Adaptation Blogfest – Novels into Movies/TV shows

Okay, so I’ve signed up for the Novel Films blogfest and I cheated slightly by doing the rounds before making my own post. I got some great ideas, and I’ve also decided that I’m not going to include play to film or comic book to film adaptations in my list, but I will include novel series into TV series, just for the heck of it.

So, here are the cases where I’ve read the book and scene it:

The Princess Bride – a true classic by any standard. Of course, it helps that the author of the book, William Goldman, wrote the screenplay as well and had a lot of experience adapting other people’s books into screenplays. On his DVD commentary, he said that if people could only remember him for one thing, he wanted that to be Princess Bride-related.

A Wrinkle in Time – a surprisingly good movie version of a favorite book. I got a chance to see this at the Toronto children’s film festival, Sprockets.

Earthsea. Ugh – not the worst fantasy film I’ve ever seen, but they messed up so much of the greatness of the two source books.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – took a long time to get made into a movie, and I think it was pretty much worth the wait. Just a shame that there won’t be movie sequels.

Starship troopers – joke of a movie, for such a great novel. Sigh.

The vampire diaries – I started watching the TV series first, and then went back to read the first book in the series, which was interesting, but overall I think I like the TV version better.

Also:

Workshops

W is for…

I’ve had writing workshops very much on my mind lately, and it occurs to me that there’s a remarkable variety in terms of different events and organizations that use that phrase to describe themselves. For instance:

Odyssey, the workshop that I’ve been waiting to see if I’ll get into. I got word two weeks ago that I was on the short waiting list, and that spots would most likely open up around the end of April, though there might be a last-minute drop-out as late as May 25th.

Odyssey is a six-week session with about sixteen participants, lectures, one-on-one consultations with the instructure, guest lecturers, and intense but constructive critique circle sessions between the participants. It’s held in Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, New Hampshire, with all participants living in residence.

I’m not really sure what to expect if I get into Odyssey, but the odd thought flashed through my head as I was listening to ‘Starship troopers’ on my audiobook player that it would likely be a writer’s version of ‘Boot Camp’ – intellectually and emotionally exhausting, but an experience that, if you got through it without cracking, would make you forever a stronger person inside and a much better writer.

Wish me luck on the waiting list thing, by the way!

While I was waiting to hear about Odyssey, I got good news in my email inbox about a completely different writing workshop. Lindsey Grant posted over at the Office of Letters and Light blog asking for suggestions about ‘revision tools’ to help National Novel Writing Month writers work on editing their stories through the year. I was really excited about the call for suggestions, since I felt I had a bit of experience with what worked and what didn’t over at places like Nanoedmo, Nanopubye, and Stringing Words, and so I put together four suggestions and posted them without even really paying attention to the prizes that Lindsey had waved to try and encourage feedback.