So
many great movies are based on books.
Just look at the recent Academy Awards.
American Hustle was based on The Sting Man. The
Wolf of Wall Street was based on a book of the same name. 12
Years A Slave was based on The Life of
William Grimes. Gravity was based on a book of the same name. I think you get the picture – pun intended.
If
you want to know what will be in movie theaters, except for sequels, spinoffs,
and remakes of successful films, look at the world of books. Publishing has made itself the minor leagues,
a feeding ground for talent to be picked up by Hollywood once it’s been tried,
tested, and proven a hit.
Writers
pen their books with the story and characters in mind, seeking to create
something powerful. Books can be quite
stirring. And some of them go on to
become movies.
It’s
rare that someone says the movie was better than the book, but that’s because
they read the book first and attach all kinds of psychological baggage to the
story. Maybe if you read a book after
seeing the movie, you’ll say the movie was better.
I
love books and some books really are best told as a book but in most cases I
think a movie depiction of anything is the most powerful way to tell a
story. You have sound, visuals, and
words – engaging multiple senses simultaneously. Books only have our own voices to reflect
upon.
Take
a book like The Wolf of Wall Street. Are you telling me you’d prefer to read it
than to see it? There’s a lot of eye
candy, decadence, and style to the film.
Seeing gorgeous people on a larger-than-life screen exceeds anything I
could imagine about them. Or, am I just
being lazy?
If
I imagine something, couldn’t I improve on perfection – and experience it the
way I’d want to? Maybe
books seem better than the movie because to read a book makes it a personal, individualized experience.
We
build on the words we read and fill in the missing parts with our prejudiced,
exaggerated vantage points. A movie
depiction has far less wiggle room than a book’s interpretation of things.
Gladly,
I don’t have to choose between movies and books. Both are readily available to us.
Each
medium has its appeal and each helps us live our lives for the better. But it’s nice to know that the backbone of
Hollywood creativity is built on books.
Check
today’s bestseller list for tomorrow’s matinee lineup.
Guest Post On Writing By David Grace
I recently
asked a brilliant scientist friend to review a chapter involving the
protagonist and a professor who was designing a new form of virus-based insect
control technology. I just wanted to make sure that whatever the professor said
about genetics wasn’t wildly and obviously inaccurate. For me, the entire bio
aspect of the book is just window dressing, the underpinning of a plot point
that I’m going to reveal later in the story. But that’s not how my friend saw
it. He happily gave me all kinds of information about how complex government
regulations are and how much they inhibit research and all the amazing things
that genetic engineers could do if only terrified flat-earthers weren’t
influencing public policy. I actually agreed with everything he said but that’s
not the point. The point is that none of that was at all relevant to the book.
But he thought it was.
At first I
wondered, “Why is he telling me all this?” but then I realized that his idea
and mine of what a novel is about were vastly different. He thought that a
novel is about technology or a cultural phenomenon. Remember when the Internet
was just getting traction and people were trying to write novels that were
somehow “about the Internet”? When email became common they made a movie called
You’ve Got Mail. When disco was big
people were very interested in writing novels that were “about disco.”
I think many
people who aren’t writers have this notion that books are about things. Every time Silicon Valley gets
a lot of press people tell me that I should write a book about a software
start-up or a chip company or a robotics inventor. No, no, no! Those aren’t
novels. They’re articles for The Smithsonian
or Vanity Fair or maybe Scientific American. Novels are about
people – not inventions, not social fads, not religious movements, not
technology — people.
Yes, the
characters exist against a backdrop of some sort, a high-tech IPO or a new cult
or a scientific breakthrough or a terrible crime or a natural disaster or a war
or a terrorist threat, but at its heart the story has to be about the interactions between human beings and it needs
to be told in a way that makes the reader care about what those people are doing and where they’re going
to end up at the end.
If I were
writing a novel about gun smuggling I might ask a munitions expert to read a
chapter that described a particular weapon but as far as the story was
concerned that gun would just be a prop. It would have no more importance to
the story than the car that the hero drove or the suit he wore.
If your hero
is a chef then someplace in the book you’re going to be talking about cooking
and you’ll want to get the facts right, but the cooking stuff is only
incidental, it’s only scenery. What
really counts is what kind of person the chef is. Who does he love? Who loves,
or hates, him? What is he trying to achieve? Will he succeed? Should he
succeed? Will the events that are portrayed in your story change him/her and if
so, how? Will the hero’s trials and travails end up making him/her a better
person? Will he/she best the villain or achieve his/her goals? How your chef
braises short ribs or makes a bearnaise is completely unimportant as far as the
story is concerned. That suff is all just scenery.
So, when
someone finds out I’m a writer and they say, “You know, X [Twitter,
self-driving cars, Bitcoin, designer babies, etc.] are really hot. You should
write a novel about X” I try to explain, very politely, that novels are about
people, what they do, why they do it, how doing or not doing it changes them,
about their struggles and their successes and failures; that the trick to
writing a good novel is presenting all that human interaction in a way that
excites the reader and makes them care about where the characters find
themselves at the very end.
Sometimes
they get it. Sometimes they pause for a moment, then they say, “Hey, how about
this? How about writing a book about scientists who start adding animal DNA to
cloned babies who grow up to become a potential master race?” Well now, wait a
minute. I might have something there.
David Grace Bio
My first
novel, The Chocolate Spy, was
published in 1978. My fourteenth novel, The
Concrete Kiss, earned a Kirkus Reviews "Critic's Pick" and was
listed as a Shelf Unbound Notable Book of 2013. My favorite novels are The Concrete Kiss and Death Never Sleeps.
Two of my
crime short stories were been published in Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and several of my science fiction short
stories have been published in Analog
Magazine.
Fourteen of
my novels and seven collections of short stories are available through my
website WWW.DavidGraceAuthor.Com
and from all major ebook sellers. Trade paperback editions ($7.99 - $8.99) of
my novels are available from both Wildside Press and Amazon.com. My Amazon
author page is www.Amazon.com/author/davidgrace
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2014.
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