Interview (Part 2): Juliet Giglio and Keith Giglio
My conversation with the screenwriting couple whose first novel The Summer of Christmas has just been released to the public.
My conversation with the screenwriting couple whose first novel The Summer of Christmas has just been released to the public.
Juliet Giglio and Keith Giglio are a husband-wife screenwriting duo who cover a lot of territory of interest to Go Into The Story readers. They write everything from studio features to TV movies and now novels with the release of The Summer of Christmas. They also teach screenwriting: Juliet at SUNY Oswego and Keith at Syracuse University.
Recently, I had an entertaining and informative interview with the pair. Today in Part 2 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Juliet and Keith discuss the differences between writing a screenplay and a novel, and how they used their screenwriting skills to write The Summer of Christmas.
Scott: Did you find that freeing in a way, to go to novels where you could write 300‑plus pages.
Juliet: It was freeing. It was really fun to be able to open up and talk about what the characters were feeling and thinking about at that moment, and not have to worry about having them talk about it.
Keith: Also, it’s interesting. I always think screenwriting is like freestyle swimming in a lap pool. There are some rules you have to comply to. Writing a novel was different. We could veer off in a different direction or create a different character. You would never really get any pushback from development people. It’s a great supportive process.
We really like getting in our heads and into back stories because that would create a scene and plans, and we could go back. Like screenwriting, novel writing is elliptical. You’re going forward, and you’re going back, going forward and going back.
Scott: Of course, William Goldman famously said, “Screenplays are structure.” How did you approach the structural component of the novel? Were you thinking in terms of sequences and…?
Keith: Yeah.
Juliet: We did, because we are screenwriters, we structured it in a very similar way where we had eight sequences. We had a clear end of act one. We had a clear midpoint, and a clear end of act two.
Keith: We had our cards on the board.
Juliet: We had cards. Then, at a certain point, we had to divide up the chapters. What we discovered, was that it was better for us to either do two chapters at a time or we’d go every other, every other. That way, we kept it fresh, and that no one was getting too far ahead.
Keith: We’d pause at the end of act one and discuss what we needed to do next and if the story was working so far. Then we’d pause at the midpoint, and we’d pause at the end of the second act to regroup. We knew how it had to end. We wanted to make sure we were on the same page.
Scott: I interviewed T. J. Newman. She wrote this book called Falling, which was a “New York Times” bestseller. She was a former airplane hostess or flight attendant and wrote this thing. Universal picked it up for seven figures.
She started off writing it as a screenplay. She didn’t know how to write a screenplay, but she just saw it as a movie. Then she eventually moved into writing it as a novel, but she approached it all the way through as like, “I’m writing a movie.”
When I’ve talked with some other writers, is that’s actually an advantage nowadays in terms of agents and publishing companies. If you come out with a book that feels like a movie, that makes it more likely that they can get it set up.
Keith: We’re hoping people enjoy the book on its own.
Juliet: It’s a fun beach read. It’s a very fun, lighthearted story. It reminds you of Christmas in the summer, which is…
Keith: Having spent four years making these Christmas movies…
Scott: Probably in the summer.
Keith: In the summer, yeah, in Connecticut and down in Nashville. I think we had real snow once.
Juliet: Right. But that film was made in Tahoe, they had real snow briefly.
Keith: Briefly.
Scott: You’ve clearly been branded Christmas people. What do you think about that?
Juliet: I think it’s great.
Keith: It’s fun.
Juliet: I’m a huge Christmas fan. Also, I think it speaks to our wheelhouse of making people happy and writing comedies. To me, it’s where the rom‑coms went. The rom‑coms were really big in the ’90s and the early 2000s. Now, they’ve left the theaters. I think the Christmas movies have picked up that mantle. I love writing them.
Scott: Let’s talk about your novel, The Summer of Christmas. Which came first: the story concept or the idea of writing a novel?
Juliet: The story concept. We were toying with this idea and when that agent said, “Hey, would you ever think of writing a book.” That’s immediately what came to mind. We remember pitching it to her in that moment. She said, “Yeah, I like this.”
Keith: Because it’s authentic. We’ve been on those sets. We’ve spent a lot of time with crazy movie stars in our career. We’ve always been torn between East Coast and West Coast. It’s a lot of us in that book.
Juliet: We live upstate half the year as well. We know the whole upstate New York world, and that helped a lot.
Scott: Before taking this on, you mentioned that Keith had been reading commercial fiction. This is like contemporary romance or romantic comedy, I guess it’s in that mix. Were you reading books? Were you getting a sense of what’s out there, or how much research did you do on that front?
Juliet: To be honest, we only read a few Christmas books. But I do love commercial fiction. It’s the type of book I read for book clubs.
Keith: While Frank Capra is my movie guy, Nick Hornby is my book guy. Hornby always does this rom‑com‑drama kind of thing. It just felt like the right space.
Juliet: We also started reading a little Nicholas Sparks and Elin Hildebrand and realized that they were intriguing books.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Juliet and Keith talk about the plot of The Summer of Christmas and why they chose to feature the filmmaking business as a central part of the story.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Juliet and Keith are repped by WME.
The Story of Christmas: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Good Reads.