So many movies released these days are derivative of other materials: comic books, video games, and most often from books.  Whenever movies adapted from books are released there’s an immediate wave, both in public reviews and personal exchanges, assenting that “the book was better.” In this, and the coming series of posts, I’ll analyze the pitfalls of this comparison, take a deeper look at the nature of both formats of storytelling, suggest a better way of thinking, and note some methodology for future adaptations.

I can’t and won’t defend every movie based on a book which disappoints. There are bad movies, both adapted and originals, just as sure as there are bad books that somehow get made into movies. However, as a writer of both novels and screenplays, familiar with the movie making process, I can offer a unique perspective.

I often see how what might be viewed as “missing” or “changed” by the book lover watching the movie, would have been very difficult and even more detrimental to include in the movie simply because of what movies can and cannot do well.  As a result, I typically enjoy both the movie and the book, relishing the differences, rather than dwelling on them. With that in mind, I believe an adjustment to the way most people think regarding this comparison of media could bring a lot more pleasure and less aggravation to dual-media experience.

My first issue with comparing books and adapted movies is what typically carries over between the two. What elements from your first experience with the story, be it movie or book, carry over into your experience with the second?

A case study:

One of my favorite books is “The Eiger Sanction” by Trevanian. A favorite of my father’s which he introduced me to. It was published well before I was born, and years later (though still before I was born) a movie based on the book was made. It was directed by and starred Clint Eastwood, one of his early directorial efforts. I remember seeing the movie when I was very young and really enjoying it. I thought I understood why my father liked the book so much. However, at the time of the movie’s release it was shunned by many critics as “lacking the sophistication of the book’s character,” among other dismal comparisons to its root material.

It would be years later before I was old enough to actually read the novel myself. While I then found there was indeed much more to this story, character depth, subplot, etc., it didn’t make me hate the movie or change my opinion of it.  I just enjoyed the book too, for what it offered different from the movie. I did notice however, that certain elements of the movie carried over into my enjoyment of the book.

In this particular example, a large part of the movie takes place while climbing a specific mountain in the Alps. The movie was filled with beautiful shots of this mountain range. Many parts of the book occur while mountain climbing, including the action filled climax, and all these were really filmed on that spectacular mountain. The setting was stunning, and the notion of all these intense scenes and conversations happening while the characters are doing complex and dangerous climbing activities was incredibly consuming.  In the book, good as it is, Trevanian could not do justice to this mountain setting. That’s not a criticism, he just couldn’t pause the story to spend pages and pages detailing these impressive, towering monsters, and while he supplied enough technical climbing details for readers to understand the complexity, the film has the ability to stream the ever-present difficulty and danger, without pausing the dialog or action for a single moment. 

These were the elements I brought over in my mind from the movie to the book. When Trevanian touched on the setting, I filled in the rest with the visuals from the movie, something a reader who hadn’t seen the movie could only do if they’d been to the Alps. Similarly, the duality of the plot and the separate action of climbing was always in my mind through the book, though Trevanian had to alternate between the two, again carried from the movie.

In short, the unique details of the movie carried over into my mind while experiencing the book, enhancing it, while so many who read the book first, saw only what the movie could not, or did not do. In general, very few readers it seems will bring those book details into the theater with them the way that the movie details came with me to the book.

When you read a book and find wonderfully deep characters, each with backstories, great little subplots, and you watch an adapted movie only to find all these elements have been omitted, shortened, or changed almost beyond recognition, you see only that something is missing. However, when you watch a movie, and see beautiful full settings and hear voices and see faces, if you then go read the book, often you don’t complain that the setting description is short changed, or the description of characters looks and voices are under explained.  Often we just carry the movie detail over and let it shape the book we read, as we’re reading it.

Another battle movies must face is competing with ideas that are only in a reader’s mind. There are many cases when an author, in interest of keeping a story moving, must keep description brief.  You don’t want to spend pages describing a room only to have a few lines of dialog and move to another location. So you give two sentences describing the room and move on, but two sentences doesn’t complete an entire room so we readers fill in the rest, filling in with details of our own choosing, and details of similar rooms we’ve been in. This makes books fun for our imaginations, but then pits movies against ideas that exist only in our minds, ideas not even the author of the book can fully account for.

As a writer of books, of course I don’t want people to wait to buy my book until after a movie is made of it, in order to watch the movie first and read the book second. No one will make a movie of a book that no one is reading, waiting for a movie instead. However, I do think we readers and viewers can enjoy both versions of a particular work, even when they might differ greatly, if we think of things a little differently and amend our expectations, and I’ll tell you how…in my next few posts.

I’m truly a believer in lifelong learning, that no matter how much you know, or think you know, you’re learning everyday. With my first novel on its way in a couple months, I am well aware that I have a great deal of learning to do when it comes to writing.

That said, as I’ve gone from the story in my mind, to my first draft, through revisions, and finally to that final draft set to print, I’ve had to learn a few lessons and had to make some shifts in my thinking to get me there. Thoughts that might be useful to writers out there now, with their stories in their minds, with first chapters written or even first drafts, who are struggling with where to go next.

One such lesson, or shift in thought that I had to make, was to let go of the notion that the story in my mind will be the story in a reader’s mind when I am done and the book is out. I’ve come to understand that this will not be the case, and in fact could never be the case.  Was I to describe every detail of setting, every detail of a character’s appearance, every thought each character has, and all the backstory each character carries, I suspect I wouldn’t live long enough to finish even one story. Thus, we as writers streamline the details to what we feel is most important for our readers to experience, and what best serves our plot. Everything else, everything we omit from the vision in our mind, then becomes open to interpretation by the reader. 

The story that reaches the page is only an approximation of the story in an author’s mind, and from those words, a brand new story is created in the mind of each reader. Their story is unique from any other reader’s and twice removed from the original thoughts. Can a story ever truly be told? I would submit that the answer is no. Only an approximation of the story can be told.

Some of this might seem obvious, but acknowledging it becomes particularly important when rewriting and refining your work. After a writer has their first draft, it can seem like cutting a part of yourself, to undergo editing pieces of your story away.  But, in almost all cases, it is necessary to do so in order to make your writing the best it can be – in order to create a work that is dense with captivating content, even when that means cutting vivid details, thoughts, emotions and yes even sometime plot.

The story in your mind will always be far greater than the story that fits into your book. You’ll always have plot that leads up to the beginning of your novel, plot that continues after your novel, backstories for characters that don’t effect this specific plot line enough to warrant inclusion, details of settings that were simply too elaborate to include while maintaining the speed of your plot through your book.

What reaches the page will always be merely an approximation of your story. Accepting this allows you to understand that cutting the book doesn’t change your story; it only changes the approximation of your story that the book holds. Thus, rather than aim to tell your story on the page, you must aim to create the best reader experience of your story that you can. Creating a better reader experience only stands to improve your readership and allow you to continue to tell stories.

Besides that, there’s other good news. For if you could get every detail of the story onto the page, you the writer would then be useless to the story. The story would exist, and you would no longer matter. However, as it is, when you hold so much more story in your mind, you always have more to offer to those who care to dig further.  When fans seek you out to answer questions they have from your book, you have a great deal of additional information to provide - more details, more experiences, more side stories, more background, and maybe even more novels.

 * Note, the examples and descriptions of this essay reflect the creation process for a novel, however many of the same ideas could be applied to a short story, a poem, a song, a painting, or any other narrative from of expression.  Speaking to one scenario only serves to keep the thought concise.

I’m a fan of a good story in whatever medium it appears, book, movie, song, video game, you name it, or in this instance ballet. Popular this time of year, of course is The Nutcracker. I’ve seen a few productions over the years and while I will concede that each performance inherently has its own variances and nuances, in each version I’ve seen, I find the story of The Nutcracker falls a little short.

Lets take a step back and ask the question, what makes a story interesting? To me the simplest answer is conflict. Conflict between characters or between a character and other forces is what almost every story uses to get us listeners, viewers, or observer to invest our time to find out what happens.  What makes a story good? If we observers feel our time was well spent investing in a story, then to us personally, the story is good. Thus, to me, a good story must have compelling conflict with the exploration of the conflict, be it leading to a resolution or not, guiding us through the story’s entirety. 

In general terms, every element of a work should serve the story.  Big budget special effects in movies, soliloquies in plays, songs in musicals, or flashback chapters in a novel, all of these can be exceptional devices so long as they serve the story, if not, they and the story fail. In a ballet, dancing is of course the primary element and dancing is used to tell the story. Therefore, by my standards, all dancing in a ballet should serve the story.

Now returning to The Nutcracker, the ballet has a definite story, the conflict of which lies between the mice, led by the Mouse-King and the soldiers who fight them, led by the Nutcracker.  This conflict might be as good as any for a story, but my issue is that this conflict resolves essentially half way through.

A story can have many conflicts but to me no further conflict arises resulting in the entire second half of the piece being without conflict and virtual without story. The dancing no longer serves the story but instead becomes a simple collage of vignettes, each with no apparent story or conflict of their own, and no matter how well performed, and how ornately decorated, still fall short of continuing to be compelling.

That said, I believe altering the story to maintain conflict, and thereby interest for the entirety could be relatively simple. Just bring back the Mouse-King for one more battle right before the conclusion. Imagine, the story as is, but when the Mouse-King was defeated he instead escapes and threatens to return. Through each vignette of various food or drink themed dances, the threat of the Mouse-King’s return is ever-present…conflict.

After the crowning of Clara (or whatever the girls name is in a particular version) and the Prince (Nutcracker) as rulers of the Land of Sweets, the Mouse-King does returns and threatens everyone. The Nutcracker must once again take up arms and then and only then defeat the Mouse-King for good. With this resolution to the conflict, now only a short amount of story is spent celebrating the defeat and awaking from the dream (if that is the interpretation of your given version.) So again I ask, is it too late to rewrite The Nutcracker?

* It is difficult to account for all interpretation of this piece, across so many years and around the world. Given the multitude of unique versions, it is possible that a similar variation to what I propose has been tried. If so, and if available to watch or at least read a review of, please point me in its direction. I would surely enjoy it.

Much like my culinary appetite, I find my appetite for stories sizable, but more noteworthy, to be heavily influenced by seasonal hallmarks.  Just as the 10^th month of the year brings an insatiable taste for anything with a particular orange gourd as an ingredient, so to does October fortify my craving for creepy, sinister, and macabre tales. Naturally, it culminates on the 31^st, before turning to the heartwarming, playful, and jolly stories that draw my fancy through the remaining holidays of the year.

With Halloween just days away, many dark, enticing tales cross my mind, but one that emerges as not only scary, but interesting to ponder is the film Angel Heart (1987). *  Though I’ve seen it multiple times, and years ago, it still stands as a complex story with themes and details worth revisiting and contemplating from time to time.

It stars a barely recognizable Mickey Rourke, to those familiar with the actor today, alongside Robert De Niro and Lisa Bonet. Rourke portrays Harry Angel. On the surface he’s an easily identifiable, hardboiled private detective – struggling to pay his bills, chasing beautiful women, and bedding a few in order to pursue his latest investigation.  But that’s only where the character begins. The missing person case that falls into Angel’s lap takes him, and us, on a dangerous path of secrets, corruption, and murder. Besides putting Angel’s own life in jeopardy, the story leads to darker territory including voodoo, deathly fortune telling, and devil worship.

This alone is enough to distinguish the story from a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe case, and to push this film into the October-appropriate realm of Horror, but this is only the surface appeal of the film. Angel Heart goes further, and doubles the detective’s investigation, with all its peril, as also a voyage of self-discovery.  As Harry Angel must go to dark and sinister places, so to must he uncover dark and sinister truths about himself.

This elevates the story from entertaining to contemplative, and is the reason this film can not only give you a welcome Halloween chill, but also leave those of you who love a good story as much as I do, ruminating on its themes and psychological consequences for years to come - revisiting this meaty morsel whenever your appetite for the menacing and direful surfaces.

* Note this film was based on William Hjortsberg’s novel Falling Angel (1978).  My familiarity lies with the film and my discussion is limited to it, though I’m sure the novel shares most of the film’s admirable qualities, as well as possesses many of its own. Perhaps appropriate for a future post...