#Because I'm a slow thinker I'm probably going to need a week (or two) per question

[philosophika]

I'm jumping on the bandwagon to say that while I agree with a lot of what you're saying, @inkovert, my overall position towards the book-to-screen pipeline is slightly more... positive? Optimistic? I don't know if those are the right words, but the fact is that I'm writing The Sorcerer's Apprentice with the hope that it might one day be made into a 2D animated film. To explain why, I'd like to try to address some of the very sound observations you made in your post, starting with those we agree on.

✦ The Problem With The Book-To Screen Pipeline

In my opinion, the primary problem facing the book-to-screen pipeline is not so much the pipeline itself but, as @inkovert mentioned in their post, that the film industry's promise of revenue and attention potentially encourages writers to undermine and neglect exploring the strengths of their own medium to try to better fit the demands of the silver screen. Although I (luckily) haven't come across any novels that succumb to this temptation in the way @inkovert describes (dressing down the writing to some mediocre mid-point between a badly written novel and an even worse screen-play), I recognize the potential threat it poses to the health of our beloved literary ecosystem. For me, the most concerning manifestation of this threat takes a slightly different shape from the one that @inkovert describes above. I'm not concerned that novels which resort to stage-direction style writing (to win over the movie industry) will take over the market because I'm sceptical of their appeal to publishing houses, film studios, readers and movie-goers alike. After all, unless those books are being written by established authors who'll bring in profits regardless of the quality of their output, how likely are they to be published in the first place? My personal hunch is: not likely at all. What does worry me is that film's dominance is encouraging writers to create storylines that cater to Hollywood's limited standards of entertainment and depth and, therefore, that it is encouraging writers to forgo experimenting with the form they have at their fingertips, to avoid breaking with narrative conventions, and to bypass what the literary genre does best: introspection. That said, Hollywood isn't entirely to blame for this; the publishing industry's self-evident preference for easily palatable, cookie-cutter, market-ready narratives makes them just as guilty for thinning the creative horizon as the movie moguls. This brings us to what I believe is the crux of the matter. The problem isn't that books are being made into movies, the problem is that the big storytelling industries are chasing the same goal: maximum profit at minimum risk. Good old capitalism strikes again! If it weren't for you meddling kids, amiright? But, seriously, you want profits? Never deviate from the three-act structure, never create an unlikeable main character, and for god's sake, don't try to critically address real-world problems and/or prejudices in any way that deviates or complicates the accepted narrative -actually, scratch that, don't write about real-world problems at all! Don't make your readers uncomfortable. We're all here to have a good time. Just try to keep it Kendall-Jenner-Pepsi lite™, okay? OKAY?? Give me a fucking break, lol. If the problem feeding this trend is money, the answer is: read better. Buy outside of your comfort zone. Take more risks as a writer and a reader and a viewer. Try things that push against industry standards. Don't always go for the book or the movie that fits all your favourite TV tropes. And, yes, of course, overthrow capitalism, but let's be real, who has the time? The problem with the book-to-screen pipeline is that we are the problem.

✦ Damn... so why are you looking forward to having your book potentially being made into a film? Doesn't that, like, go against everything you just said?

Nope, I don't think so. I mean, I would love for my book to be made into a film, but will it? Doubtful for all the above reasons (maximum profit, minimum risk). As for why I'm still saying I'd love for that to happen: again, as @inkovert very eloquently wrote in their post, literature and film have different strengths. Literature, as I touched upon in the previous section, is fundamentally an introspective medium, one that permits the reader total access to another (fictional) person's inner world and, in turn, allows the reader to experience how it determines their perception of the outer world. To paraphrase Gotham Writers, literature's strength is that it tells the outward story from the inside, that is to say, "inside-out" (Source). Film, as @inkovert pointed out, is a visual (nowadays, primarily an audio-visual) medium. Its strength is that it tells the story from the "outside-in" (Source). It employs atmosphere, rhythm, symmetry & dissymmetry, colour, light & shadow, shape, movement, costume design, music, and more, to reveal the inner workings of character and plot. Because I'm writing literature, I'm limited by the strengths of that medium. Meaning, there are just some things I can't do as well as I'd be able to do if I were working with film. For example, I can't spend a paragraph describing every detail of an outfit that has no real bearing on the plot because I risk ruining the pace and boring my reader; but if I were shooting a film, I could show the main character's evolution through the costume design. In fact, I would need to, for the film to be worth its salt visually. The same goes for music. All those playlists people on Writeblr keep making? Those have a place in film. So, why do I want my book to be made into a movie? Because I can't do my story justice in one medium alone. It's not complete without translation. Is yours?

Thank you, again @inkovert! I'm looking forward to participating in more Spilled Ink Saturdays <3

✦ P.S. I reserve the right to disagree with everything I just said should someone come up to me with a more convincing take or just proves me wrong, which happens a lot more than I'd like to admit. Also, if you got through that mammoth of a post, thank you and my apologies :)

SPILLED INK SATURDAY 》 Writeblr Discourse Series

Session 1: Book-to-Screen Adaptations

Welcome to our first session of Spilled Ink (get it? like spilled tea?), a new writeblr discourse series that I'm excited to introduce into the community. I wanted to start this series to generate some discussion and camaraderie within the writeblr community, but also because I think there are a lot of writer/reader/author-related topics and debates that crop up pretty frequently and I figured it would be interesting to hear thoughts and opinions on these matters from a writer's perspective.

So every Saturday (or potentially every other Saturday depending on how things go), I will post a topic of discussion. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you can do so one of two ways:

➸ Return to the OG post (which will always be linked in the title of the post) and reblog with your take on the topic, either in text or in the tags

➸ If you see someone's take on your feed and you want to chime in on something they said, feel free to reblog their response

I want to stress that the purpose of this series is to have healthy, open-minded dialogue about these topics and hear perspectives that you may not have considered otherwise. I think one of the beautiful things about writeblr is that it's rich with people from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences who can lend a wider perspective on the subjects discussed. That said, I'm asking that everyone who chooses to participate please be respectful when providing your opinion or when responding to someone else's. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how strong it is, but there's a difference between being opinionated and being borderline rude and antagonizing. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or hateful speech of any kind will not be condoned or tolerated. I want to set that bar straight now because future sessions will touch on topics such as race and sexuality, so I will always have this reminder at the top of the post for each session. I truly want this to be a safe space for people to share their thoughts freely and not be afraid to speak up, so just please be mindful of your words in your responses.

With that out of the way, the discourse question for our first session is:

How do you feel about the frequency with which books are adapted to movies/tv shows these days?

You know what I mean. When you open any social media platform these days and you're immediately bombarded with ads for the latest tv show or movie being released on Hulu or Paramount+. I've often wondered if writers or up-and-coming authors have any personal feelings about this. Do you find it exciting? Does it make you hopeful that your work could one day be on the big screen? Or is it a bit...irksome? Or are you completely indifferent?

Reblog and share your thoughts. Mine will be under the cut, below. 👇🏾

・❥・

I know it may seem like something absolutely trivial and harmless to some, so perfectly understandable if people are indifferent about it all. But I personally find it irksome.

I could be wrong about the increased frequency of book-to-screen adaptations compared to 10 years prior, but for me personally it feels like it's increased quite a lot. I feel like I'll see a book hyped by booktok and/or other online book communities all over my social media feed one minute, and the next minute it's announced that it's headed for the big screen. And for the author's in question, I'm sure it's thrilling, because it provides the exposure that authors need nowadays to sell their books and their brand. But it bothers me because...well, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it makes it more and more evident that the movie/tv industry is running out of ideas. How often do we hear about some 90s/00s TV show being rebooted for god-knows-why when no one asked for it? It's not a secret that the entertainment industry is running on fumes when it comes to generating original ideas for the screen. And the same way that reboots are a lazy way of pumping out entertainment for a consumerist audience, outsourcing ideas from authors because you can't think of your own is also just that - lazy. And the consequence of that, I feel, is that authors will begin to write stories with the intention that it will be visually consumed, thereby feeding into that book-to-screen pipeline.

I recently read a book from a sci-fi author whose novels I really enjoyed in the past, but with each new release of his the quality of his books decreased just a bit. And with the latest book of his I read, it was easy to pinpoint why. It was clear as day that he had written the book with the idea/intention that it would be put on the screen. I don't know how to quite describe it, but it felt like I was reading a screenplay, with certain storytelling elements ignored and with action scenes written like cue cards for an actor. It was like a slapdash job with the note "fix it in post" slapped onto it. And it was just so...disappointing. Not only as a reader, but as a writer. Writers are free to write screenplays, but they are considered screenwriters, not authors, and the craft that is required for each medium is a bit different. Neither is superior to the other, but there's a depth that goes into writing a novel or short story that isn't necessarily needed for a screenplay because the screenwriter will work in collaboration with the director and others to carry out the vision (I'm happy to have screenwriters on writeblr chime in on whether this is true, because I'm speaking off my own understanding, not known experiences). The end product of a screenplay is a visual. Whereas the end product for a novel is the novel itself, and how it stimulates the readers imagination. If we get more novels written with the intention of being translated to a visual medium, then all the typically necessary components like description, exposition etc no longer become necessary. I'm not saying that this is happening just yet. There are many quality novels that have received screen adaptations recently (Pachinko, A Man Called Ove etc), but luckily those authors were dedicated to the craft of writing and storytelling first. The movie and tv deals were an added bonus that came after. But what happens when you have an emergence of authors who have those priorities in reverse? Movie deal first to increase my exposure and worry about good storytelling second? It inevitably causes a change in the writing landscape (that I argue is already happening (see: future discourse session), and not necessarily for the better.