Jaws to Game of Thrones: Writing Books to Sell as Screenplays

Meet Richard Moon

Richard H Moon is an award-winning screenwriter, producer, family man, care-provider for several dogs and cats, a curler, archer, hiker, musician, physics tutor, SFF nerd, literature aficionado, history obsessive, and kitten fosterer. He has a physics degree, but has never let that get in his way. He’s always ready to geek out about story and character and deep meaning and also cool robots, and he supports every human out there who is making art with their own hands and bodies and minds. He lives with his family in Southern California, on the ancestral and unceded land of the Hahamongna people.

Full Transcript.

Jaws to Game of Thrones: Writing Books to Sell as Screenplays

with  Richard Moon

Laura Williams: [00:00:00] What if the secret to seeing your book on the silver screen isn't about finding Hollywood connections, but about how you build your story from the very first page? Today we're joined by Richard Moon, an award-winning screenwriter and novelist who knows exactly what it takes to bridge the gap between prose and picture. He's here to break down the ultimate storytelling puzzle: how to tell if your manuscript has true cinematic potential, and how to write a story that seamlessly translates from the page to the screen, and vice versa. Richard, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Richard Moon: [00:00:35] Thank you very much for having me, Laura. It's a pleasure to be here.

Laura Williams: [00:00:39] So a lot of authors look at their work and think, wow, this really belongs on the big screen. But as someone who's worn both hats, as a novelist and a screenwriter, what's the single biggest difference in how a story has to function structurally to work as a script versus a book? [00:01:00]

Richard Moon: [00:01:00] Yeah, that's an important question, and one a lot of writers who've only worked in one medium haven't really thought about. I'd say the biggest difference between the two is also the most obvious one. A novel is read — it's words on the page, description and emotion and interiority. A screenplay, and the movie that comes from it, is visual. It's what's on the screen, what we see.

Richard Moon: You don't get a lot of room to sit inside a character's head, or even linger on the minutest details of description, because a movie is engaging so many more senses at once. Because it's visual and auditory in a way a novel isn't, the way you craft the story has to be very different, and it's important to take that into account. [00:02:00] A lot of people I've talked to who feel their story should be a movie — when I actually read what they've written, it's often very interior. It's beautiful on the page, but when it comes to translating it into a movie, the question is always, okay, but what does this look like, and what does this sound like?

Richard Moon: Because at the end of the day, the camera can't get inside somebody's head. Even if you're filming someone's imagination or a delusion, their whole thought process, there's still a visual element you have to nail down and say, this is what it looks like. That's often the hardest part of any book-to-screen translation. And honestly, the reverse direction is just as hard, because with a screenplay you can leave a lot of detail out, since that detail becomes someone else's job further down the production. [00:03:00] A good screenplay doesn't spend half a page describing what someone's desk looks like, because that's thirty seconds of screen time — and ultimately, some of those decisions belong to the director, the set designer, the costumer, the casting director. So the screenplay really needs to focus only on the details that actually matter and need to be seen. When you take that and try to turn it into a novel, you can end up with something very sparse and action-driven that doesn't really draw a reader in.

Richard Moon: It's missing the details you want in a book, the ones that paint the picture in the reader's mind. Like I said, going in either direction has real challenges, and it can be tough to figure out which direction any particular story wants to go.

Laura Williams: [00:03:59] Do you find that books that are more dialogue-driven fit into a movie or a television series better? [00:04:00]

Richard Moon: [00:04:07] That's a good question, because dialogue does move things forward in a way that gets you past spending three pages describing a raindrop. But at the same time, in a book you can craft a beautiful scene that's just two people talking for twenty pages. And the question, again, once you translate that into a screenplay, becomes, what does that actually look like? Is it people sitting in a room talking for twenty minutes? There are movies where that works, but unless you're writing My Dinner with Andre, the question becomes, is this just going to stall the forward progress of the movie?

Richard Moon: Another difference between books and movies, in my experience, is time. In a book, time is extremely [00:05:00] flexible — a paragraph can cover years, and multiple pages might cover only a few seconds of the actual story. With a screenplay, because it's a visual medium, it has to move forward. It's constantly moving. If you write a screenplay that spends multiple pages on the same three-minute stretch, you're not really lingering on that time, you're going over it again and again — but within that, the story still has to move forward one second per second.

Richard Moon: The whole screenplay really needs to keep moving, or it becomes deathly dull to sit and watch two people talk about things for an hour, especially if the conversation isn't moving at the pace a normal conversation would. If you spend minutes on a character just thinking about the next thing [00:06:00] they're going to say — which you can absolutely do in a book, and it's beautiful there — on a screenplay, what does that actually look like?

Laura Williams: [00:06:07] There's a famous saying that books let us see what characters are thinking, while movies force us to see what they're doing. So when you're assessing a novel's cinematic possibilities, how do you do that? What are you actually looking for?

Richard Moon: [00:06:24] I look for something that makes me say, ah, I see what this looks like, and I know how this is going to work visually.

Laura Williams: [00:06:36] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:06:36] If things keep moving forward, take us somewhere new, and the character is changing through actions and things we can actually perceive visually, that's when you know you've got something that can translate nicely. As opposed to, like I said, if everything is interior — even when the location isn't the important part of the story, which is true of several books I adore, [00:07:00] where the character's mind is what matters and where they physically are isn't all that interesting. But with a movie, I need to know where they are, every second. Are they in the kitchen? In some liminal space in their mind? In outer space? I need to know.

Laura Williams: [00:07:22] That makes sense.

Richard Moon: [00:07:22] Does it feel forwardly propulsive and visual? Can we hang a hook on where someone is and what they're doing?

Richard Moon: That's not to say you can't have any interiority at all. A famous example of a translation that did it extremely well is Fight Club — not to spoil a thirty-year-old movie at this point, but so much of that film, you realize by the end, was taking place inside one character's head. None of it was real, [00:08:00] it was entirely his delusions and hallucinations. But those delusions and hallucinations were visual and forwardly propulsive — you can see how Tyler and the narrator talking to each other works on a visual level, because they're talking, they're fighting, all of it is happening in ways we can actually see. So the fact that it's all inside his head becomes a lot less important than how you translate it from one form to the other.

Richard Moon: But a book where everything genuinely takes place inside one character's head, with no visual element because it's all emotional and textual, that's a much harder translation.

Laura Williams: [00:08:41] It's so funny how they're both storytelling machines, the written word of a novel and the visual language of movies, but how different they are from each other. I know very often screenwriters end up writing novels, and novelists end up screenwriting. I have a friend [00:09:00] who's a screenwriter and producer who's now writing a children's book about a penguin in the glaciers. It's amazing, but she's had trouble with the transition — she said that when she was screenwriting and producing, there were all these other people involved

Richard Moon: [00:09:20] Mm-hmm.

Laura Williams: [00:09:21] who handled all these other things.

Richard Moon: [00:09:23] Yeah, that's —

Laura Williams: [00:09:23] It's different. And she has a publisher now, but even that's not nearly as many people.

Richard Moon: [00:09:29] No, exactly. Like I was saying earlier — when you're writing a screenplay, there's a lot you don't need to describe. One of the things I come back to whenever I'm teaching screenwriting, at any level, is: when it comes to a detail, is this important? How important is this detail? If it's not important to the plot, the story, or the character that this guy has blond hair, why are you telling me he has blond hair? [00:10:00] And why are you restricting the casting director to only blond actors for that role? If it's not important, leave it out. If it is important, make sure we know it, and that we know it matters.

Richard Moon: It's difficult, because a screenplay is really a blueprint for making a movie or TV show — there are a lot more steps beyond the screenplay itself. There's a director making decisions, there's a whole crew involved in the creative process. Filmmaking, at its best, is inherently collaborative. It's not even that you rely on those other people — it's that the finished product comes out of that collaboration of different focuses.

Richard Moon: You don't have to rely on a casting director to figure out the dialogue, the same way you don't have to worry about the screenwriter or the actor finding the best desk for an office set.

Laura Williams: [00:10:56] Okay.

Richard Moon: [00:10:56] Everybody has their own focus, and when it works, [00:11:00] everyone excels at theirs, and you get this beautiful collaboration out of it. Whereas with a novel — I'm working on one right now, and I have one already out — it's in some ways so much more isolated and lonely,

Laura Williams: [00:11:21] Yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:11:22] even more than screenwriting is. With a screenplay, you're still working alone to start — you have to get the script written

Laura Williams: [00:11:27] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:11:27] before you're working with anyone else, and even then, the script isn't really finished. But with a novel, I'm the one who has to put the words down, and even with beta readers and writing groups helping out, it's still me doing the work. I'll say, coming out of the independent film world, I was very happy when I found a publisher who said, ‘Yeah, we'll find the cover artist, and you'll get to approve the cover art, but you don't have to find the cover artist yourself,'

Laura Williams: [00:11:57] Yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:11:58] ‘you don't have to do the cover art.'

Richard Moon: And I thought, [00:12:00] oh, thank God — I don't have to handle the interior design either, since none of that is really my skill set.

Laura Williams: [00:12:08] Okay, so you have the author who's written the book, and they hand it off to the screenwriter. Sometimes there's collaboration between the two, sometimes there isn't. The screenwriter forms their own interpretation of the novelist's work, then hands that off to the director and actors, who have their own interpretation on top of that. Am I right in assuming that's roughly how it goes?

Richard Moon: [00:12:31] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:12:31] That must be where a lot of the drift away from the original story comes from. Like when you see a book you know inside and out, one you love, adapted on screen, and you're maybe disappointed by it. Sometimes it's perfect, but sometimes you're a little let down.

Richard Moon: [00:12:44] It can be.

Laura Williams: [00:12:45] I see that happen a lot.

Richard Moon: [00:12:46] Yeah, it can be difficult, both as someone who loved the book and as the person who wrote it, because there can be a lot of drift through any kind of adaptation, since adaptation is inherently change — you're [00:13:00] changing the format. We've all seen movies where the original author had a lot of control over the resulting film, and you watch it and think, oh, I can tell, because there's a whole bunch of stuff in there —

Laura Williams: [00:13:15] Like Stephen King.

Richard Moon: [00:13:17] Yeah, stuff that doesn't really need

Laura Williams: [00:13:18] Stephen King usually had that, yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:13:20] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:13:21] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:13:22] I hesitate to bring her up, but I think of some of the middle Harry Potter movies, where you can kind of see Rowling's fingers still in there, and you think, okay, yeah, but you could've cut this — there are fifteen minutes in this movie you could remove without losing a single thing. I'm sure it's great in the book, but in this movie it just doesn't work.

Laura Williams: [00:13:41] One of my favorite adaptations, because it really is just like the book — you can agree or disagree, but I've read the book many times — is Jaws. Jaws is almost, page one to the last page, on the screen, and it just amazes me that Spielberg pulled that off. [00:14:00] You could go to my website and read a story about what happened to me one weekend as a kid, when my brother and I — our parents took us to see Jaws, for some godforsaken reason. And we're boat people, we're always out on the water, so I still don't understand why they did that. We got dragged around the ocean in a twenty-two-foot boat by a thirteen-foot hammerhead

Richard Moon: [00:14:20] Oh —

Laura Williams: [00:14:21] that same weekend, right after seeing the movie.

Richard Moon: [00:14:24] Well, I —

Laura Williams: [00:14:25] Terrifying.

Richard Moon: [00:14:26] It is fundamentally a boat movie, but at the same time, I also saw Jaws probably way too young myself. That's actually a great example, because Peter Benchley's book is, in many ways — some people might describe it as not that great a book, or as pulp, because it's very — not simple, that's not quite the right word — lean. He doesn't spend three hundred pages describing the dapple of light on the water [00:15:00] off the island. He gets to it, and it just drives forward the whole time. It's driving, and

Laura Williams: [00:15:05] Almost every bit of dialogue had a purpose.

Richard Moon: [00:15:10] Yes.

Laura Williams: [00:15:10] Yeah, I've

Richard Moon: [00:15:11] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:15:12] always loved that book.

Richard Moon: [00:15:13] And he provided — I'm sure when he was writing it, he wasn't thinking this is going to become a movie. He was writing the story he wanted to tell, the way he wanted to tell it. But he left so many spaces where, even where the book does get inside somebody's head, it's not exclusively inside their head — it really gives the screenwriter, I've forgotten who actually wrote that adaptation, and more importantly Spielberg, room to show Brody interacting with his kid in that particular way, which tells us so much. And Roy Scheider pouring wine into a wine glass, then pouring wine into his own large water glass until there's three cups' worth in it. That tells us [00:16:00] everything about what's going on inside his head, but it does it visually — that's a beautiful example.

Laura Williams: [00:16:08] My favorite scene is when Quint tells the story about the USS Indianapolis

Richard Moon: [00:16:13] Mm-hmm.

Laura Williams: [00:16:13] and his tattoo. That's my favorite scene. I actually have an uncle who was on that ship — he survived, thank God. But there was such rawness to that whole moment, how it seemed to pull the three of them together right then. I love that scene.

Richard Moon: [00:16:26] And so much of it just sings because of Shaw's performance there — he's just fully into it, and you can tell.

Laura Williams: [00:16:33] Oh yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:16:34] His whole performance is amazing, because

Laura Williams: [00:16:37] Everything — when he was standing in the back of the room —

Richard Moon: [00:16:40] Right, and the way his confidence collapses during the hunt. He's told this story about his traumatic past and why he won't go in the water, won't wear a life vest, and then, as the hunt progresses and shifts from them chasing the [00:17:00] shark to the shark chasing them, you can see that trauma coming back to him. It's just —

Laura Williams: [00:17:05] Yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:17:05] That's one I really adore — I love a good actor at the top of their game. It's amazing.

Laura Williams: [00:17:13] So we kind of went off on a tangent there, but

Richard Moon: [00:17:16] Okay.

Laura Williams: [00:17:17] that's a very good example of a well-done book adaptation. One of the worst I've seen, on the other hand, is Game of Thrones once it hit the last season — I was just thinking, where are we even going with this, what have you done. I was so upset.

Richard Moon: [00:17:37] Well —

Laura Williams: [00:17:37] So upset.

Richard Moon: [00:17:38] Have you ever seen the original pilot episode of the series — the one that

Laura Williams: [00:17:45] I don't think I have, no.

Richard Moon: [00:17:47] I've —

Laura Williams: [00:17:47] No, definitely not.

Richard Moon: [00:17:49] I think I've read about it, or maybe seen bits and pieces — it's not really out there, you can't find it easily. But it was a genuinely terrible adaptation of the source material, and they had to go [00:18:00] back and redo it, because it stuck too close to exactly what Martin had written, rather than translating it for the screen. When they went back and said, right, this needs to work as a TV show, not just a transliteration of the book — to his credit, I believe George R.R. Martin was one of the loudest voices pushing for that, since he'd worked in screenwriting and producing himself. He understood, and he's also one of those writers who feels it's very important not to be overly attached to every single word.

Richard Moon: It's the story that matters, not the exact words, and he's very much that way — if something needs to change, it needs to change. If someone comes up with a better line, use the better line. So their second pass at it is what actually aired, and it's a much better adaptation. I think that first season is a pretty good adaptation of that first book, [00:19:00] but yeah, in those later seasons, once they'd outpaced his output and were working more from his outlines and concepts, while also dealing with the consequences of the changes they'd already made to fit the TV format, things start to almost fall apart on them. It's kind of interesting.

Laura Williams: [00:19:28] It's a shame, but I guess it makes sense that it would happen.

Richard Moon: [00:19:32] Yeah, and there's so

Laura Williams: [00:19:33] I don't know.

Richard Moon: [00:19:33] much that I actually liked. I know a lot of people were really attached in the books to Lady Stoneheart, but at the same time, given how they'd shaped the series by that point, I was glad they didn't include her. It would've felt out of place with how the series had been running —

Laura Williams: [00:19:55] I can understand why you'd say that, yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:19:57] It would've introduced too much magic into that world.

Laura Williams: [00:19:59] Right. [00:20:00] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:20:01] Same with the other Targaryen prince showing up — I honestly don't remember much of the last couple of books at this point, but even so, I think

Laura Williams: [00:20:11] I haven't read the books in a long time either.

Richard Moon: [00:20:13] Yeah, but

Laura Williams: [00:20:14] Yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:20:15] what we got in those last few seasons kind of amazed me, because when those books first came out, it felt interesting — a magical medieval world dealing with an oncoming climate catastrophe, and what's this going to look like? Then in that last season, it's basically, nope, as long as you stab the right guy, the climate catastrophe just goes away. Poof, gone. And you think, wait, is that actually the story he was trying to tell from the beginning? Because it doesn't feel like it. I don't know.

Laura Williams: [00:20:49] So Game of Thrones is one example, on the television side. But then you've got something like Lord of the Rings — these huge, epic, worldbuilding [00:21:00] movies. They take so much time, money, people, thought. They're wonderful to watch, I can't imagine trying to put all those pieces together. But you write historical horror fantasy, and you do a lot of extensive worldbuilding yourself, right?

Richard Moon: [00:21:17] Oh yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:21:17] So when they're building those worlds —

Richard Moon: [00:21:18] Although, because I was using real history too, [00:21:20] so I got to cheat a little.

Laura Williams: [00:21:23] Is it difficult to translate that from book to screen, when you have to account for the fact that you can't just go make this movie small — it has to be this huge thing just to get the point of the book or the series across?

Richard Moon: [00:21:39] It's a huge consideration, because the bigger the world you build, the bigger the budget ultimately has to be. My book actually started life as a treatment for a feature film — at the time, I was only thinking in terms of screenplays. I came up with the idea, did a bunch of research, and wrote up the whole treatment, which ran to about — I don't remember exactly — pages and pages of description of character and plot. Then I kind of put it away, because it was too big for anything I could get produced at the time, and I figured I'd come back to it eventually. Then, when the pandemic shut everything down in 2020, I had a chance to refocus on writing, pulled that treatment back out, looked at it, and thought, I'm nuts. There's no way I can make this as a feature — not just because the budget would be enormous

Laura Williams: [00:22:36] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:22:37] to get everything on that page onto the screen, but because there's just too much there for a feature film. I'd have had to cut so many little ideas I'd already worked into the treatment. So I sat back and thought, this would work a lot better as a book. Could it still be translated into a visual medium? Absolutely. But now, [00:23:00] and my wife makes this point a lot too — she loves the book, but she says this would really work as a series, you couldn't make it into just one movie without cutting the heart out of the story. I can see pulling this book out into at least two seasons, especially short streaming seasons, but even so — even though I originally conceived of the story as visual, with that forward momentum of a movie, once I got into how much of the world I needed to cover, it became clear this was too much for a movie. It needed to be a book.

Richard Moon: You can see the same thing with Lord of the Rings — people had been trying to adapt it for decades. Rankin and Bass did an animated version, Ralph Bakshi did one of, I believe, The Hobbit, and the Monty Python guys had tried for years to get Lord of the Rings made. It's such a difficult concept, because it's so big. [00:24:00] The whole world is enormous, the story is enormous. And you look at what Peter Jackson

Laura Williams: [00:24:07] There was no way to pare it down.

Richard Moon: [00:24:08] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:24:09] Right, yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:24:11] and even so, look at what they made — this huge trilogy, it's tremendous, and there's so much cut out of those books to make those films work. I actually knew a guy,

Laura Williams: [00:24:26] True, yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:24:27] we were only acquaintances at the time, who told me he walked out of The Fellowship of the Ring because there was no Tom Bombadil. He said, if there's no Tom Bombadil, I'm not finishing this movie. At the time I thought he was nuts, and honestly I still do — because if you actually read the books, Tom Bombadil is this — it's an aside, this thing that just stops

Laura Williams: [00:24:50] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:24:50] the story so Tolkien can talk about this weird thing he wanted to explore for twenty pages, which is really cool, and I love it in the books, [00:24:57] but it would've killed the [00:25:00] pacing of that movie. It would've just murdered it — they'd only just gotten out of the Shire.

Laura Williams: [00:25:05] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:25:06] Yeah, and if you watch the extended editions of Lord of the Rings, which add so much of that material back in, they're great if you're going to spend two weeks watching them like a series. If you're sitting in a theater, less so.

Laura Williams: [00:25:21] Not so much, right.

Richard Moon: [00:25:22] Yeah, Peter Jackson famously agrees that the theatrical cuts work better as movies, even though the extended cuts are more faithful adaptations with a lot more detail. The theatrical cuts are the theatrical cuts for a reason — they wanted them to work as movies, in a movie theater, for a movie-watching audience.

Laura Williams: [00:25:49] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:25:50] It's a

Laura Williams: [00:25:50] And some works just wouldn't be as long anyway.

Richard Moon: [00:25:51] Yeah, exactly — it's a great example, [00:25:56] because there's so much, and it's so [00:26:00] expensive, but still, so much was cut to make those movies work.

Laura Williams: [00:26:06] It's very interesting how it all works together. So, tell me about your book. Well, first, I want to ask you about the actual process of writing it. Screenwriting has plot and pacing too, of course. What did you discover about the transition into writing a novel? What did you struggle with, and what came easier, given your prior experience?

Richard Moon: [00:26:28] The main struggle was something you don't necessarily have to face consciously in screenwriting — things like, okay, am I telling this in first person or third person? If it's third person close, whose viewpoint is it? Am I sticking with one viewpoint character, and how do I transition from one to another? With screenwriting, that's actually easy, because the viewpoint is always [00:27:00] the camera. You're always describing what the camera sees, and if you're sticking with a character, that character is simply in the scene — that makes it easy. But with a book, it was harder, because those are decisions you have to make before you're even crafting the sentences, before you figure out how a description should work.

Laura Williams: [00:27:16] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:27:17] That was the main thing that actually took me a long time — I wrote the beginning of the book three or four different ways before I settled on how I wanted to tell it. The other big thing was really a matter of pacing — figuring out how long I wanted to stay within a particular scene, or even a viewpoint, and how that tied into chapter length. My first draft had twenty-six chapters and ran about one hundred twenty thousand words. After revisions, it's now sixty-eight chapters and about [00:28:00] one hundred twelve thousand words. So it's shorter, with more chapters, because going through revisions, I kept realizing these chapters needed to be shorter — I didn't need to pack three full viewpoint sections into every chapter, I was making the reader do too much work for the story I was trying to tell. Figuring out that pacing was interesting, because it was both very similar to and completely different from pacing in a screenplay, where it's all about how long you stay in a particular scene, how many slug lines you have to move through to get someone from point to point. That forward propulsion is what pacing means there. In a book, pacing means I can spend an entire chapter on one character just thinking about things, and that's fine — it just still has to move in a way that carries the reader along, even if it isn't moving through time and space in the same way. And then the hardest part — not really the hardest part, but it does tickle my brain sometimes — is just [00:29:00] how many more words it takes to write a book. With screenwriting, the challenge is getting as much out of as few words as possible, because every inch

Richard Moon: [00:29:22] matters. With novel writing, it's the opposite — I actually need to describe what this room looks like, what this person looks like, the details of this action sequence, and do it in a way that feels fun and beautiful at the same time, and that just takes more words. It's a lot more typing.

Laura Williams: [00:29:44] I'd imagine that early on, before you really get into the groove, it'd be difficult to translate the imagery in your mind onto the page the way a reader would actually experience it in a novel, as opposed to on screen.

Richard Moon: [00:29:59] [00:30:00] Yeah, unless it's a critically important detail, in a screenplay you don't need to describe what the park looks like — you just write, exterior, park, day.

Laura Williams: [00:30:06] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:30:07] Bam, you've painted the picture. Whereas if you do that in a novel, you come off looking extremely lazy — which it is. You have to put us in the space, build the picture for us to imagine. So, even though it's a lot more words, I'd say it's not actually the harder part of writing, which is figuring out how you want to say something and making those choices — it's just so much more typing. But yes, you do have to get into those details, because it's the details that give a reader that verisimilitude, that feeling of this is real and I'm actually here.

Laura Williams: [00:30:48] It sounds like, overall, you really enjoy the experience.

Richard Moon: [00:30:51] Oh yes, I love both formats, and I think I love them precisely because of their differences. [00:31:00] I love finding the right turn of phrase that gives you the image and also reaches into your chest and squeezes your heart just a little bit. And at the same time, there's nothing quite like writing a screenplay and landing some scene, some piece of action, on the perfect last two words of its own line — that ‘Rosebud'-type moment, the kind of thing that lands you. I know that's actually a novel example, but you know — finding the way to say the thing you want to say in just three words. That's the good stuff, right?

Laura Williams: [00:31:41] I know, it feels so good.

Richard Moon: [00:31:43] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:31:45] Tell me a little about where you started, what you've done, and I'd also love to hear more about your book.

Richard Moon: [00:31:53] Yeah, absolutely. I took kind of a weird path into screenwriting to begin with. [00:32:00] I'd been writing short stories and working on some very bad books and novels before and during college. There came a point — I don't remember exactly what prompted it — where my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, and we just celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary,

Laura Williams: [00:32:21] Oh wow, happy anniversary.

Richard Moon: [00:32:23] Thank you. But she asked me why I hadn't tried screenwriting — I remember exactly how she put it: because you're always complaining about the shows we watch. I was in college at the time, and I'd always be saying, I don't know why they did that, it should've gone like this instead. And she said, well, you're always complaining, have you tried screenwriting? I hadn't, but I picked up some books, particularly J. Michael Straczynski's screenwriting book, and started playing around with the format. I really took to it, [00:33:00] and wrote a couple of spec scripts for shows I liked — one for CSI, one for Stargate SG-1. Both got me some interest from a couple of agents, and actually landed me a job through a private ad from a director looking for help writing his next screenplay. I worked on that with him — a religious horror movie that I don't think ever got made — but it was so much fun that I kept doing more of that kind of work, helping people develop their ideas.

Richard Moon: After a few years of that, going to pitch festivals, pitching projects and not really getting anywhere, my wife was going through a work transition of her own, and I was pretty frustrated with where I was. We both sort of settled on the idea that, well, we know some people with money, and we both have some background in project management — why don't we start a production company and produce some of my scripts? That was the original idea, just producing my own scripts. We're the kind of nerds who, as soon as we decided to do that, went to UCLA and took classes on how to actually do it. Through one of those classes, we ended up making a short film with a group of other filmmakers, and things just kept going from there. People ask how I broke into Hollywood, and honestly, I never really did — I was happy working in the independent film world, made a few movies, made a pilot, some of which I wrote and some I didn't. Right when the pandemic hit, we'd been trying to get our next feature off the ground, and it had fallen apart, I think, five times by that point. It felt a lot like that Monty Python bit with Swamp Castle — [00:35:00] we'd build a funding plan, start lining up locations and crew, and the whole thing would collapse. We'd build it up again, and it would fall apart again, over and over. So when the pandemic shut everything down, it shut all of those efforts down along with it. And while I was worried about the pandemic like everyone else, I also remember thinking, thank God, I don't have to keep trying to make this movie anymore. At that point I realized I hadn't done any writing for myself in three or four years, since I'd been entirely focused on that one feature. So that summer, I sat down and wrote two — actually three — screenplays, two of which are under option right now, hopefully

Laura Williams: [00:35:51] Oh —

Richard Moon: [00:35:52] They're both fun little stories. And that's the same summer I sat down and thought, this Egyptian story — maybe this isn't [00:36:00] a movie, maybe it needs to be a novel. I got the first draft done in about seven or eight months, and then it was another two or three years before it was ready enough that I could actually get it published. It came out last November. It's called To Conquer Death, and the basic premise draws on an actual event in ancient history, around 1170 BC, called the Bronze Age Collapse — within about thirty years, a wave of climate disasters, migrations, and invasions destroyed most of the major Bronze Age civilizations: the Hittites, the Mycenaean Greeks, badly wounded the Assyrian Empire and Babylon, and Egypt's New Kingdom survived, but just barely, by the skin of its teeth. My thought, reading up on all the history around this event, [00:37:00] was: what if the Bronze Age Collapse was actually caused by a zombie apocalypse?

Laura Williams: [00:37:10] Oh wow.

Richard Moon: [00:37:11] I wanted to see what a zombie apocalypse would look like in the Bronze Age, and how people of that era would react to the dead rising from their graves and coming for the living. So the story follows two brothers from ancient Egypt who encounter what looks like an invasion of people from across the sea. They discover these aren't really invaders — they're refugees, barbarians fleeing something much darker that's driven them out of their forests. The brothers end up joining with two women from this barbarian group, and are sent by the pharaoh back along the refugee route to find out what's actually causing the migrations, and what this darkness is. Along the way, [00:38:00] they have to work through their own trauma, how they each approach death and grief, and they form a kind of found family

Laura Williams: [00:38:08] Right.

Richard Moon: [00:38:09] that none of them realized they needed in their lives.

Laura Williams: [00:38:15] I've got you on my TBR list. I've really enjoyed this conversation, because I don't know much about screenwriting or the movie world, and it's really interesting seeing how it's both different from and similar to novel writing. I'd love to see how someone handles a truly history-accurate movie, because that has to be incredibly complicated

Richard Moon: [00:38:39] Oh yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:38:40] when you're trying to set a scene in, say, 1946 Germany, or something like that.

Richard Moon: [00:38:44] Well, you see —

Laura Williams: [00:38:45] Yeah.

Richard Moon: [00:38:46] there are plenty of historical movies out there that genuinely try to stick to the history, and then there are the ones where the director basically says, the historians weren't there, what do they know, and just changes things left and right. Which is fine, on a lot of levels, since the whole point is to tell a great movie — it only really falls down, in my opinion, when the movie gets treated as if it is the history, and you have to say, no, it's not, this is a movie. It's based on history, but it's not [00:39:00] the history. I love the movie 1776, but I know John Adams didn't actually break into song while debating the Declaration of Independence.

Laura Williams: [00:39:34] No, we didn't.

Richard Moon: [00:39:37] Right.

Laura Williams: [00:39:39] And sometimes too, when people do historical work, they modernize it far too much, and that drives me absolutely insane.

Richard Moon: [00:39:48] Yeah, and I've had

Laura Williams: [00:39:49] But it is what it is.

Richard Moon: [00:39:51] this come up just this month, at a few conventions, talking about the challenge of — my story is set three thousand years ago, but I'm telling it [00:40:00] to an audience that speaks colloquial modern English. So there are choices in the language I have to make that have genuinely kept me up at night.

Laura Williams: [00:40:13] Yeah, and that's funny too, because I think that's so much harder to solve on the page than in a film, where you just hear someone actually speak it. For example, the books I write are set in Louisiana, and there's an elderly Black woman with a very deep-South way of speaking, and it's hard to get that onto the page correctly.

Richard Moon: [00:40:37] Mm-hmm.

Laura Williams: [00:40:37] and still make sure it flows properly in the reader's head. It's different — actors have to go through a similar struggle trying to live up to whatever the part demands, I'm sure, but

Richard Moon: [00:40:48] You still end up with problems there too — we all know a movie where an actor's accent is trying hard but not quite landing, and all sorts of other issues. [00:40:58] Beyond that, you also get certain tropes that come out of, especially, historical adaptations — like, it's just a simple fact of our film history that all Romans are British. [00:41:00] Right?

Laura Williams: [00:41:16] Hey, wait —

Richard Moon: [00:41:17] They have to be British, because that's just the convention we translate things into. Classical Latin obviously didn't sound like a British accent, but we're translating, and we stick with that trope anyway. It can be kind of —

Laura Williams: [00:41:31] Well, I'm looking forward to reading your book — I'm going to [00:41:35] definitely do that. It sounds really interesting.

Laura Williams: I really appreciate you taking the time.

Richard Moon: [00:41:42] Thank you for having me.

Laura Williams: [00:41:44] It sounds like it.

Richard Moon: [00:41:45] Wonderful.

Laura Williams: [00:41:46] Yeah, I've learned a lot, and I hope my listeners have too. As an author, it gives you a lot to think about, if you ever have plans or hopes of putting your work into film or [00:42:00] TV or anything like that.

Laura Williams: So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Richard Moon: [00:42:03] Thank you very much.

Laura Williams: [00:42:04] So tell everybody where your book can be found, and where you can be found.

Richard Moon: [00:42:09] Okay, yes. My book can be found very easily at richardmoonbooks.com. Nice and easy. You'll find links there to pick it up on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, on Bookshop.org — and please, if you're so inclined, go order it through your favorite local indie bookshop.

Laura Williams: [00:42:28] Yes.

Richard Moon: [00:42:29] Please, absolutely, go to your local library and have them order it. I'm a huge library supporter and love seeing that book wherever it can be found. As for finding me, the easiest places are either Instagram, also richardmoonbooks, or Blue Sky, where if you just search my name, I pop right up. And if you have any interest in seeing whether your book, or your story, or your idea could be translated into a movie, I, along with several other extremely talented producers, can [00:43:00] be found at voyagemedia.com. They run an incubator program focused on adapting existing and even self-published novels.

Richard Moon: You can go through that list, find a producer who seems like a good fit for whatever your story is, and pitch them directly — they'll evaluate it.

Laura Williams: [00:43:20] That's great information to have.

Richard Moon: [00:43:21] I really like working with Voyage. They've been a great company.

Laura Williams: [00:43:25] And you said you're working on a second book?

Richard Moon: [00:43:28] Yes, I am. This one isn't historical.

Laura Williams: [00:43:30] Is it a standalone, or —

Richard Moon: [00:43:32] Yeah, I tend to think in standalones rather than series, and then — whenever I say that, I have to remind myself I actually have sequel plans for two out of the three standalones I'm currently working on. But yes, this next book is actually science fiction, best described as building out a world of space pirates.

Richard Moon: I'm exploring what it's like for new societies to develop out [00:44:00] in the far reaches of the solar system.

Laura Williams: [00:44:03] That has to be fun to write. Yeah, it really does. Well, thank you so much, I really appreciated this — it's been very informative. To learn more about the podcast, and to sign up to be the first to know when new episodes are up, visit thewritingbiz.com.

Laura Williams: And until next time, take what you've learned and put it to work in your own writing biz. Maybe we'll get some movies out of it.

Richard Moon: [00:44:26] Maybe.

Laura Williams: [00:44:27] Thank you so much, Richard. This has been great.

Richard Moon: [00:44:30] This has been wonderful.