Writing and the Archetypes: Are They the Best for Developing Characters?—Part 2

So, in part 1 of this 3-part series I introduced the concept of the archetypes and why writers use them. And, like I said there, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why archetypes might be useful tools for developing characters in fictional settings.

But, here’s the problem: they’re not characters, they’re archetypes!

This is the essence of the problem. Archetypes are by definition not people. They are aspects of people, aspects of being human, aspects of … you get the point (actually, it's the other way around ... we're aspects of the archetypes!). Archetypes make for great traits, characteristics, qualities, but they do not make for whole characters. They make pieces of characters.

Stories are about us. Stories are about human beings and the human condition. Every story, any story, all stories MUST be about a person on a journey. If the story is not about a person on a journey it is not a story, it is something else: a situation, a problem, a predicament to be solved, whatever; but it’s not a story (I’m sure I’ll get some mail on this one).

A human being is a character. A character has traits-characteristics. The human is an aggregate of behaviors and these traits-characteristics. Taken separately (i.e., an archetype) these traits-characteristics-behaviors cannot standalone. They do not have choice, they do not have will, they cannot act in pursuit of a goal, they cannot be flawed by some moral conflict that speaks to some inner lesson to be learned (or not). Only a fully formed human being, a multidimensional person, a protagonist can stand alone to drive a narrative forward. Archetypes help, but they do not drive. Motivation drives a story and a protagonist. Motivation is the crankshaft of every story (or at least the best kinds of stories). Archetypes reflect motivation (i.e., a trickster is motivated to trick), but they are shadows in this regard. Without human desire and choice the motivation is shallow and thin. Only a human gives meaning, significance, and purpose to motivation—not archetypes.

So, herein lies the problem. All those great writers out there who have written books on this, who have built careers on pushing the archetypes as the foundation of all storytelling, who have banked their entire story-development theory on the primacy of archetypal development are not bad and wrong, but they are gilding the lily in my opinion. You can write a great trickster character, but that will take you just so far. You can write a great villain, but that will take you just so far. You can write a great ally, but—

Maybe this metaphor will help clarify the relationship between a pattern (archetype) and the thing is generates (human being):

Say you are a knitter and you want to make a quilt. So, you buy a knitting pattern that comes in the mail and when it arrives you open it and hold it in your hand. You are not holding a quilt, you are holding a patten for a quilt. The pattern is a piece of paper with instructions, knitting code, and directions: i.e, it is an abstraction of something it will help to create. It is the raw material for making a "real" quilt, which is something you can use to warm yourself or lay on a couch to look pretty for the neighbors when they come over to spill coffee all over it.

Let's take this one step further. You are a writer (okay, a stretch, but go with me) who wants to write a story about a quilt. Which is going to be the most useful to you as a storyteller: the abstract pattern, or the physical quilt? Obviously the latter and not the former. Having a big, warm, wooly quilt gives you a fully dimensional object that you can describe and interact with as a writer. A pattern for this object cannot do those things; it's just a pattern.

And so the difference between the Enneagram and the archetypes. The Enneagram is the fully dimensional and realized object that functions in the world with form. The pattern (archetype) is the function without form. The pattern is essential, the pattern will inform, the pattern will guide, but the pattern is not as rich or useful as the thing it helps to create. Patterns can exist without the things they represent. The things they represent can not exist without the patterns. We can't exist as human beings without the archetypes, but they can exist (and do) without us.

And this is how using archetypes as the foundation of story development can derail and undermine your process, rather than support it. Using patterns of human behavior to cobble together a whole character is not unlike a Victor Frankenstein approach to storytelling. You can't piece together a great character or a great story like a quilt. You must find the crankshaft for motivation and you must find it in the full dimensionality of a protagonist, if he-she is going to drive a story from beginning, through the middle, to the end. Archetypes give wonderful, recognizable, and universal conceits all humans can recognize despite culture or upbringing. But they can’t carry the narrative. For that you have to find what I call the “narrative crankshaft."

In the world of character development (and in story structure, in my opinion) the best tool for discovering, developing, and implementing motivation in a narrative is the Enneagram System. The Enneagram is, in fact, the best tool available for describing human motivation and its related behaviors—period. This is why it has become one of the most popular tools today used by therapists, organizational development consultants, coaches, and a host of other personal-growth and business-development gurus.

I can already hear the objections. “Oh, really? So, all the other personality-typing systems out there (MBTI, DIsC, BPP, etc.) are all chopped liver?” No, of course not. But, they are personality-typing systems. They do not cover motivation; they describe behaviors and traits, not unlike the archetypes. The Enneagram System is not a typing system (despite what many Enneagram practitioners think). It is a holistic paradigm for modeling what motivates human behavior, thought, and feeling in all realms of life. That's what makes it such a gold mine for writers and storytellers. And this is the essential difference between the Enneagram and all other "personality systems," including the archetypes.

When it comes time to write a story and develop characters, a writer needs to be able to see the whole picture, not just the pieces of what is under the hood. Archetypal models won’t do the job, nor will running characters through some personality-typing test. What will do the job, however, is the Enneagram because only the Enneagram shows you the crankshaft for human personality; it is not personality, but it is the driver of personality. The Enneagram, not the archetypes, drives human action and thus creates the narrative crankshaft responsible for driving a story from beginning to end.

In part 3 of this series we’ll look at the Enneagram more specifically and why it is not only a fantastic tool for character development, but also for discovering a story’s natural, right, and true structure. This is something I call the Enneagram-Story Bridge™ and it can be the springboard for liberating any constrained writing process.

Big words, I know. But, it’s a pretty big bridge.

Premise Line–Log line Conundrum: Aren’t They the Same Thing—NOT!

Wending one's way through the language of the story development jungle is one of the most crazy-making issues faced by new authors and screenwriters. This problem is wonderfully exemplified by the phrases “premise line” and “log line.” Yes—now is a good time to go running screaming down the hall.

We hear these phrases used interchangeably all the time. Well-intentioned advice given by so many writing teachers and gurus becomes migraine material when "premise line" and "log line" are actually used in the same sentence referring to the same thing. I’ve actually heard this done by story consultants, “Yes, you need a great premise line. In fact, the log line is the key to any good premise. So, take the time to develop a great premise line.” Still running screaming down the hall, FYI.

Okay, I didn’t hear this exact exchange; I paraphrase. But this is what happens. Writing teachers mix these two critical concepts up and spew them out as if they were Twiddle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Premise line and log line are two DIFFERENT tools, two DIFFERENT concepts, and two different skills. Okay, stop running down the hall now and listen.

So, what is the difference?

The premise line is your story. Period. The premise line is a complex and subtle construction that reveals not just a main character and an adventure; it actually delivers the basic structure of the story to the reader-viewer. The art of the premise line is the art of precision and clarity of ideas. A well-formed premise will “click” when you read it to someone and they will say, “Yeah, I see that story. I’d read that.” They “see” the story in just a few short lines. But, getting those lines just right might take hours, days, or even weeks. I’ve known some to take months. What is it they “see”?

The premise line gives them a clear vision of a protagonist acting with a purposeful desire toward a goal that is opposed by some force, and all this leading to some dénouement. This is a simplistic definition, but it captures the essence of what a premise line accomplishes. I will be writing a later post that breaks this down specifically with examples, but for now, know that the premise line is the structure of your story told as a single sentence (that’s right—1 sentence; and not a long run-on sentence sprinkled with comma splicing!) that has forward movement and gives a sense of the story’s beginning, middle, and end (no, don’t give away the ending).

Here is an example of a good premise line (three guesses what book/movie):

When the innocent, youngest son of a powerful mafia godfather discovers his beloved father has been shot as part of a turf war, he agrees to join the family to exact revenge and re-establish the family’s honor, until his actions force him to cross a line he was never meant to cross, dooming him to become the next Godfather.

Contrast this to a log line. The log line is your story’s high concept in a short sentence. If you don’t know what high concept means (yes, it means something) then check out my post on this concept.

The log line, unlike the premise line, does not show the overarching shape of your story, it does not give you the action line of the protagonist, nor does it give you a sense of the big picture. No, the log line’s job is to grab you and get your mind and emotions churning. There are seven components to a high-concept idea:

• High level of entertainment value
• High degree of originality
• High level of uniqueness (different than original)
• Highly visual
• Possesses a clear emotional focus (root emotion)
• Targets a broad, general audience, or a large niche market
• Sparks a “what if” question
  (Excerpted from my book The Anatomy of a Premise Line: 7 Steps to Foolproof Premise and Story Development. Bookbyte Digital, publication date 2012)

When a story has one or more of these components, then it can say it is high concept. The more the merrier. If it only has one or two, the claim can get iffy. Each of these bullets means something specific and are important to understand. Please refer to my post for more explanation. But, for the purposes of this post understand that the log line exemplifies these seven components of the high concept, and it does so in few words. Here are some examples:

• A monster shark terrorizes a small coastal town [Jaws, Peter Benchly]
• A cop battles uber-thieves when they take over an office building. [Nothing Lasts Forever, Roderick Thorp (film: Die Hard)]
• A young boy discovers he’s a wizard and goes off to wizard school. [Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling]
• A man saves a pregnant woman in a world where women no longer give birth. [Children of Men, P.D. James]

None of these tell you about a hero or heroine, none of them give you any idea about the journey to be traveled, but they do grab you and get you wondering “what if.” That’s the job of the log line.

These are the differences between the two tools. It does not take a rocket scientist to see how they work together to form a powerful effect in pitching a story. One grabs you and the other satisfies the “what if” with a bit more detail. Together they sell the story and get you that next meeting.

So, to summarize: premise line and log line are two different tools that work synergistically to create a powerful image of your story. They were built to work together, not separately. If you build them well, you will take many lunches—and you won’t have to pay either.

Now go be brilliant.

High Concept: Yes—It Actually Means Something!

As writers we have all come up against the agent, publisher, studio hack or fellow writer who, when asked to give feedback on our story retorts, “Yeah, good idea, but … it needs to pop more. There’s no high concept.” Sigh. And what the heck does that mean? What are you supposed to do with that? People throw this phrase around like the definition is common knowledge.

But when asked to explain their sorry selves, these same people only deliver cliches, like:

• It’s your story’s hook
• It’s what’s fun about your story
• It’s your story in a single image
• It’s your story’s heart
• It’s your story as a movie one-sheet
• It’s the essence of your premise
• And so on …

All of these have some truth to them. All of these speak to the idea of a high concept, but none of them really explain the darn thing. “High concept” has become a term d’art that everyone uses and that no one really understands.

After much hair pulling, moaning, and sleepless nights analyzing this idea, I have stumbled upon an elegant construct that I think will with both define the term accurately, but also give writers a tool for testing their ideas to quickly see if there is a high-concept component present. It goes like this:

High concept applies to any idea: motorcycle design, toothpaste, cooking, comic books, novels, movies, the list is endless. High concept is about essence; that visceral thing that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and doesn’t let go. From a writing perspective, a story idea that is high concept captures the reader’s or viewer’s imagination, excites their senses, get’s them asking “what if,” and sparks them to start imagining the story even before they have read a word. High concept drives the commercial book business, as well as the film and television industries. A high-concept idea has the following seven qualities:

The 7 Qualities of a High-Concept Idea™:

• High level of entertainment value
• High degree of originality
• High level of uniqueness (different than original)
• Highly visual
• Possesses a clear emotional focus (root emotion)
• Targets a broad, general audience, or a large niche market
• Sparks a “what if” question
  (Excerpted from my book How Not to Write Your Self-Published Book: Top 25 Writer Fails & Fixes. Xela Opus Press, publication date 2013)
  

Let’s look at each of these to get a better idea of what they mean:

High-level of entertainment value: This can be elusive. Defining “entertainment value” is like trying to define pornography; it’s in the eye of the beholder. Simply put, you know if something is entertaining, or not, if it holds your attention and sparks your imagination. If you are distracted easily from the idea or interested purely on an intellectual basis, then it is safe to say that the idea may be interesting, engaging, and curious, but not entertaining.

High degree of originality: What does it mean to be original? Some common words associated with originality are: fresh, new, innovative, novel (no, not a book). Think of originality as approach-centric. The idea may be centered in a familiar context, but the approach (original take) offered to get to that familiar context has never been used before, for example:

Frankenstein:
Familiar idea: evil monster terrorizes the humans.
Original take: the monster and humans switch moral ground and the humans terrorize the monster.

Dog Day Afternoon:
Familiar idea: man robs a bank for money.
Original take: man robs a bank to get sex change for his transsexual lover and wins the hearts and minds of the people.

Lord of the Flies:
Familiar idea: survivors shipped wrecked on an island.
Original take: the survivors are proper English schoolboys who abandon all civilized norms reverting into primitive savages.

So, originality is more about finding new ways to present the familiar, rather than inventing something new from scratch.

High level of uniqueness: Whereas originality is about approach and fresh perspective, uniqueness is about being one-of-a-kind, first time, and incomparable. Being original can also involve uniqueness, but being unique transcends even originality.

Highly visual: high-concept ideas have a visual quality about them that is palpable. When you read or hear about a high-concept idea your mind starts conjuring images and you literally see the idea unfold in your mind. This is why high-concept books make such good films when adapted. Books with cinematic imagery are almost always high-concept stories.

Possesses a clear emotional focus: Like imagery, high-concept ideas spark emotion, but not just any emotion, usually it is a primal emotion: fear, joy, hate, love, rage, etc. There is no wishy-washy emotional engagement of the reader. The involvement is strong, immediate, and intense.

Possesses mass audience appeal: The idea appeals to an audience beyond friends and family. The target market is broad, diverse, and large. Some ideas are very niche, appealing to a specific demographic, but this is usually a large demographic. High-concept ideas are popular ideas, mass ideas, and often trendy ideas.

Usually born from a “what if” question: What if dinosaurs were cloned (Jurassic Park)? What if women stopped giving birth (Children of Men)? What if Martians invaded the Earth (War of the Worlds)? High-concept ideas are often posed first with a “what if” scenario and then the hook becomes clear. The hook is that part of the high concept that grabs the reader. It is often the one piece of the idea that is the original concept or the unique element. In the three examples just given, each of them has a clear hook that leads to a high-concept premise line (the "premise line" will be the subject of a later post).

Do you have to have all seven qualities for an idea to be high concept? No, but the more of them you have, the more likely you will have a strong high concept. When the idea of high concept is put in the context of these seven qualities, it becomes easier to see that commercial ideas and literary (i.e., soft) ideas often have a clear line of demarcation. That line is the high concept. The next piece of this concept concerns the log line, which is a practical tool for realizing the potential of your high concept. In other words, your log line (different than a premise line!) is your high concept stated in a short, concise sentence. But, this is the subject of a later post.

I hope this helps. It sure helped me when I figured it out.

Now, go be brilliant.

Attack of the Three-Act Structure: Run for Your Lives!

As writers we have all been bamboozled! We have done the one thing we, as writers, should never do—assume. We have assumed that because someone writes a bloody book and gives advice about writing that: 1) they know what the hell they’re talking about, 2) they are right, 3) because they wrote a book they have something original to say.

All of these assumptions are dead wrong. And you can extrapolate all this to writer-bloggers (including me!). Like I always say, my mantra if you will: listen to everyone, follow no one. So listen up—

One of the great lies we have all swallowed, only because the source of the lie spoke with some authority or sold books or screenplays, is the lie of the three-act structure. The idea that a story is told in three acts is about as true and real as Area 51, or the Legion of Doom, or Elvis still being alive (sorry, he’s really dead). Three acts have NOTHING to do with storytelling. However, three acts have a great deal to do with physical stage production. Let me explain.

Way back in the days of the Greeks, we’re talking pre-default days—circa 500–300 B.C.—drama was king. Theater, in the form of epic poetry, was the Comic-Con of the age. Physical plays performed by human beings on a stage that required moving sets and technical setups (some amazingly elaborate) were an unavoidable part of physical production of a play. Even then it was not thought smart to have the audience sit and watch the sausage being made, so some enterprising Greek came up with the idea of curtains or screens that could be put into place to shield the audience from the gross happenings between transitions. Curtains were one way to not break the mood, to not lose the tempo, etc.

Thus, acts were born. Writers started writing to accommodate these changes in the physical requirements in their plays. Acts were sometimes three, sometimes two, and sometimes ten! Even 2500 years ago there was no hard and fast rule about the number three. So, the idea of acts is not an idea related to telling a story, it is an idea related to a specific form of delivering a story: i.e., a stage play. Acts are about the constraints of physical production, not writing or storytelling. 

Commercial television is another place where acts make sense, because of commercials.  Every 17 or 20 minuets you have to break the story to sell soap—thus an act.  TV shows have anywhere from 4–6 acts due to commercial breaks.  Again, not a part of storytelling; a part of selling soap, i.e., how the story is delivered due to the constraints of the storytelling environment! (Remember, TV is not an entertainment medium, it is a sales medium—TV shows exist so you'll watch the commercials, not the other way around.)

So, where the hell did we get this cockamamie idea that screenplays or novels should be told in three acts (or four or six)? “Oh,” replies the literary critic, "it comes from Aristotle. In his foundational work Poetics he laid out the necessity of three acts in drama and comedy.”

WRONG!

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) never talked about acts. He talked about a beginning, middle, and end in any drama or comedy, but he laid down no such rule about acts. So, don’t blame him.

Not to point fingers, because I think the actual origin of this in modern times is impossible to “finger,” but one influential source for this monstrosity of an idea is Syd Field. We all have a debt of gratitude to this man for trailblazing the field of screenwriting for popular audiences. He is a great man and he deserves his place in the pantheon of marketing mavericks. Yeah, I know … here comes the “but.”

But—Syd, more than anyone, popularized the idea of three acts through his “Paradigm” theory; the idea that stories are told in three acts, but that the second act should be broken up into parts A and B. And because he was "the first," and because he was articulate and made sense, people assumed this must be true; this must be the way of things. In Hollywood this notion of three acts took hold like a pernicious weed. To this day, at the highest levels of creative power, creative executives all talk about three acts. Agents, managers, all manner of industry blowhard talk about three acts. Even, sadly, we screenwriters smoke this nasty weed. In the publishing world, the problem is less pronounced, but it is still an issue. Literary novels, especially, are less prone to this infestation, but commercial, genre fiction is more likely to succumb.

Run, run, run—for your creative lives! Three acts have nothing to do with storytelling. Shake loose this idea and free yourself. Three acts will not serve you or your story, unless you’re a playwright. So, what should you do instead? How should you structure your story?

What story development tool is best for you is a highly personal and complicated issue. There are some good story structure teachers out there (“story gurus”—see my post http://bit.ly/qW9Bww) who have alternative approaches to the three-act structure. Many of them do some modified version of the three or four act structure, but some like the fabulous John Truby (The Anatomy of Story) have created real solutions to the problem. Chris Vogler (The Hero’s Journey) is another. I can’t recommend John Truby highly enough, though. His work is truly seminal in the field. My own methodology is also good (Enneagram-Story Bridge™), but my approach is better suited for building a development foundation that can then be ported over to a more determined system, like Truby's or Vogler's. For now, I will just leave it at that, as this topic of story-structure methodology deserves a more detailed examination all its own—at a later time.

Just know that there are useful alternatives out there and that you will be hugely benefited in your creative process if you just walk away (nay, run) from the model of three acts, and look instead for an approach that focuses on classic story development and not the same ol’ same ol’, story-structure straightjacket.

Now, go be brilliant!

To Outline or not to Outline, That Is the Question

I was talking with a writer recently and we got into a heated argument about writing and planning. Basically the conversation when like this:

Me: Maybe you should do an outline of your story?
Him: Outline! Never! I can't control my creative process; I need to be free and unhindered as a writer!
Me: (rolling eyes) Okay, well, sometimes it helps to get a plan for your writing.
Him: Never! Creativity needs to flow like a river, not be contained in some box like a plan or outline!
Me: (sighing) Well, even a river has banks that direct the flow of water and rivers seem to flow just fine.
Him: No! I just have to struggle with my creative process ... it's part of being an artist. You just don't understand!

That's the jist of the conversation, exclamation points and all. The debate here is an age-old one between artists and their process. Can you still be creative without imposing constraints on the creative process? Can a painter paint without knowing what they will paint before hand? Can a sculptor sculpt without knowing where they will chip away the stone? Can a writer write without an outline or some plan of attack? And if there are such plans does that somehow diminish the process of creation?

All valid questions, but all are based on a fallacy: creativity has no constraints.

The fact is ALL creative people plan, outline, constrain, and contain their process (not their creativity!), I don't care what their art. Since we're all writers, let's just look at writing.

You sit down at your writing-place and begin your session. You don't know what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, and refuse to think about your story in any way. You are just going to let the process run free like that river. Oh the joy, oh the freedom, oh the ... wait ... nothing is happening. The paper or computer screen is blank. WTF is wrong?

What's wrong is that the above scenario is a setup for failure. The only way this writer is going to produce any work is if he/she starts to automatic write or channel some disembodied entity, in which case they are not being a writer, they are only being a channel for someone(thing) else who is doing the writing.

No, this above scenario can't happen, if a writer wants to write. Yes, people claim the do this, but they are not telling themselves the truth about what is really going on. Even if you sit down with nothing in your head, no plan, no organization, something will come. An idea will happen and then A will lead to B will lead to C and some logic will be imposed that determines what happens next. Even if the logic only goes for one or two scenes, the writer still has to wonder what is the next scene? What came before this scene? How is this person going to act in the scene? Uh, I don't mean to burst the bubble, but this is called planning. This is called outlining. Even if it only goes for two scenes and all happens in your head, you're organizing and outlining your story. Every writer does it; every writer can't not do it. It is a function of the creative process. EVERY creative person plans, organizes, and imposes logical rules on their creative output whether they want to admit it or not. How far they go, how detailed they get, is all a matter of personal pathology (how controlling do you have to be?), not a function of outlining or organizing.

The point is that the debate about whether or not you can be a writer and still use outlines and organization of your material is a false debate. Just as a river has banks that form and direct the flow of water, every writer has banks of their creative river that gives form, direction, and flow to their writing process, without stifling or smothering that creativity. Frankly, it is only the amateur who thinks he/she has to be completely spontaneous and unencumbered by process in order to achieve his/her creative vision. Any pro knows that such an approach is a dead end, and that real writing requires imposing limits, while at the same time leveraging those limits to the full advantage of any story.

Outlining is a matter of craft, not art. Organizing is a function of being a professional, not of being a cretin. Planning is the royal road to productivity, not a dead end of creativity.

So, stop worrying about whether you are outlining or planning your work; you're already doing it.

Let Us Now Praise Stephanie Harrison: Again!

On September 26th I posted an entry on Stephanie Harrison’s book Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen and promised to try to track her down to do an interview about her book and her writing experience. Well, the writing gods have smiled and she found me. Below is my interview with her and it’s wonderful and insightful and too short. If you haven’t read the earlier post please do, and then come back to read this. BUY THIS BOOK! You won’t be sorry. Thanx again Stephanie! J.

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1. Can you talk a bit about why your compiled this anthology?

I was trying to find an anthology like this to use in a fiction writing class—I was sure there would be one out there somewhere. But I discovered there wasn’t and thought I’d just compile one myself. (Now, having done it, I understand why it hadn’t been done. Anthologies are a lot of work, and this one in particular took a lot of tedious research.)

Anyway, I wanted an anthology like this because I was teaching creative writing and my students were turning in short stories that looked (to me) a lot like movie treatments. Understandable. We’ve all seen more movies than we’ve read short stories. So I thought it might be instructive to look at a few short stories alongside their movie adaptations and talk about the differences.

For example, it’s worth noting that content of the story “The Killers” is the first ten minutes or so of the feature-length film. There are exceptions, but the scope of a short story is generally much smaller than a film and certainly smaller than a novel. So in addition to all the obvious things you need to learn when you’re learning to write, you also need to figure out what the form you’re using can reasonably contain.

I’ve discovered that it’s useful to use movies in the undergraduate creative writing classroom, although it’s highly irregular. The fact is, our students are very savvy about almost every other media form except literature. As I point out to them, gently of course, their literary taste is equivalent to elevator music. They would be embarrassed to claim an orchestral version of “The Girl from Ipanima” as their music of choice, but they want that kind of smooth accessibility from literature. Or, put another way, they can handle a fractured narrative in films like Memento or Pulp Fiction, but in a story it’s too difficult. Why is that?

2. Do you think the trend to adapt comic books and graphic novels vs. prose fiction, as source adaptation material, is a bad thing?

I’ve liked, even loved, a lot of films made from graphic material. I think what you’re trying to get at here, though, is the fact that a graphic story might be easier to sell than prose fiction because people in film tend to be visually oriented.

I don’t think that means that adapting graphic material is easier. Once again, when you move from one form to another there are gains and losses. One of the strengths of prose fiction is the opportunity for the reader to experience a character’s thoughts. The rough equivalent in film is the voiceover, which can be annoying, self-conscious or pretentiously “meta” depending on how much or how well it’s used. So a book that’s heavy on interior monologue can be a real challenge to adapt.

Similarly, one of the strengths of graphic fiction is the symbolic/intuitive/shorthand level on which it works. Think, for example, of Charlie Brown and the simplicity of his face and expressions. To replace Charlie Brown with an actor—any actor—would make him too particular—too, well, real. Or think of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which works so brilliantly, and in a way that novels or stories about the holocaust can’t. The graphics allow the reader to experience the material at a remove, or at least on a different level. So I guess I’m arguing that there are inherent challenges in adapting graphic material that people may ignore because it seems easier.

3. What was your greatest challenge writing this book?

Compiling an anthology is a lot harder than you might think, particularly if you refuse to settle on an audience. From the very beginning we (my agent, editor and I) pondered whether this would appeal more to readers or movie buffs and we couldn’t figure it out. So in the end, they sent me off to write the book I’d like to read. And since I enjoy both I tried to balance the two. It would certainly have been a different and easier-to-compile anthology if I’d come at it from one side or the other.

4. How did you settle on the thirty-five stories that comprise the collection?

The nuts and bolts of it went something like this: I worked a long list of what I considered worthwhile movies, checking off one by one whether or not they had been adapted from a short story. (Not that easy, because, as you probably know “adapted from a story by” is not the same as “adapted from a short story by” but it can be. I chased down a lot of red herrings.) Then I worked the list of authors, looking for adaptations of work from writers I admired. It was all extremely tedious and locating some of the older stories was sometimes very difficult. I ended up with about 200 possibles. Then I read and read and read and watched and watched and watched.

I whittled 200 down to about 75 for the proposal -- and my editor decided that 35 was a good number to shoot for. Picking the final stories was like putting a puzzle together. The thing is, you don’t always get permission to reprint what you want. Or a story turns out to be too expensive to justify. And you can’t have too many long stories because you have to watch the page count. And all the time you have your eye on the quality of the story v. the quality of the movie and then that added serendipity, the backstory behind the adaptation. So you move things around. You look for patterns and examples and what has and has not been anthologized a lot. If it’s an easily found story is there justification for reprinting it yet again? And so forth.

5. What did you leave out that you’re sorry you couldn’t include?

I wanted James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” but it was too expensive. And “Sally Bowles” by Christopher Isherwood was too long. And Salinger doesn’t ever give reprint permission, but his story “Uncle Wriggely in Connecticut” was adapted into a sweet, little-known film called My Foolish Heart.

6. Do you have a favorite story that adapted well to the screen? A worst?

I have a lot of favorites, but one story I worked particularly hard to get was Budd Schulberg’s “Your Arkansas Traveler” which was adapted as A Face in the Crowd. It’s about a guy named Lonesome Rhodes who, through sheer folksiness, rockets out of nowhere to become a political/cultural phenom. A quote from the story:

… it takes a free (and free-wheeling) society for a success like his [Lonesome Rhode’s], and for another it takes a particular hopped-up kind of free society. Our kind, God bless it. This is a real screwball country, if you stop to think about it. Where else would the girls be tearing the clothes off skinny, pasty-faced boys with neurotic voices like Frank Sinatra … Or making Lonesome Rhodes, an obvious concoction if ever there was one, their favorite lover-boy and social philosopher? …

This country has a terrible hankering for its lost frontier, the way a mother forever mourns for a son run down by a truck when he was seven years old. The frontier song has ended, but oh how the melody lingers on. That’s why we don’t trust brain-trusters and professors. Lonesome said it perfectly on the air one day. “My Grandpaw Bascom never went to no school an’ he was the smartest fella in the county. Everything I know I owe t’ my Granddaddy Bascom who didn’ know nuthin’ either …

The story, written in the fifties, had been long out of print and I thought it and the film deserved some attention. The film wasn’t an overwhelming success when it came out, but it’s aged extremely well—and is, I think, more relevant than ever. I’d even go so far as to say that if the character of Lonesome Rhodes had been a woman, she would have been winkin’, doggoneit.

7. Do you think it is important that a director be a reader of fiction (like Hitchcock, Hawks, etc.). Many young directors aren’t passionate readers, these days.

That was one of the surprising things I learned while compiling this anthology. Being a reader really is an advantage for filmmakers. After all, the material has to come from somewhere. The cautionary tale is Carol Reed, who didn’t like to read and relied on his wife to do it for him. Once Reed’s successful, productive and profitable relationship with Graham Greene—a partnership responsible for The Third Man and The Fallen Idol among other fine films—had run its course, Reed’s career pretty much tanked. He was never again able to find material that suited his point of view.

8. You have a Hitchcock quote, “I do not let the writer go off on his own and just write a script that I will interpret. I stay involved with him and get him involved in the direction of the picture. So, he becomes more than a writer; he becomes part maker of the picture.” This is a notion that would give most movie studio creative executives a stroke. Do you think Hitch’s idea is relevant today, or at all to a good adaptation?

Well, I think Hitchcock was a bit disingenuous when he said this. The writers who worked with him would probably disagree. But I do think it’s a shame that writers aren’t given more respect, because when a writer/director relationship works and continues over several films, it’s a thing of beauty.

9. What are you working on now and when can we buy it?

In the summer of 2004 I read in the newspaper that the wife of Somalia’s former dictator had died in Columbus, Ohio at the age of 72. I had just returned to Columbus from Florida, where I had spent three years, and this news came as a bit of a surprise. I hadn’t been aware of the Somali community when I left, but when I returned it was becoming too large to miss. Today there are upwards of 50,000 Somalis in our heartland city, and I’m told that three Somali families move to Columbus every day. It’s the second largest Somali community in the country, behind Minneapolis.

Huh, I thought to myself, that’s interesting. Since I was looking for work, I talked my way into a job teaching English to adult Somali refugees. And somewhere along the line I decided theirs was a story that needed to be told.

So I’m writing about the strangers that came to my town. Poor. Black. Muslim. From the most failed of failed states—there hasn’t been a functioning government in Somalia since 1991, when the dictator fled. In fact, the U.N. has recently declared Somalia the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, surpassing even Darfur. But unlike Darfur, Somalia is a no-go zone, too dangerous and intractable to help.

The working title is Sweet and Bitter Run and it’s a story about unlikely friendships and a mutual love of words. About grammar and poetry and politics. I don’t know when you’ll be able to buy it, but thanks for asking. I’ve been working like crazy and I should be able to pursue a book contract in the very near future. I’ll let you know. You and my mother. She keeps asking the same question.

10. Will you put out any new editions of Adaptations, with additional stories?

Maybe not additional stories, but I would love to do an update at some point and swap a few out to keep the collection up to date. I’m not sure if that will happen or not.

11. What question did I not ask that I should have?

I think I’ve rambled enough …