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Selling The Rights

11/27/2017

Recently, I came across several items in my social media newsfeed saying the Tolkien Estate has made a deal with Amazon for somewhere in the neighbourhood of a cool $250 million, to develop a multi-year TV series based on a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Given the well-known, longstanding (if dignified and quiet) and fierce opposition of Christopher Tolkien to the Peter Jackson films, it’s fair to say I was gobsmacked at this news. You could have knocked me over with a feather, and similar clichés. And that got me to thinking.

Now, quite beside the legal imbroglio between the Tolkien Estate and New Line over the royalties that may or may not have been paid over the LOTR films, I understand Mr. Tolkien’s opposition. I’m constantly telling my own students they need to understand that J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth are two very different places. Why?

Well, to begin with, Professor Tolkien was a scholar writing his works with a deep knowledge of Northern European literature during a time frame from around the First World War until the 1950s; and he was doing so from the perspective of a quintessential early 20th century WASP male (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant --- except he was Roman Catholic, not Protestant; but you get my point). That’s one reason why, I think, Tolkien’s female characters generally suck like a vacuum cleaner. The late Roger Ebert said in his review of the first LOTR film that Tolkien’s tale proceeded at times with the leisurely nature of a Victorian travel guide.

Peter Jackson, on the other hand, was making films by and for 21st century audiences, and as Mr. Ebert also says, Jackson couldn’t help himself from ramping up LOTR into a special-effects laden, swords and sorcery action extravaganza. (It’s a matter of personal sorrow to me when I tell my students that, if Professor Tolkien were alive and unknown as an author today, and brought the LOTR manuscript to publishers, I very much doubt any would publish it. The same holds true with C.S. Lewis, I’m also sad to say. Literary and filmic audience tastes change dramatically over time, and today’s jaded audiences are nothing like those of 70 years ago.)

Getting back to my assertion that the two visions of Middle Earth --- Tolkien’s and Jackson’s --- are markedly different… it took me quite a while to reconcile that truth for myself; I didn’t especially like the Jackson films at first (I’ve since made my peace with them and can enjoy them on their own merits) because they were guilty of the sin I think many film adaptations are guilty of: in a number of respects --- some films more than others --- they’re not faithful to the books from whence they come. And as a purist, I don’t care for that very much. It seems like a desecration, somehow.

(One of the worst examples of this is a 1950s cartoon adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm --- apparently funded in part by the CIA --- in which the story’s ending is rewritten so the animals overthrow the pigs in order to restore truth, justice and the American way to Animal Farm. Are you freaking kidding me, guys? I remember thinking in outraged disbelief when I first viewed this abomination. You just destroyed the entire point of Orwell’s masterful tale, you morons. Sigh. Oh, the humanity.)

And all this comes about because of a little phrase we see in the opening credits of films: “based on the book by…”

Based on. Not “retold verbatim.” Not “faithfully rendered according to the Master’s words.” Nope. Based on. Which means, essentially, “we’ve paid for the privilege of obtaining the rights to the author’s story, and so will now proceed to tell it in whatever manner we think is most effective --- including adding and deleting events, characters, dialogue, settings, themes, motifs, symbols and just about anything else we want. At will. And boy oh boy, sometimes, we have a lot of will.”

So… why has the Tolkien Estate made this deal? And in general, why do authors sell the film rights to their stories? (I doubt Christopher Paolini can possibly have been pleased with the filmic adaptation of Eragon.) Well, being a poor and obscure author myself, I can only speculate as to the reasons.

The first and most obvious one is Money (although apparently Tolkien originally sold the rights to The Hobbit and LOTR for a relative pittance). If one has a hot literary property, the film rights can command a pretty penny, and while I think most of us would like to pretend the writing is all about ars gratia artis and all that, there’s no denying even writers gotta make a living.

The second reason could be Exposure. It’s a sad truism in our visually obsessed society nowadays that many people don’t want to read words on a page (or a screen); they want everything done for them so that all they have to do is watch, glassy-eyed. So converting a literary masterpiece over to film can immeasurably widen a work’s exposure to the public.

Finally, a different medium can strive to bring a New Vision of the tale to life. It can obviously work: I’ve never heard that J.K. Rowling was unhappy with the filmic adaptations of Harry Potter; Diana Gabaldon is evidently okay with what Ron Moore is doing with Outlander; and George R.R. Martin is actively involved with the TV version of Game of Thrones. I guess it depends on how it is done.

So… would you do it? I hear you ask. Sell the film rights to your literary baby? Hmm. Not sure. To repeat my own words, I guess it would depend on how it was done, and how much control I would retain. As an unknown, that probably wouldn’t be a lot.

But… it would be an interesting dilemma to have, I must admit.

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The Game and Other Childhood Confessions

11/20/2017

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When does the creative process first manifest itself within the budding author? I was asked this question the other day by a friend, with particular emphasis on myself. In other words, when do the first embryonic talents begin to emerge?

Well, to start with, I’ve always loved reading. I vividly recall dashing home with my first-grade primer, an absurdly titled book called Tip, about an eponymous dog and his earnestly simple adventures, shouting to my mother as I came in the front door that I can read! I do recall being read to prior to that by my parents, and I also recall an endless supply of library books. (Back then, libraries were still blessedly hushed places where reverence for the printed word was easily instilled.) I recall early writing efforts for school --- including winning an elementary class-wide competition in grade four and reading my magnum opus aloud as part of the entertainment section of each Friday afternoon’s whole-school assembly. But I think a major creative energy that, perhaps, presaged my future literary self was a childhood activity my closest friends and I simply called The Game, or A Game.

There were three of us in my core group. I’ll call my two friends Arthur and Isaac, after the classic science fiction authors I was even then beginning to discover. (As I’ve said elsewhere, I was precocious as a child --- but I do deny I was a toad.) Artie was a year older than Isaac and me, and we played all sorts of things. Both Artie and Isaac were big football fans, and while I’ve been pretty indifferent to the concept of organized sports my entire life --- not really sure why --- I quite willingly joined in the football games. I think I had something to prove. Some of the fringe members of the group were, to my eyes anyway, fairly tough boys --- one or two of them borderline bullies --- and I was, I think, at least subconsciously, determined to prove I was a scrappy contender even with the nerdy glasses I was saddled with from grade two onwards. So we played football. And soccer, too, as I recall, although that was mostly as school.

We also played war. You need to know this was at the height of the Cold War and the Vietnam conflict, and there were a lot of spy and war shows like Combat on TV. GI Joe was just about the only doll it was remotely socially acceptable for boys to play with, and I had a GI Joe doctor’s kit that my parents bought me because they refused to indulge my blood lust and buy me toy guns. (I wanted a Johnny-7 O.M.A. gun. Desperately. Look it up on Wikipedia and you’ll see why: seven different weapons in one gun! But nooo, in a fairly heavy-handed attempt at parental influencing, I got a doctor’s kit.)

But as often as I could persuade Artie and Isaac, we played The Game.

The Game was, at its heart, just a never-ending series of story ideas. Mostly with me as the protagonist, and Artie and Isaac assuming various subordinate roles. The ideas could come from books I had read, or films I had seen, or just about anything that would serve as a springboard for my imagination. I also served as director, telling Artie and Isaac how they would react in given situations and what they would say. Speaking of heavy-handed, in retrospect, it was rather on my part --- guess I came by it honestly --- and thinking about it now, I wonder at their patience/acquiescence. Although really, I suppose, when children play, there are always leaders and followers. And Artie and Isaac must have enjoyed themselves, because children are also pretty good at telling other children to stuff it when they become too unbearable. (I don’t think I’m rationalizing here… am I? No, no, definitely not.)

We played The Game in different places: quite a lot in Isaac’s back yard, for some reason --- maybe because it had a really good swing set with all kinds of extras that could serve as props or sets for varied scenarios; sometimes in Artie’s basement, because it was undeveloped and full of stuff like old, broken-down furniture transformable into forts and caves and passages. And in Artie’s back yard, lying on the ground beside a perpetually unfinished garage pad, there was an old, real World War II machine gun that could become all sorts of things. (I don’t think it ever occurred to me to wonder how or why that machine gun was there. It just was. Many things, children just accept on faith.)

The Game lasted as an enduring and wildly successful activity for us until Artie entered junior high. Then, for reasons I didn’t understand --- don’t now, really --- it became rather juvenile and embarrassingly passé for him. I was first puzzled by his reaction, then sorrowful, because I sensed the winds of change were blowing, and I wasn’t particularly keen to see where they were taking us. Isaac took his cue from Artie and that was the end of The Game. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess.

But by then, I had already started writing, so that lessened the sting somewhat. If my friends wouldn’t play out my creative ideas with me, then gosh-darn it, I would turn to the pen and keep on going, recording and writing and imagining new vistas, boldly going and all that. It was about then I first read The Hobbit, followed in lightning succession by The Lord of the Rings, and that was personally transformative. It was a whole new world. A brave new world, to have such creatures in’t. And I would write about worlds like it.

The die was cast.

Oh, and… I was 12, by the way.

Yep, perhaps just a tad precocious.

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People or Puppets?

11/13/2017

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“My dear Frodo!’ exclaimed Gandalf. ‘Hobbits really are amazing creatures, as I have said before. You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I’m a pretty organized kind of guy. I run my classroom with a very organized hand --- in fact, I’m fairly sure my students would say very emphatically that I structure things right down to the last detail, with the finesse of a drill sergeant. And my home life tends to be fairly organized too, if perhaps a tad more relaxed.

Now, on a seemingly unrelated note (although it’s very related, I promise), there’s a lot of chatter on my social media feed right now about NaNoWriMo --- National Novel Writing Month, for those of you who think that acronym is completely nonsensical. It involves undertaking a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. I don’t participate. I’m not a huge fan of the process, and if you want to know why, you can read my thoughts on the matter here if you’re interested. But it does seem to have sparked some renewed debate on whether being a plotter or a pantser --- someone who writes with or without much story planning --- is the better approach to writing. Given what I’ve told you, it would be logical for you to assume I’m a plotter. So it may come as something of a surprise when I say that I tend to throw most of my personal organizational habits out the window when it comes to writing. I’m not really a plotter.

I didn’t start out that way. Honest. I began by making fairly copious notes about what was going to happen, and when, and in what order, and which characters would undertake which actions, and so on, right down the line. Eyes left! Quick march! and all that. It was very tidy.

Except it didn’t work. And it’s all my characters’ fault. Because I think --- for me, anyway --- the question began to loom large in my concrete-sequential thought processes: are my characters puppets, or people?

You see, puppets do as they’re told. They have no independent ideas, no self-will. Without the puppeteer pulling those strings, puppets undertake precisely nothing. And literary puppets --- story characters --- move woodenly along with all the animation of a twig.

People --- ah, now that’s a different kettle of fish altogether. People are maddeningly independent. Almost all humans have a strong bloody-minded streak to them. It seems to be genetically hardwired into us. It could simultaneously be our greatest asset, and our greatest weakness. People don’t automatically do as they’re told and go where they’re directed. Free will’s a bitch at times, isn’t it? So literary people --- also story characters --- tend to look up at the writer with a jaundiced eye and say, “No, I don’t want to do that. I’m going to do this instead. And you can’t stop me.”

When this started to happen to me --- fairly early on as a writer --- I paused and gave the matter some thought. And I decided I wasn’t going to even try to stop my characters from going their own way. Because it meant that, somehow, they had wondrously come to some sort of life, somewhere in the nanospace between keyboard and page. I felt like Geppetto watching Pinocchio becoming a real boy.

(Now, this isn’t to say you can’t forecast the actions of people/characters. After all, there are times when many of us are very much creatures of habit. But even the most hidebound person will, from time to time, do things that are completely out of character. Just look at Gandalf’s delighted comments at the beginning of this post.)

Here’s how interaction works between people (take notes, please; there’ll be a quiz on this at the end): one person says something to another person; the second person responds --- usually completely spontaneously, because we mostly tend to be That Sort Of Bear (something that often times gets us into trouble, doesn’t it?) --- and then the first person responds again, and so on. We have now built a chain of either statements or actions that constitutes life or story events. Repeat sequence over and over again, and you’ve now built a life --- or a novel.

So this was all quite liberating for me as a writer. Yeah, I still think and write out at least a general outline of where my story’s headed. But not too detailed an outline, because I know perfectly well that at least one character is going to derail that outline before much time has elapsed. It may be only one box car that goes off the rails, or it could be the entire damned train. Either way, it’s very exciting, at least in this literary metaphor, because there’s been no loss of life or destruction of property (well, figuratively speaking… characters may die; empires may fall; but you get my drift, I hope).

If you ask yourself the question “are my characters people, or puppets?” I think most writers would desire the former. Be forewarned, however: it will result in some literary mayhem from time to time.

But it’s a lot more fun than watching a pair of marionettes singing
“High on a hill was a lonely goatherd
Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo
Loud was the voice of the lonely goatherd
Lay ee odl lay ee odl-oo”

And if the little girl in a pale pink coat ultimately decides she doesn’t want to get together with the lonely goatherd because he smells of goats and has the manners of same… well, that’s okay, too.

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Lies We Tell

11/6/2017

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Yeah, Virgil. What gives with the loopy motto? Is it just that we all go out of our minds at certain phases of the moon? Or did you have some sinister idea in mind?

Well, actually, we know the answer. Labor vincit omnia was an early propaganda statement to encourage more Romans to become farmers. And it’s in use nowadays in countless schools as a motto (oh, the humanity). Just goes to show, I suppose, that there’s nearly always a dark motive to just about everything if you want to search hard enough.

(By the way… some smart aleck asked me what I would use for a school motto in place of labor vincit omnia if I thought it was so awful. Scientia est potentia, I replied without missing a beat --- knowledge is power. Much more inspiring, in my humble correct opinion.)

In my last post, I mentioned, among other things, that I took classical guitar lessons when I was but a lad just entering my teens. While I enjoyed the lessons, at least until high school came along and I discovered girls and other entertaining diversions, I said I don’t think I ever had a huge passion for the guitar, and any skill I developed was technical rather than from the heart. I worked hard at the guitar --- for the first few years, at least --- and eventually became pretty good at it. But I was never great. Because I lacked the two other critical things necessary for personal success: Passion and Gift.

Hard work is absolutely necessary to achieve success/mastery, of course. (There are tremendously talented people out there who never amount to anything, because they’re not prepared to put in the work needed to accomplish their goals.) But it’s only one leg of a triad, passion and gift being the other two. To be great at something --- to conquer all, as Virgil says --- you must: have a passion for what you do; possess a gift, an innate natural talent waiting to be tapped and nurtured; and work hard to develop that talent. You can become competent at most things merely by working hard and striving to do well. But you will never be great, never conquer all, without the other two legs of the triad.

Lest you think this is all just me getting my Eeyore grump on, Billy Joel references this exact issue in his classic song Allentown as he speaks about the betrayal felt by an entire generation:

Well we're waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved

So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coal
And chromium steel
And we're waiting here in Allentown

If we worked hard, if we behaved. Yep. Sorry, boys and girls, but that’s no guarantee of greatness. Nor should it be.

I mention all this because hard work conquers all is right in there with that other deplorable lie so many well-meaning people propagate, mostly on unsuspecting children: you can do/be anything you want. The unspoken but implied corollary is, if you work hard enough at it, you can be terrific. Well, nope, that’s just not true. Sorry to burst your bubble, folks. Case in point: I really wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid --- attracted far more by the lure of Bright and Shiny Technology rather than any nascent cold warrior impulses, I hasten to add. (When my neighbourhood friends and I played ‘war’ --- hey, this was during the height of the Vietnam era, you know, and it was only one of the many games we played --- I was always the medic, with my GI Joe doctor’s bag, dispensing sugar pill drugs to soften the blows of faux wounds sustained.) However, my distance vision without glasses was so awful from grade three onwards --- thanks, mom, for that particular inherited characteristic --- there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I would ever have been accepted into any fighter pilot program worth its salt. So that particular career option was closed to me.

Sigh. Yes, I know there’s laser vision correction and all that now. But if that’s your rebuttal, you’re missing the point: you can do/be anything you want is still a lie. A well-meaning lie, as I said, but a lie nonetheless, just like hard work conquers all.

So, what advice would you give children --- or even older people, then, Eeyore? I hear you muttering. Simply this: find your passion --- chances are, you may already know, or suspect, what it is, although you may not as yet, and that’s okay, too --- then check to see if you seem to be gifted with even embryonic natural ability at it: we’re all gifted with an ability to do or be extraordinary at something. Then, and only then, work hard at it.

And go out there and conquer the whole damn world with it.

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D.R. RANSHAW

Selling The Rights

The Game and Other Childhood Confessions

People or Puppets?

Lies We Tell

D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

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