Moira Buffini on Moving from Screenwriting to Penning a Novel

I never thought that I would write a novel. I have been a dramatist for decades. I love writing for the screen and have always been an advocate for the transformative power of plays. I have been writing them since I was at school. 

I had the idea for what became Songlight in the year leading up to lockdown and always meant to write it for the screen. My son and daughter were in their teens at the time and every weekend there seemed to be a big film on in the cinema that my son wanted to see. My daughter was not so well served. With the exception of The Hunger Games and the odd intelligent comedy with a female protagonist, there didn’t seem to be much out there for teenage girls. I wanted to write something for her - and for my teenage self.

In my mind, I saw a group of young people living in a low-tech dystopian future, a world where nature is slowly recovering from a mass extinction event. The idea was inspired by John Wyndham’s cold war dystopian novel The Chrysalids, which I read at school and have carried with me though life as one of those formative books. 

I tentatively mentioned my idea to Matt Charman, my (Academy Award nominated) screenwriter and producer friend and he suggested writing it 'on spec’ i.e. without a commission. ‘The longer you hold on to it without being paid,’ he said, ‘the more control you’ll have over it, the more you’ll be able to work out what it is.’ I thought this was great advice and I began work. 

I knew my opening scene would involve the two friends meeting in a small fishing boat. One of them is there in the flesh, the other is a telepathic presence. I knew that the boat’s owner, Lark, would be my heroine and I knew she lived in a place where her telepathy or ‘songlight’ is persecuted. I imagined the action and I sat down to do what I always do - begin by improvising the first scene. This means you’re writing into character straight away and it isn’t as sterile as working out the entire plot beforehand (I have never been able to do this). 

I wrote EXT. HARBOUR. DAY - and almost immediately fell down. When and where was this place? What was Lark wearing, what did her boat look like, who did she live with, what did she believe in, what were her expectations for her future? I knew I had to write her from the inside and I tried again, abandoning the scene heading and writing an improvised internal monologue. It worked immediately. By the time I had finished a page I realised I was writing first person prose and that this had to be a novel before it could be anything else. 

At the beginning of lockdown, every screen and theatre job I was involved in vanished overnight. I found myself with that rare luxury - time. I wrote the first draft, giving my characters voices, so that they could tell me their stories and show me their world. The village of Northaven sprang to life and then the city of Brightlinghelm. Sister Swan, my mercurial antagonist, landed on the page, damaged and dangerous. She fascinated me. I knew my country, Brightland, was at war and I wanted to write about the effects of this military autocracy on both girls and boys. So the men appeared, Rye and Piper, the new cadets and Heron Mikane, the veteran. Then I began to write the enemy, the Aylish. I wanted to see what happened to my young protagonists when the propaganda they were raised with begins to break down. Songlight is a story of growing resistance.

After lockdown, the story world grew. It has been enormously beneficial working with Matt and my collaborators from the world of film. Screenwriters are team players and bouncing the ideas and stories around soon expanded the world from one book into three. When, to my delight, Faber in the UK and HarperCollins in the US bought the trilogy, I experienced for the first time, the editorial relationship. In the film world, script editors are always looking for things to cut and I was very surprised when my two book editors, Alice Swan and Tara Weikum began telling me to write more. ‘What’s she thinking here?’ ‘How’s he feeling about that?’ In film, this must be done in a line of action and it all sits in the subtext of the dialogue. In a novel, it is expansive. That unconstrained freedom has been a real joy. But I’m glad for my screen training in economy and I still hate to waste a single word.

I have written many plays for young people and have always found them to be the best audience - both open-minded and exacting. They won’t tolerate being bored. I have never made any concessions with complexity of language or theme when writing for younger audiences and I have approached the novel in the same way. When I was young, YA didn’t exist. I read everything from Wyndham and Dostoyevsky to Jackie Collins and I don’t think any of it harmed me. All it did was make me want to write. 

Lark and her friend Nightingale are still inspiring me and I’m still discovering this brave new world of prose. I have just finished the second novel in the trilogy and their friendship, this tiny light in a dark world, continues to bring about seismic change, not just in their lives but in mine.