add the little flourishes you didn’t think of earlier because you were too busy dealing with larger issues. As a story architect, you have to know where the walls go before you bring in the furniture.

My job is to help brainstorm new ideas, new fixes for old problems, new or improved elements of character, plot, pacing, structure, dialogue, you-name-it—in short, to suggest ways of bringing the story up to its fullest potential in a way that will also be appealing to publishers and producers.

The author’s job—again, ideally—is to decide which suggestions work best for the story he or she wants to tell, and—after we’re done—to implement those suggestions on the page. If the author doesn’t like something, they don’t use it. This keeps the author in charge.

The advantage of working in outline format is that you don’t invest days, weeks, even months of your life writing scenes that ultimately are not used. When you start with a solid outline, you know going in that you’re probably going to use every scene you write—which, in turn, makes for faster writing and fewer revisions.

It also keeps you from getting stalled in the writing process—you never have to stop and wonder where to go from here. You know where to go from here because we’ve already figured that out and plugged it into the outline. You no longer have a reason not to write.

In the end, you have a story that’s better, tighter, more keenly focused and more marketable. And that shows.

You only get one chance to make a first impression; my job is to make sure it’s your best.

RSB: Let's shift gears for a moment and talk about your novel Nano, which was published by Forge/St. Martin’s in 2005. What compelled you to write a novel dealing with the most complex technology ever conceived?

JRM: A couple of things, really. I’ve always been fascinated by cool technologies. Much of my career as a journalist has focused on rendering complex technologies easily understandable, so I wasn’t worried about that. I like things that break the rules, challenging our perception of what’s possible. And it’s a technology that will utterly transform the world—or destroy it. What’s not to like? You can find free chapter excerpts on my johnrobertmarlow.com website.

RB: Tell me a little bit about the challenges you faced in developing Nano, both as a book and a screenplay. JRM: Novels came more easily to me than screenplays, probably because I grew up reading tons of novels. I also have a very clear image in my head—a strong visual sense—of what I want to get across. Which, in turn, sort of compels me to describe things and events in considerable detail, in order to fully convey that image to the reader. You can do that in a novel, and you can dwell on anything for sentences, paragraphs, even pages—as long as it’s interesting. I like that.

You can’t do that in a screenplay, because you don’t have time. What you’re writing may cost anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million dollars a minute to film. If James Cameron is filming it, that may rise to two million a minute—and the result will be magnificent.

But when someone’s reading your script, they really don’t give a damn what color the wallpaper is, and in most cases if you put that kind of detail in a screenplay you’re only going to a) appear unprofessional, b) piss people off, or c) both.

A strong visual sense is a huge plus when writing for the screen—but you have to learn what to leave out. For a novelist accustomed to a variable pagecount, that doesn’t come easily.

As to development in the more traditional sense of the word, I wrote the book manuscript, was asked to lengthen it, was persuaded to drop a few tangential elements, and it was published in a form pretty close to my first lengthened draft. So there wasn’t a whole lot of standard “development” there, though I did learn quite a bit from my editor, Jim Frenkel.

The screenplay is a different story. My first draft was essentially a straight adaptation of the novel. One of the problems with that was the cost. When you’re writing a book, a page is a page, and the cost of production is the same whether you’re at a child’s birthday party or blowing up a planet.

When you’re writing a screenplay, someone has to film that—and when it comes time to budget the script, all scenes are not created equal. The greater the number of big expensive “set pieces” any given script contains, the smaller the number of people able—or willing—to shoot it.

Larry and Mark Kasdan first made me aware of this, and Jan de Bont and Christopher Stanley made some good suggestions and in general started me thinking about less expensive ways to accomplish some of my story aims.

So the development of the Nano script has involved a number of things. Cutting stuff that was really cool but not essential to the story, for example, and then reducing the number of locations. Both of those measures make for a smaller budget. Nothing’s going to make this a low-budget movie—but now it’s something that a reasonable number of people can afford to shoot.

There’s also the ongoing task of taking everything I’ve learned over the past few years—about character, pacing, dialogue, story, structure, even action—and applying it in a way that draws forth the concept’s full potential.

I thought I was capable of doing that when I wrote the first draft. But the more you learn, the more you realize you have yet to learn. The moment you think you’ve got it all figured it out—that’s the moment you stop getting better.

And that’s the moment you need to watch out for.

RSB: Putting aside the understandable impulse not to do anything to a book that was successfully published and well received, is there anything that—in hindsight or as a result of your work with other writers at TED—you would have done differently?

JRM: Absolutely. The great thing about writing is, the more you do it, the better you get. At the time I wrote the Nano novel, my development as a writer was uneven. I was very strong on concept, action, plotting, and structure. My dialogue was fair to good. But my characters and sense of pacing were underdeveloped. Overall, I was good enough to get published—but I still had a lot to learn.

Oddly enough, it was my foray into Hollywood that brought these issues to my attention. In a screenplay, everything is so stripped down that problems become more apparent. And of course there’s no shortage of people ready, willing, and able to tell you what’s wrong with your story.

One of the issues with the Nano novel—and to some extent with early versions of the screenplay—was the uneven pacing; there’d be this rollicking action sequence, and then people would sit down in a room and talk philosophy or religion.

The conversations were interesting and very much in keeping with the story’s focus on nanotech—but the information they conveyed could have been shortened and more smoothly integrated into the story. For the screenplay, most of that stuff has to go; it’s just too cumbersome for the format.

Another issue was that the characters were pretty much there to serve my purposes rather than their own. That’s always a mistake. You don’t say, “Gee, I want xyz to happen, so I’ll make up a character who does that.”

You want the characters’ motivations to drive the story. That’s a lot harder to do, but when done right, reader/audience involvement skyrockets—because now you’ve got well-rounded characters who seem like living, breathing people with desires, goals, and frustrations just like the rest of us. And most people—not all, but most—get hooked into a story because they either care about or are fascinated by one or more of your main characters.

I learned a lot about that from Terry Rossio, who co-wrote the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and many, many, many others. He puts a tremendous amount of thought into everything he does, and the results speak for themselves. There’s a 10,000+ word interview with him on my Lonely Keyboard website; the topic is screenwriting, but much of what he says applies to books as well.

But, back to characters. I tell clients all the time: if readers don’t care about your characters, it’s over. Because story isn’t about things that happen; it’s about things that happen to people—or characters—and how those characters are affected by and react to those events.

If no one cares about your characters, no one cares about your story. And if no one cares about your story, that’s it. You can write THE END or FADE OUT on page one.

You don’t want to do that. If your story’s been properly developed, you’ll never have to.

For more information about TED's Screenplay Services, feel free to contact us.