[Writing Post] Adaptations are NOT as Easy as You Think
Last week was a major milestone for an author I know and admire – her Young Adult novel series became a web series on Geek and Sundry. Yes, I’m referring to Rachel Caine and the Morganville series. Jimmy and I were backers of her Kickstarter campaign to get this done, and I’m so thrilled for her to see it finally come to fruition with the backing and support of Felicia Day’s Geek and Sundry channel. And though I know she doesn’t need defending… I read the comments and wanted to kinda smack some folk. (NEVER, EVER read the comments, I know.)
There are challenges to adapting books to visual media. Heck, there are challenges in adapting books/stories to ANY other media. Unless you have infinite time (which no one does) no book can be word-for-word/scene-for-scene adapted. Things that you can do in your head and on the page just CAN’T be done on screen. For one, if you have a character that wears white? Yeah, you can’t shoot that easily. The lighting necessary for the cameras will cause that costuming to be a pain to shoot, keep clean, etc.
Screen time is expensive – pixels/paper is cheap. Long discussions and explanations are great (sometimes – debatable) in a book, but need to be boiled down to ESSENTIAL bits for screen. I adapted a story once to a script – there was a three sentence paragraph to answer a question that, when you looked at it, boiled down to “Yes”. Guess what goes in the script? Because again… time. You do what you can with what you have available. Compression has to happen to make sure the story stays on track – both in dialogue, scenes, and even characters. Caine addresses some of this in her backers’ updates.
Just this one note – to those who complained the webisodes were “too short” (and should’ve been longer) and/or they should’ve “waited until they had more money” – don’t. Just don’t. Unless you’re ready to throw the hundreds of THOUSANDS (to millions) of dollars it would take to make 30 min – 1 hour episodes you want at them right now? You don’t get a say. The fact this crew made what probably amounted to a total of an hour of show for $80K? Astonishing. Yes, it was chopped up into little bits – the first episode did feel rushed and a little awkward (what first episode of ANYTHING doesn’t?) but it settled and got better, and I hope they get more opportunities to continue to tell the story.
So if you like the books, or vampires, or just some fun watching – go check out the Morganville Webseries on the Geek and Sundry Channel. I love the books. I am entertained by the web series. I’m super happy to have made a little bit of it possible. And now… I have to get back to work, I have a short story deadline approaching…