When is an Historical Novel Like a Movie Adaptation?

Writing an historical novel is much like making a book into a movie. There are three ways to make a book-length piece of fiction into a film.

First way, you can replicate the book as closely as possible, sometimes scene for scene. The Harry Potter films come to mind. Gone With the Wind. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, although even those movies left out large chunks of narrative. The books these movies were made from had a huge and demanding fan base. Watching the movie had better be pretty much like reading the book, or else.

The most spectacular failure in an effort of this kind, to my eye, was Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film, Greed. Von Stroheim followed the book it was made from, Frank Norris's McTeague, not only scene for scene but line for line, often putting a paragraph of Norris's text up on the screen to accompany his visual expression of it. No wonder the studio bosses took it away from him and chopped it to pieces. Setting aside the cost overruns, it was just too long for anyone to sit and watch. It's true that there are respected critics out there who believe Greed to be the greatest movie ever made. I don't think it's even a movie.

A book-length work of fiction is a different art form from a movie. The second way to approach making a book into a movie is to be respectful of that difference and also be respectful of the book, of the spirit of the book, that is, not the words, and to express that spirit cinematically. A good short story, like Brokeback Mountain, makes a better movie than a whole book, because there's less stuff in it. Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage was a huge book. The Hollywood movie that was made from it took just a segment of it and made a thumping good movie. Same with East of Eden.

The third approach is to take the book title and write whatever you feel like. You hardly even have to read the book to do this. Just make stuff up. Sometimes it's fine. Depends on what you're working with. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex is a good example.

The problems of writing a historical novel are similar. The material you're working with may be bigger than what you're trying to do.

The first way to approach your historical novel is to put in everything you can find out about the place and time you're working with. All the famous characters, all the historical events, hardly anything truly fictional, like those terrific books from the English writers about the Tudors and the Elizabethans. Or you can write about a big handful of fictional characters experiencing different aspects of the reality of your historical period, like John Dos Passos in USA. You can get lost in this sort of thing, like von Stroheim in Frank Norris's work, and find yourself tracking down the buttons on the underwear your people would have worn when you should be blocking out swaths of dramatic action. But maybe that's okay, if you have what it takes to pull off a huge saga. (Like a loyal fan base, a supportive publisher, and thirty more years of productive life.)

The second way to do it is to respect the period, express the spirit of the period as you understand it, but put your own characters in your book, with their own drama. Get the details right, but find a segment of the universe that you can work with. Then go ahead and shamelessly write fiction.

Or you might use the third approach, which is not respectable but might be fun. Pick a period, pick a historical figure, put her in all the wrong clothes and tell bald-faced lies about her. Only make sure her heirs aren't going to sue you.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Where to Hide Out

I'm in a good place right now.

As I may have mentioned, I'm trying to write a spy thriller, which is a genre outside of my usual field of expertise. I like to read them, but I've never written one. They need to be highly structured before they can actually thrill. This is a lot of work.

And it's all on spec. Nobody has asked me to do this. I haven't even got an agent, and if I did I would have nothing fit to show her yet.

The way to get things written, as we all know, is basically to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. One of the reasons this is working for me right now is sensory deprivation. I quit the TV. We have no TV anymore. My Facebook presence is limited by the number of funny cat videos I can actually absorb. I watch movies only in my living room when we have guests over and get out the projector. As a result my main form of entertainment is making up stuff to go in this book.

And the dreams I have at night. Very vivid dreams, sometimes quite disturbing. I lost a good friend a few weeks ago, and when something as bad as that happens what I usually do is sleep a lot, lose myself in another time period, and write. So here I am, happy as a clam, completely split off from reality. Here's a picture of the model room of the New York Yacht Club, which has hardly changed since 1915. I might as well be there, sitting comfortably in one of those leather chairs, except that I don't think they let women do that.

Also I have new tools. Scrivener, for example, is turning out to be the most wonderful thing, especially for a historical work with a lot of real people in it. Instead of fumbling around amongst a whole file folder of documents looking for my World War I Sabotage timeline, and trying to remember what I named the file, I can simply scroll down the left-hand sidebar of Scrivener and there it is. Together with character notes and Wikipedia entries for Franz von Papen, Karl Boy-Ed, Guy Gaunt, and any number of other folks who were active on the New York espionage scene in 1915. As well as my fictional characters, of course.

Scrivener does wonderful tricks with the word count. You can set a target count for every session. You can set a target count for every scene. You can figure out beforehand where the plot points are supposed to go, mathematically. You want structure? This is structure.

You should try it. You get to play with it free for thirty days. So many bells and whistles! (A great mode for writing screenplays, too.) So far I've written six thousand words on the first draft, and going like a house afire.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Of Novelists and Pathological Liars

Last month I posted about the possible connection between the brains of liars and the brains of novelists.  I am sure Freud would have a lot to say about my focus on the links between novel writing and lying, but frankly I don’t want to know what he would think.

Since I am in no position to perform actual scientific research on the subject, the best I can do is look for parallels and imagine what the connections might be.

If one looks up pathological lying, standard information on the subject gives one a lot to ponder.  First of all, though the condition commonly called pathological lying has been in the medical literature since 1891, it is not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  But that is not to say that it is does not exist.  Lots can be and is said on the subject.  The more I read about it, the more parallels I see with fiction writing.

Here are some of the things that novelists and pathological liars (P-Liars) have in common:

Ordinary liars, make up stories for self-protection or self-aggrandizement.  P-Liars will make up stories and tell them, even if there is no discernible benefit to them.  This is absolutely true of novelists.  Certainly most of us are not doing it for the money.  Or the celebrity.  Psychologists call this type of lying “internally motivated.”  No novelist I’ve ever met thinks of his or her stories in any other way.

P-Liars begin to show symptoms at around 16 years of age.  For a number of years now, I have been asking novelist on two continents at what age they began to write stories.  Only once has any of them given me an age over fifteen.  Many say they began as early as five.  I myself was nine.  Perhaps then, the compulsion to write novels is a form of early-onset pathological lying.

P-Liars have average or above average intelligence.  I would say most novelists are above average, but this conclusion may be the result of personal prejudice on my part.

The kinds of stories the two groups (?) make up have quite a few similarities.  P-Liars’ tales are almost always elaborate and long and are described in one report as “dazzling or fantastical, but never breach the limits of plausibility.”  Such stories are the professed goal of novelists.  And like novelists, P-Liars know and can admit that their stories are made up.  They fail lie detector tests.

People with other, more serious personality disorders may lie, but often they don’t know they’re making things up.  They also have traits not usually found in P-Liars or novelists—like a pathological fear of rejection.   No person with such a dread could possibly function as a novelist.  In fact, we practically revel in rejection.  Just ask; we will gladly describe our file of rejection letters.  We proudly keep them.  They are the proof that we are who we think we are.

Annamaria Alfieri