A Volleyball Didn’t Cut It

When I decided to adapt Utopia, the screenplay I had written in 1996, into a novel, I expected the challenges to be structural—updating the story for the intervening decades, expanding the world, converting a screenplay into prose. I didn’t expect to discover how much the form itself would change what the story was able to be.

Utopia had qualities worth keeping. It moved. It had a plot that understood its own direction, scenes that drove themselves forward, a governing system at its centre that carried real thematic substance. It lacked the interiority that prose affords, especially in situations where actions and thoughts are contradictory.

The discipline of screenwriting itself demands that scenes are written to describe location, action and dialogue—all genuinely useful elements of story that I’d learned to deploy. What the form generally doesn’t permit, and in fact discourages, is access to what a character is thinking. An action description that becomes a character study is considered by actors and directors as self-indulgent in a script. You can get away with writing: She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. This tells you what the camera might notice. It does not tell you what is happening below the smile, or why, or how long she has been practising that particular management of her face.

There are, technically, auditory workarounds for interiority in film. Voiceover is the most direct. Forrest Gump is an example of voiceover used well, although Forrest being an unreliable narrator adds its own complications. For scenes where a character is entirely alone with their thoughts, there is the creative solution of giving them something to address. Tom Hanks spent most of Cast Away explaining himself to a volleyball named Wilson.

In You’ve Got Mail, the two protagonists can only be honest with each other through written correspondence—in effect, through prose—because face to face they manage their expressions too carefully to say anything true. The film had to borrow the technology of the novel to carry its emotional centre. I have now cited three Tom Hanks films to make a single argument about screenwriting. I’m sure he’d want to know how helpful his catalogue has been. Do let him know when you see him.

The conventions in screenwriting exist for good reasons—a screenplay is a blueprint, and the texture of a character’s inner life is supplied later by other artists. This has been a reasonable and generally successful division of labour. And if Utopia had ever been made into a film, I’m certain that it would have developed significantly greater depth than it had on the page. But once I started writing, I found that there was so much more that I could do with prose that even an incredibly talented team of actors and creatives wouldn’t have been able to do.

A Frictionless State follows four point-of-view characters. Ari Feld is the protagonist—a gifted technician whose ability to read systems is matched, at some cost, by a corresponding inability to read the people around him. The story also follows Alene, the investigator who begins to see Ari clearly as her investigation progresses. Sharon, his estranged wife, has been holding a particular disappointment for long enough that she has almost stopped noticing it’s there. And Francis, Ari’s foster mother, one of the architects of the governing order who is herself dangerous. Each of them carries an interior life the story requires—not as psychological colour, but as structure. And what each of them is thinking is sometimes directly contrary to what they are showing. No volleyball required.

When a character learns something they have decided not to act on, a screenplay can write the non-action—the slight pause, the controlled expression, the turn away from the window. In prose, you can also write the decision process of not taking action—the calculation being run, what it costs, what it protects. The reader holds both at once, the performance and the reason for it. For a story about characters operating inside a system that manages what is known and permitted, the gap between what is presented and what is actual is not a technique. It is the subject.

The moral register opens up differently in prose, too. No character in A Frictionless State operates from clean premises. The choices available to them are consistently bad or worse—shaped by the system they live inside, the loyalties they carry, the things they know they are not supposed to know. A screenplay can dramatise those choices from outside. Prose can show them being made, in real time, from inside. The armchair version of ethics—where you consider what someone should have done without being inside what they were facing—does not apply here. The reader is in the room while the decision is forming, not waiting outside for the result.

A Frictionless State is, in its deepest structure, about exactly this gap. In 2074, the Council of Global Stability governs through the managed delivery of all resources, including information, controlling what is known, what is released, what is suppressed. Ari discovers evidence that the pandemic may not have been what it seemed. His investigation begins by disrupting the official account and has the potential to threaten the entire architecture of managed reality that holds the world’s stability in place. A story about the gap between what is shown and what is true—about systems that maintain order by eliminating the expression of friction, not just the friction itself—needed a form that could be on the surface and below it simultaneously. The match between content and form is not incidental. It is where the story lives.

Ari reads systems better than he reads people. That asymmetry—his precision in one domain running alongside his losses in the other—only becomes fully legible in prose, where the reader can be inside it. Alene can observe the gap from outside without yet knowing how it applies to her life. Sharon can have had too much experience of it to bother describing it. Francis can be choosing, with full awareness, not to see it at all.

All of that is happening simultaneously in different registers of knowing. The screenplay had no architecture for it. The novel, as it turned out, did.

A Frictionless State is free to read, one chapter at a time. Start reading →