On your Twitter profile, you describe yourself as a writer “of terrible movies but a good novel.” What makes, Last Stop This Town, different from the screenplays you wrote for Slackers or American Pie 2? Is it just that this project is more personal as there were fewer people changing your original vision?
Film is a collaborative medium. I almost always get rewritten, directors put their stamps on it, actors improvise, and editors move things around. Sometimes that works out great, sometimes not so much. Last Stop is all on me. So yes, it’s about flying solo for the first time, but it’s also a personal story because for me at least, leaving high school was a surprisingly traumatic time. I left high school after my junior year to go to college, so it was especially hard for me. You think college is going to be 100% awesome—parties, sex, freedom—but no one tells you it’s scary to go off into the world on your own.
One of the best ways to get your story made into a movie is to get it first published as a novel. However, one of the best ways to sell a book is to get it made into a movie. In a literary market where publishers are increasingly worried about a first time author’s “platform,” how important was your status as a screenwriter in terms of pitching this book to publishers or agents?
Let’s just say I was able to skip a few steps. I called my film agent, he called a book agent in New York, and the next day he had read my manuscript and I was off to the races. But I certainly paid my dues when I broke into screenwriting in the first place. The film business is incredibly competitive (no duh) so getting a bunch of movies made, even if some of that was dumb luck, carries a lot of weight.
When you finish a screenplay, the success of the project is largely dependent on so many factors beyond the screenwriter’s control: director, actors, producers… Were you at all prepared for how much legwork you would have to do as an author to get your book read and reviewed?
It’s been a lot of work, but it’s also fun because it’s just me putting myself out there, doing the interviews, connecting with bloggers, signing books. I’m used to standing behind Shannon Elizabeth and reporters asking me to get out of the shot, so if this counts as hard work, I’m okay with it.
You and the best selling “dick lit” author, Tucker Max, both went to Duke Law and you both gave up law jobs to write humorous stories that revolve around guys going to parties and trying to get laid. Is there any connection? Does it take intelligent, ambitious guys to successfully write about immature characters acting irresponsible?
I doubt there’s any correlation between being smart and writing coming-of-age comedies, but the one thing a legal career gives you is discipline. That, and time management. The biggest hurdle in writing any novel is simply writing it. If a law partner walked into my office and said he needed me to write a 100-page brief by Monday I wouldn’t panic, I’d just get it done. I might slash his tires, too, but I’d get the job done. Same thing with all the lawyer-writers I know. They crank shit out.
Manhattan is a popular setting in novels because almost any random event or person can appear around every corner. On the same token, the immensity of New York City also makes these chance meetings between characters seem a bit more unrealistic. Are there any other challenges that come with writing about one of the most popular settings in American literature?
I grew up in Connecticut, so New York was the scary big city where anything could happen. So not only is New York the perfect setting to make Connecticut kids look like yokels, but it is one of the few places that really never sleeps. The story takes place over the course of one night, and except for maybe Vegas and L.A., where else are you going to realistically keep the story going at 4:00 am? But yes, it’s got its challenges, too. Pretty unlikely for the characters to run into each other in a city of millions. So I make sure the characters point out that fact so that later on when it happens, the cheat feels more like a wink than a dodge.
I thought about that problem—ten years from now, will this novel seem “so 2012”? But ultimately, I wanted to capture a time and a mood. Some of the pop culture reference were already all over the map—“Walk like an Egyptian” is from the 80s, “Pretty Sneaky, Sis” is from the 70s—but if you get it, great, if not, no big deal. That’s just how I like to make my teenagers talk. But ultimately, if the book is successful, it will be because of the characters and themes about the excitement and fear of leaving the nest, not the one-liners.
And as for the music, I’m into all the alternative bands I mention in the book and I guess the filmmaker in me just couldn’t resists playing a soundtrack for the reader.
What are the differences between trying to write a humorous screenplay as opposed to a funny novel?
I think it’s pacing. Screenplays have to pack in the laughs and that’s a real challenge because sometimes it takes away from the character development. The novel can breathe. There’s not a constant pressure for the next joke. That being said, this novel is probably more like a screenplay than most, so we’ll see how my style progresses as I become more experienced in writing novels.
While the storyline in novels are not limited by such things as budget or a fear of exceeding an R rating, are there other challenges in terms of writing a novel that do not exist when writing a screenplay?
Reprogramming my brain to write in the past tense (screenplays are all present tense because it’s technically stage direction). But on a less mundane level, there’s a certain level of superficiality in a screenplay that just doesn’t cut it in novel form. What’s left implied in the screenplay is explicit in the novel. So you really have to do your homework. Figure out your characters, their back stories, and motivations. That’s an incredibly difficult process, but when it’s done, you know your characters like your best friends. I don’t know that I have the same relationship with my screenplay protagonists. But I love my guys from Last Stop.
Follow David H. Steinberg on Twitter and get a copy of Last Stop This Town here.
Follow Shawn Alff on Twitter or Facebook and email him if interested in writing about Sex & Love
When David H. Steinberg left high school at 16 to attend Yale, he could not have known he would spend the better part of his adult career chronicling the lives of teenagers searching for themselves in an American landscape of casual hookups and wild parties. I caught up with Steinberg to see what his experience was like shifting from writing screenplays for such comedies as American Pie 2, to penning his first novel, Last Stop This Town.
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