HAUNTED BY “LESS IS MORE”

 by Jule Selbo 

Being a ‘guest’ on a blog is an honor. The regulars on Writers Who Kill have years of writing experience and great books resting under their blog-umbrella. Being a guest here means I get a chance to talk about my latest book, 6 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery, and muse a bit about my writing experience and the fact that I am a ‘recovering Hollywood screenwriter’.

My screenwriting career jumped off from my playwriting efforts. My short plays were performed in high school, college and when I moved to New York City, I had a few produced off-off Broadway. One of the plays got some attention and opened doors in tv and film.

My years as a screenwriter set a ‘style’ in my writing because the craft is often about using as few words as possible. The term ‘white space’ refers to the look of a script page. A tired executive whose job it is to read 20-30 scripts a week picks the ‘next’ script off her desk and flips through it. She either smiles or curses, depending on the amount of ‘white space’ on the page. More white space, in most cases, equals a ‘faster read’, that the writer hasn’t gotten verbose and doesn’t use over-explicit descriptions of locations, characters, motivations, or dialogue. ‘Less is usually more’ in a screenplay because the camera/visuals will fill in details.

How often was I with actors on sets, in their dressing rooms, or at social gatherings who lamented having to handle dialogue that carried exposition? Or dialogue that explained their emotions? Or doing scenes that didn’t have a strong story purpose? The answer?  A lot. Why? It comes back to the camera again. Actors feel like they can emote with their eyes/their faces/their bodies. They don’t like to have to do ‘explain’ scenes, they like the ‘actions’ of their characters to fill in their personalities and intentions.

I wrote in various story genres (action, adventure, coming of age, bio-pic, romance , sci fi and comedy) during my Hollywood years and learned about the need to fulfill ‘genre promises’ so that the audience would be satisfied. TV and movie scripts often use a few ‘supporting’ genres to fill out characters’ lives (such as romantic relationships, friendships, family, fears, silliness). I still enjoy thinking how different story genres will illuminate my characters while keeping the crime/mystery genre in its primary place.

Budgets were always talked about in the film/tv industry; the producers want to keep the cast costs low by only including characters who were absolutely needed for the story. Locations should be kept to a minimum because the getting of permits, the moving and re-setting up of crew and equipment was time-consuming and expensive. I hear from readers of crime/mysteries that too many characters can get confusing – and yes – we build stories with red herrings and various suspects, but I try to keep the ‘cast list’ low.

The above are just a few things where I feel my screenwriting experiences have influenced the Dee Rommel series. Who’s Dee Rommel? Her childhood dream was to be a top police detective in Portland, Maine.  ‘Bad guys’ changed all that when, as a young cop, she was going after perps of a hit-and-run (a child died) on a wintry-icy night and tracked them to the top of a building under construction. Dee was the first on her team to the roof, where she was sideswiped by the villains. Sliding off the roof into a dumpster filled with insulation and drywall, she sustained a serious injury that was going to sideline her (after rehab) to a desk job at the Police Department. She needs to come to a decision: should she stay with the police force or join her godfather’s PI firm?

The Dee Rommel series is a 10-parter. 6 DAYS was released this summer (2026) and follows 10 DAYS, 9 DAYS, 8 DAYS, 7 DAYS (you see the pattern). She has 10 days to solve the first case; the next case needs to be solved in 9 days (again, you see the pattern). It’s countdown to 1 DAY.

As a screenwriter, I worked on a few television series that were serialized (Melrose Place, Life Goes On, Space Above and Beyond and more). Of course, the ‘long’ character stories had to stretch 10 to 22 episodes, but each week we had a ‘short’ story that needed a beginning, middle and end. The Dee Rommel series has a 10-book character arc for Dee and some of the other ‘core’ characters, but I wanted to make sure that people could read them out of order too. I didn’t want Dee (or any character) to have to do the heavy backstory ‘exposition’, so the challenge of finding new ways to catch-the-reader-up has been fun.

6 DAYS has a bit extra in it too, genre-wise. I wanted to add a bit of thriller/horror to the crime/mystery genre, a sense that ghosts haunted a private island that was home to a family with deep, dark secrets.

An ethereal beauty, heiress Freya Cummings hasn’t left her private island in Maine for over twenty years, not since she was thirteen. Her reclusive lifestyle is infamous. When a teenager files a maternity suit against her, and mysterious evidence seems damning, former policewoman and now private investigator, Dee Rommel, is hired. She travels up the coast from Portland to flesh out the truth, and as avenues of investigation are shut down, and New England’s blood banks are hacked, and bodies are found, Dee discovers dark secrets can create dangerous chaos for the families and for her own relationships.  

Thanks again to WRITERS WHO KILL for giving me this chance to muse on some of my writing thoughts—and share my excitement about the release of 5^th book in the Dee Rommel Series: 6 DAYS. Halfway through the series!  Yeah!  Jule Selbo, Portland Maine

Adapting the Screenwriting Paradigm to a Novel By Lynn-Steven Johanson

I have worked in various areas of theatre most of my life, primarily as a director and later as a playwright. In the early 2000’s, I began to experiment with writing screenplays and wrote two crime dramas. Both did well in screenwriting contests, but I concluded that if I didn’t live in Los Angeles and schmoose with the right people, selling one would be next to impossible. So, I chalked up the writing to a good learning experience, and both scripts languished in a database on my hard drive.

 

What does this have to do with writing a novel, you may ask? Well, I mentioned to my wife one day that I had dried up on ideas for a new play, and she suggested adapting one of my screenplays into a novel. I scoffed at the idea saying, “I can’t write anything that long.” I eventually went on to write a few more plays. Then, a couple years later, I hit another dry spell and remembered what she said about writing a novel.

 

I pulled up what I considered the better of the two screenplays and looked at the first scene. Throwing caution to the wind, I wrote the narrative and expanded the dialogue. The result was chapter one. I handed the draft to my wife and had her read it because I trusted her opinion. A former English teacher, Joyce consumes at least one novel a week, and her favorite author is Dick Francis, who wrote some great mysteries. Her response was, “Keep going. I’ve read worse.” With those words of encouragement, I continued adapting scenes into chapters, and about six months and thirty-six chapters later, I had the first draft of Rose’s Thorn. Following numerous revisions, a fruitless search for an agent, and a few publisher inquiries, Rose’s Thorn was picked up by Level Best Books and published in March 2020.

 

I didn’t have the luxury of having a screenplay to adapt for my second novel, Havana Brown. I had to write it from scratch. But being a person who needs structure, I decided to adapt the screenwriting paradigm espoused by Syd Field in his book, The Screenwriter’s Workbook, into a structural paradigm for a novel. Now, some people swear by Field’s book and some people swear at it. Personally, I happen to like it because I used his paradigm for writing my two screenplays.

 

What this paradigm does for a novel is to break it down into a three-act structure. As Syd Field defines it for the screenplay: Act I is the setup, Act II is the confrontation, and Act III is the resolution. At the end of Act I, a major story event needs to take place, and at the end of Act II, another major event needs to happen. Since Act II is twice as long as Act I and Act III, a midpoint needs to be established that acts as a link to connect the first half and the second half of the confrontation. This link can be an incident, an event, a piece of dialogue, or anything that directs the second half of the confrontation forward toward the resolution. Now, keep in mind the events in this paradigm are fluid and subject to change as you write. While the paradigm structure itself doesn’t change, the events often will.

 

Without giving too much away about Havana Brown, the paradigm works like this: Act I (74 pages in length) ends with plot point one which is the detective noticing pet hair on a particular individual; the Act II (136 pages) midpoint at page 143 is the killer committing a minor traffic violation; and Act III (41 pages) begins at page 211 with plot point two, which is the murder of a person close to the detective.

 

The rest of the events in the story are constructed in between these plot points. They are the incidents, clues, reveals, dead ends, red herrings, and all the other things writers of mysteries use to tell the story. Havana Brown has a main plot as well as two subplots. But the paradigm’s plot points focus only on the main plot—apprehending the serial killer.

 

I know that some writers are not like me and don’t require the kind of structure that I do. They can keep basic story ideas in their heads and write freely. I envy those people. But if you are like me and need to structure your novels ahead of time in some outline form, I recommend reading Syd Field’s book. Even if you write freely, the book is worth a read. I find getting different perspectives on craft is always important and thinking outside the box can add additional techniques to the writer’s tool chest.

 

Lynn-Steven Johanson is an award-winning playwright whose plays have been produced on four continents. Born and raised in Northwest Iowa, Lynn holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His most recent novel, Havana Brown, was released in May 2021, by Level Best Books. Lynn lives in Illinois with his wife and has three adult children. He is currently working on the third installment of his Joe Erickson Mysteries.