Translating Literature to the Screen

The axiom in movie criticism--if not in the movie business itself--is that first-rate literature almost never translates to the screen. The problem is that the novel can do one great thing that movies, despite their immense influence and universal appeal, cannot. It can go inside the heads of its characters to tell us what they are thinking. The movies can only attempt to show us the characters, though they have sometimes tried to do both by the device know as "voice over." But from Cervantes through Tolstoy through Henry James through Proust, interiority has been the great glory of the novel, and the movies cannot really compete with it.

(from "Reel Literature" by Joseph Epstein).

Origins of a Story

From an interview with Flannery O'Connor

Q How does a story come into being? Do you create it or does it create you? Do you think there's a danger of a writer's exhausting his material?

A. I don't know that I could really say how a story comes into being. I suppose it's about fifty-fifty as to whether you create it or it creates you. If it's a good story, it's as much a revelation to you as it is to the reader. I'm afraid it is possible to exhaust your material. What you exhaust are those things that you are capable of bringing alive. I mean if you've done it once, you don't want to do the same thing over. The longer you write the more conscious you are of what you can and cannot make live. What you have to do is try to deepen your penetration of these things.

from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963

Writing with Zest

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market; or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-excited. He should be a thing of fevers and-enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when arc you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

Wouldn't it be wonderful, for instance, to throw down a copy of Harper's Bazaar you happened to be leafing through at the dentist's, and leap to your typewriter and ride off with hilarious anger, attacking their silly and sometimes shocking snobbishness? Years ago I did just that. I came across an issue where the Bazaar photographers, with their perverted sense of equality, once again utilized natives in a Puerto Rican back street as props in front of which their starved-looking manikins postured for the benefit of yet more emaciated half-women in the best salons in the country. The photographs so enraged me I ran, did not walk, to my machine and wrote "Sun and Shadow," the story of an old Puerto Rican who ruins the Bazaar photographer's afternoon by sneaking into each picture and dropping his pants.

When was the last time you did a story like that, out of pure indignation?

Here's my formula. What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate?

Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.

From Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

The Right Word

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. (Mark Twain)

Choosing Your Main Characters

British novelist and literary critic David Lodge has said, "Character is arguably the most important single component of the novel. ... Nothing can equal the great tradition of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human nature. Yet character is probably the most difficult aspect of the art of fiction to discuss intechnical terms."

Probably one of the easiest jobs you will have as you write your novel is that of choosing your main character. In fact, it is likely that the main character is an inseparable part of your original idea: "A young man becomes dissatisfied with his working class life and leaps at the chance to receive a gentleman's education." Your main character is the young man. "A woman fights for custody of her daughter after her ex-husband accuses her of neglect." Your main character is the mother.

Your main character may even have been in your mind BEFORE your story idea: You want to write about someone who's like your feisty Aunt Sally, or base a character on a famous person--or on yourself.

Besides the main character (also called the PROTAGONIST), a novel must have a minimum of two more characters: the ANTAGONIST (the person in conflict with the protagonist) and a SUPPORTING CHARACTER with whom the main character can interact and reveal his thoughts and plans. (Note that in some novels the antagonist is not an actual character. It may be a force ofnature, an oppressive culture or society, or a conflict WITHIN the protagonist, but there must always be someONE or someTHING set in opposition to the main character.)

There is no upper limit to the number of characters you may include in your novel. How many you need will be a function primarily of the plot, as well as of the length and scope of your novel. Use as many as you need--but don't clutter up your novel like Penn Station. Since each character must be distinct and memorable, if you use only as many as you need, you make your job much easier, and in the long run, your novel more powerful.

--from the "Focus On The Novel" Workshop

A Good Modern Sentence

"A good modern sentence proceeds evenly, loosely joined by commas, and its feel is hypothetical, approximate, unstructured and always aiming at an impossible exactness which it knows it will not achieve." (from A.S. Byatt's ON HISTORIES AND STORIES)

Characters and Inner Conflicts

If your characters have no inner conflicts, your work will be a melodrama. Inner conflict confirms that the characters are involved, that something is at risk for them.

from HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL by James Frey