Helen Stringer's Blog - Posts Tagged "gloaming"

There’s a weird thing about writing. Or, rather, about what is actually considered to be “writing.” For many years I worked on screenplays, honing my craft, creating stories intended for features or television. I considered myself a writer, but most of my friends and acquaintances did not.

Then I wrote Spellbinder , a middle-grade fantasy novel, and suddenly I was a writer.

“What does it feel like to be a writer?” people asked, when I showed them the ARCs.

But it's not like that. I didn’t suddenly become a writer. I had always been a writer, or more accurately, a storyteller. The compulsion to create stories, to observe the world around you and extrapolate a sequence of events, does not magically appear one day, unbidden. It has always been there. The medium does not dictate whether or not someone is a “writer.” Books are not more worthy than plays or screenplays or songs. Each has its own place and some stories are better told through one medium than another (one reason why movies based on novels are frequently disappointing).

I mention all this because I recently decided to return to filmmaking for one of my favorite tales. It’s called The Gloaming , and is a paranormal scfi story that I actually first worked on while writing Spellbinder. Both stories had ghosts as major characters, but The Gloaming was intended for adults and was much darker. I worked on one or the other each day, depending on what mood I was in. But, unlike Spellbinder, The Gloaming wasn’t a novel. It was a screenplay and was intended as a television pilot. Why? Well, because there was such a strong visual element to the story and I really “saw” it in my minds eye.

I see all my stories as if they were films unspooling in my head, but some are just meant to be told in pictures rather than words. Okay, you may ask, so why a series, why not a movie? Because the best television shows tell their stories gradually, unfurling as the characters learn and grow and change. They draw their audience into the world of the people inhabiting the tale, until the story becomes almost real.

So there I was, working on two stories, and The Gloaming was developing nicely right up to the moment that Spellbinder caught the attention of an agent. I stopped work on it and put all my energies into the adventures of Belladonna Johnson, and then into creating the gloomy landscape of Paradigm . But The Gloaming never went away, it was always there at the back of my mind…wanting to be told.

There then followed a series of events that led to my returning to the not-quite-dead, not-quite-alive Alex Solomon. The first was a result of Spellbinder being optioned as a potential series for MTV. I was a bit leery about it at the time, but was assured by various agents (by this time, I had a bunch of them) that a series would be a great way of bringing new readers to the books. It didn’t really turn out that way.

The story of Spellbinder was moved from the UK to the Pacific north west of America, the characters were aged up to 17, the fearsome Wild Hunt no longer rode the storm but became a couple of guys in black suits, and the worst…the absolute worst thing was that they completely changed the names of the two main characters! So any new readers attracted to the books by the television series would have been sorely disappointed.

Happily, it was never made.

The second event was shooting the trailer for Paradigm. As you may know, I started out as a filmmaker, attended the AFI, won various awards, and worked in the industry in various ways right up until Spellbinder was bought by Feiwel & Friends. But it had been years since I had actually shot anything. I told myself that I didn’t miss it, that writing books was better because a screenplay is only a blueprint. (I’m a past master at lying to myself!) The Paradigm shoot was only three days long, but that was enough to remind me how much I love filmmaking. The days are often 12 hours or more, the work is hard, the weather too hot or too cold…and on the Paradigm shoot we even managed to get stranded in the desert for nine hours. But I loved every last thing about it. It was how I started telling stories, and I yearned to do it again.

When I got home, I pulled up The Gloaming and another story I had been working on, called the actors who had starred in the Paradigm trailer, and scheduled a table-read of both scripts. It was wonderful to hear them, but there was no doubt about which one was best – everyone loved The Gloaming.

I didn’t waste any time trying to get someone else to produce it. I wanted the pictures in my head in front of an audience without any filtering or meddling. I sat down and broke down the script, then budgeted the shoot. It would take ten days, at the end of which we would have a six episode web series. I was joined by people who had worked on the Paradigm shoot, as well as people I had known the last time I was involved in making films.

Everyone loved the screenplay, it was tight and concise, dark and unusual. I decided to finance it through a Kickstarter campaign. I also created a mock-up of the title sequence, to give people an idea of the tone, and even recorded Greg Albinetti (who played Sam in the Paradigm trailer) reading an opening chapter that I had written when I briefly considered turning it into a book.

It was that chapter, more than anything else, that convinced me that a novel was not the correct way of telling this particular story. The Gloaming was a film.

I’ve included the chapter here, but for more detail about how we are going to make the web series a reality, please follow the link to The Gloaming Kickstarter campaign. Donations start at $5 and there are lots of lovely rewards for helping the story of Alex, Veronica and Ralph become a reality. But even if you can’t donate, it would be really helpful if you could just spread the word to anyone who might be interested.

Stories can be told in so many ways, with the spoken word, in books, in panels of pictures, in poetry, in song…and in film. The creators of all those things have one thing in common – they are all, without exception, writers.