Nanofail

Like everyone else at the beginning of Nanowrimo, I was bubbling over with enthusiasm and confidence. Began writing my YA novel, for which I’d made copious notes, and felt happy and busy.

However – unlike everyone else – by day seven or eight, I hit a slump. I didn’t even feel particularly bad about it. I accepted my fate that I wouldn’t reach 50,000 words. On days when I wrote 1000 words – still far short of Nanowrimo’s daily 1667-word minimum – I congratulated myself. On days when I didn’t write anything at all, I thought ‘Meh, what can you do.’ (Yeah. I didn’t even achieve my modest ambition to write at least something every day.)

Besides not being sufficiently disciplined, I found I have a hard time focusing on one project. During the month of November I wrote a short story and began another. So, I finished up the month with 12,000 words in the neglected novel, a 5000 word short story, and the beginnings of another story (about 500 words).

But you know what? It’s still probably more fiction than I’ve ever written in a calendar month. Nanowin!

Bruised Apple Books

I came across another rather gorgeous used bookstore when I was upstate over the weekend – Bruised Apple Books in Peekskill, NY …

Creaky floorboards, vintage typewriters, scribbled signage, souvenir tees, plenty of seats and tons of cheap books. Delish.

Fan-pleaser or crowd-pleaser?

Movie adaptations of popular novels are troublesome things, especially when the novel’s fanbase is so intense and visible that a filmmaker could be pushed into thinking they’re making the film for the fans of the novel, as opposed for filmgoers in general (or, God forbid, to please his/her own sensibilities). This is the kind of thinking that results in borefests like Chris Columbus’s two Harry Potter movies, and Chris Weitz’s New Moon.

(Just so’s you know: the fangirls are overjoyed with New Moon. The critics – and pretty much everyone who didn’t love the books to death – are not so much.)

One problem with Meyer’s books is their off-balance structure. Two-thirds of Twilight and New Moon were made up of angst and swooning – nothing wrong with that in and of itself – until Meyer realised she’s writing a book about vampires and werewolves and there should probably be some kind of actiony plot. So in Twilight we get the evil, human-eating vampires showing up (some might call them ‘proper’ vampires) and deciding they’d quite like Bella for supper, and in New Moon we get the highly convoluted situation of Jacob inadvertently leading Edward into believing that Bella’s dead, and Alice showing up to drag Bella off to Italy with her, because she’s foreseen that Edward’s gonna off himself there.

Now. Catherine Hardwicke got around this last-minute plot problem quite well by interspersing scenes of the evil vamps killing people in the early parts of Twilight. A small change, but a very important one. It meant that when the evil vampires showed up to the Cullens’ game of baseball, we already knew who they were, and that they were bad news. (Of course, their indecently long hair and swaggering tipped us off to their evil ways too.) And it meant that early on, amidst all the angst and swooning, we also knew that it was all leading somewhere – that a momentum was building.

Chris Weitz, however, makes no changes to Meyer’s original structure, and packs all of the important stuff – the jaunt to Italy, the face-off with the Volturi (it’s Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning, people! Give them more than five lines each!) – into the last half hour. There is very little foreshadowing or preamble for this, and so it feels tacked-on – silly, even. Part of the problem is that we have no idea where the Cullens have been for most of the film, and so it falls to poor Ashley Greene to be Exposition Girl when Alice eventually turns up.

But it’s a movie. Why not show the Cullens in exile, and Edward’s dark night of the soul, visually? Why couldn’t we have had interspersed scenes of Carlisle and Emmett trying to tempt Edward into playing vampire baseball, only to have him sulkily decline? Seen Alice having her vision of Bella jumping off a cliff, and telling Rosalie about it? Seen Edward heading off for Italy?

But Weitz, unlike Hardwicke, would not mess with the original structure. And consequently, the novels’ fans love Weitz and despise Hardwicke. But you know what else? Hardwicke’s Twilight feels a hell of a lot more efficient than Weitz’s New Moon – despite being only about 20 minutes shorter in actuality. (Also sorely missing from New Moon is Carter Burwell’s kick-ass score – Alexandre Desplat is a lot more generic.)

One hears a lot of talk about the virtues of “staying true to the book” when adapting a novel into a movie. But I say, screw that. They’re different mediums, and require different structures. Sometimes a movie can even improve on a novel’s structure. Take the TV show Veronica Mars. Via voiceover, we’re privy to Veronica’s thoughts, and it’s certainly her story – but we also see scenes that Veronica doesn’t.

This is difficult to do in a novel – if it’s in first person, the only way to relay a scene that the narrator hasn’t witnessed without ‘cheating’ is through heavy-handed exposition. And this is basically what happens in the novel New Moon. But there was no reason for this clunky structure to be repeated in the movie. Bella is the main character, and certainly, we should feel what she feels – but not to the detriment of the other (more interesting) characters, or of the storyline as a whole.

Kay, rant over. Personally, I think Eclipse will rock. It’s being directed by David ‘30 Days of Night‘ Slade. Does this mean the vamps will be hideous and communicate via ungodly shrieks? One can only hope …