My solo novel 'Icons' was optioned by Alcon Entertainment, the folks who made the 'Beautiful Creatures' movie, and that's gotten as far as a script, but no news yet.
Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.
Journalism is straying into entertainment. The lines between serious news segments, news entertainment, and news comedy are blurring.
The difference does not lie in the things that news does that novels do not do, but in the things that novels do that news cannot do. In other words, this basic technique of news - just one among many - is something a novel can use, but a novel can deploy a multitude of other techniques also. Novels are not bound by the rules of reportage. Far from it. They're predicated on delivering experience.
I tried to buy the script of 'Hancock.' I loved it. The script was far darker and edgier than the movie.
I love the novel of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful novel. I love the movie of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful movie. And they're totally different. You accept each on its own terms, and that's kind of the ideal.
On the news that the Tsar had sent the troops icons to boost their morals, General Dragomirov quipped: 'The Japanese are beating us with machine-guns, but never mind: we'll beat them with icons.
My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...
I like writing dialog but don't think I'd be much good at a screenplay. I once had to write a treatment for a novel of mine - a condition of its being optioned by a movie producer - and I turned out something pretty lackluster. So my inclination would be to stay out of the way of an experienced screenwriter.
As far as entertainment, 'The Right Stuff' is a good movie. As far as a documentary of the early space days, which they purported it to be, it is not at all.
The script in many ways is limiting and novel is liberating. You get to go into the heads of your characters and their background and have fun with them; something you are discouraged from doing with a script. With the novel, I can tell you what the characters are thinking, I can tell you their view of the world, background information, things I wouldn't dare touch in the script.
'City of Bohane' has been optioned for film, and I've finished a first draft of the script.
A script is just a script. A good script can be a bad movie, so easily. It's the process that makes it good. You need a good script, don't get me wrong, but you need all those other things to make a good movie. You really do.
The real news has gotten more surreal and absurd, and my fake news, if you want to call it that, has gotten more plausible. And at some point, those two trend lines crossed.
I read widely - for news, the arts, science, for entertainment, and the value of being informed - and, as a fiction writer, I can't help transposing what I learn into the scenario for a novel or story.
At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.
A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.