Saturday, April 21, 2012

Don't bother to "Pardon my French"


You call them swear words. Or profanity. Or vulgarity. Or simply “bad words.” Mr. Spock, ever democratic and unemotional in his assessment of human behavior, called them “colorful metaphors.” 

I, however, like to call them “sentence enhancers.”

Briefly:  Both my parents were from blue-collar immigrant backgrounds. Rough lives spent in the military, working in coal mines and oil refineries, coupled with--in some cases--lack of education or English skills--made my grandparents and my great-grandparents expert users of these often-effective words.  My parents, both white-collar and college-educated, still remained close to their roots during my early childhood, using fluently (though, in my mother’s case, a bit ashamedly) the strong words they’d heard from their roughneck fathers and grandfathers. We children, of course, got our mouths washed out with soap for using such words. Which obviously made the words all the more tempting and delicious and ourselves all the more sneaky about their use.

If you're feeling brave, read on:

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Hanging out my shingle

After years of helping people polish manuscripts, I've decided to open a small side business.  I help with all phases of the writing process, from zero draft to sending the query letters, or any stage of the process at which you find yourself.

I used a template and didn't do anything with a lot of "bells and whistles," but I plan to get my own logo in the next few months and will be updating the site often.

Come visit!

Lynne's WordNerdy Editing

Google Crome leaves off one of my backgrounds.  Until I get it fixed, please use Firefox.

My business e-mail:  lynne@wordnerdyediting.com

Friday, April 6, 2012

Anne Tyler interviewed on Goodreads

To mark the release of her 19th novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, the usually-shy Anne Tyler did an interview with NPR last week--her first NPR interview in 35 years--and another on Goodreads, which made the site's April newsletter. In the interview, she talks a bit about her writing process, which I always find fascinating. She writes with a Pilot gel ink pen (I'm guessing her pen preferences have changed since she started writing, as gel inks weren't around in the 1960's) on unlined white paper. I actually know of some twenty-and-thirtysomething writers who hand write at some point in their process as well, so it isn't just a generational thing. At a certain point in her process, she reads aloud into a tape recorder. I believe I've suggested reading your work aloud or having somebody you trust read it to you (see Revision Strategies tab, the article "What if I can't find any problems in my writing?"). There are free digital recording programs such as Audacity that will enable you to record yourself or somebody else reading your work. A ten-dollar mic would do just fine for a voice recording that doesn't have to be stellar quality.

Every Tyler novel is about ordinary people in fairly mundane situations, but it's the quirks she gives them and the sometimes unconventional ways in which they deal with these situations, their search for transcendence--and the subtlety with which Tyler writes--that take her work up a level from "popular" fiction.

For the first time in her career, Tyler has tackled a subject I never thought I'd see her try.  In The Beginner's Goodbye, a grieving widower is visited by the spirit of his dead wife. This subject matter could turn maudlin or didactic in the hands of a less skilled author, so I'm eager to see how Tyler handles it. If you're waiting to find out what her personal views are on the subject of an afterlife, you'll have a long wait.

My personal favorite Tyler novels and which would I recommend?  Glad you asked.  Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, and Breathing Lessons. Among her more difficult, darker reads are:  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Amateur Marriage, Celestial Navigation, A Patchwork Planet. I have also read and appreciated A Slipping-Down Life, If Morning Ever Comes, Digging to America, and Ladder of Years. A Slipping-Down Life and If Morning Ever Comes are two of her earliest novels; it's interesting to see how her writing has evolved.  She admits that she wouldn't recommend any of her first four novels to anyone to read. That kind of modesty is refreshing and rare these days, and my personal opinion is that she's better at her worst than many authors are at their best.


Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Thoughts on Book-to-Film Adaptations

No jump cut in this post; sorry for the length. But: thoughts, I have them.


If you’re about to use one of the following criticisms of a film adapted from a book:

“_______[setting] wasn’t what I pictured.”
“______ [character] isn’t supposed to have a beard/be tall/be short/be blond/be black.”
“They left out___________” [a character? an important character? or an incident where a character blows his nose on a dirty hankie or passes by a cottage with a mean, barking dog outside?]

Please consider the following:

-Films and novels are different art forms. If it’s a book told from first-person point of view with a lot of internal monologue, in order to remain really true to the book, you’d have the character sitting or standing or walking around while a voiceover tells the story. Film gives the possibility of opening up the landscape. So instead of a montage and a voiceover, we are treated to a flashback of Katniss Everdeen with her dead father, and scenes from the Capitol where the gamesmakers are pulling the strings and talking about how to mess with the tributes and keep the audience at the edge of their seats.

- The visual medium is much faster at establishing character and setting.  Nevertheless, in the interest of character development, some characters may be omitted or combined. See the bit about "establishing scenes" below.

-The POV of the book may not translate to film very well.

-Not everyone who is seeing the movie has read the book.  Filmmakers have to consider a wider audience when adapting a text.

-“_________[character] was too short/ too tall/ not hawt enough.” If a male character described as tall is being portrayed by an actor who is only five-foot-six, please consider: would you rather have an actor who captures the character’s essence, personality, etc.; in short, one who plays the character well, or someone less talented who fits your daydreams? And “hawt” is certainly in the eye of the beholder.    

Small rant on casting: Occasionally, and unfortunately, the most “bankable” actors are chosen regardless of talent or whether they fit the character. I grant you permission to complain about that one. Case in point:  Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg in “Valkyrie.”  The rest of the cast were perfect in their roles; Cruise, however, felt like a big blank spot to me. Tom Cruise in an American Army uniform circa 1867 (“The Last Samurai”) was also Tom Cruise in a Nazi uniform in 1942; rinse, repeat. I wasn’t at all convinced.  Cruise has done fine work, especially in “Rain Man” and in “Born on the Fourth of July,” but this performance felt phoned in. My personal opinion is that Jim Caviezel would have been a much better choice, both for his physical presence (Stauffenberg was over six feet tall and so is Caviezel--physical presence is extremely important to a visual medium) and, more important, for his personal religious conviction. Stauffenberg was a devout Christian, and when the atrocities of the Nazi party began to conflict with what Stauffenberg considered his first commitment to a power higher than Hitler, he put himself on the line and spearheaded an assassination plot which failed, resulting in arrest and execution for treason. Caviezel is a devout Christian.He certainly could have used that to inform his performance--and my personal opinion is that "Claus" should have been given some dialogue to that effect. It could have been done without coming across as preachy.

-A book or book series that takes place over several months or years is going to need paring down to make it fit into a reasonable two-to-two-and-a-half-hour time slot--and again, make sense to an audience that hasn’t read the book.  The events of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird take place over more than three years; the film based on the book condensed it to a year.  Because Atticus Finch was the moral center of the book, there was much more face time for Atticus in the film than in the book, and a good bit of time spent in the courtroom.  No complaints here, as we get amazing performances from both Brock Peters as Tom Robinson and Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. I admit I was disappointed at the combining of the characters of Miss Rachel Haverford and Miss Stephanie Crawford into the character of Dill’s “Aunt Stephanie,” though I understand the necessity for what the filmmakers intended. For me, the biggest disappointment was the POV shift to Jem. But back to my point: What filmgoers may not understand is that characters in films need “establishing scenes.” The same for The Hunger Games: Prim gives Katniss the Mockingjay pin instead of Katniss’s friend Madge from the book. I had to explain to my students that, for an audience who hasn’t read the book, Madge would have needed an establishing scene--the two girls passing notes in class, walking home from school together--and there were more important elements, such as showing the bond between the two sisters, the scenes with Katniss’s father, that were more important for the first film.  Madge gets more face time in Catching Fire; we’ll see what the filmmakers decide to do with her then.

The 1940 film version of Pride and Prejudice featured costumes that looked like they were left over from “Gone With the Wind,” moving the setting from the early 1800’s to the mid-1800’s.  The dances in the movie were mid-1800’s rather than Regency-era as well. Greer Garson was 36 when she played 21-year-old Lizzy Bennett. Lady Catherine comes as Darcy’s ambassador at the end rather than as an antagonist, which was a complete departure from the book. Yet I love the adaptation for its fidelity to the spirit of the book--the social satire and the madcap all-girl Bennett household are quite faithful to the book’s portrayals, as is the depiction of Mrs. Bennett, anxious to the point of neurosis, to see her daughters settled and secure. Plus, you have wonderful Edmund Gwenn as Mr. Bennett. Best of all, it was the catalyst for my reading the book and starting me down the path of near-obsession with Jane Austen’s work. (haters to the left!) I’ve seen other adaptations and liked different things about each one.  How awesome is a literary work that it can be done and redone so many times and still be fresh?

My students have complained about the film adaptation of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief. Their complaints range from change in characters’ hair color/ complexions to more principled complaints that scenes from the other four books were included in the first film. I asked if those changes were helpful to someone who hadn’t read the book.  Many of them admit they were.  “But what are they going to do for the other four movies?” was the question that arose.  And they had a point.  Since I haven’t read the books (yet) the movie was all right, but given the alterations made, I may have actually been unable to give the filmmakers a pass on what they changed. Perhaps there are some books or book series that are better left unadapted to film, even the ones with high action and adventure.

So. . . movie or book?  Which one to go to first?  My response: Look! A meteor shower! *runs away.*