Writing when you are not an expert

When I lived in England I had a rule.  No soap operas.  I forbade myself to watch Emmerdale, Eastenders, and Coronation Street because once you get involved you start following a particular storyline and then before you know it BAM.  You are hooked and cannot live without knowing who it was that burnt down the underwear factory, or who shot Phil Mitchell.  You can see that my rules were not always followed.

But when I moved to Cyprus everything changed.  New job, new routine, new home, new roads, new food, and new language.  In many respects at the beginning everything was so unfamiliar I may as well have been on the moon.  I didn’t know anyone or anything with the exception of my husband.  I am sure than in the first few weeks I walked around with a constantly surprised/confused look on my face.  Especially when somebody spoke to me.

The biggest thing to tackle was without doubt the language, and this is an ongoing challenge.  I am reasonably ‘fluent’ now, but still at times I meet somebody with such a strong accent that I feel like I haven’t learnt a single thing since day one, and I am left slack jawed and stupid looking when I don’t understand.  But luckily I am not shy, and don’t care about making mistakes, and it’s a good job because there have been plenty.  One example that stands out from the rest occurred whilst describing what I thought was a snowball fight to my in-laws.  It turns out it is very easy to get one word wrong and make this a very different story.  One that included balls of a very different nature.

But my previous rule about not watching soap operas has slowly dwindled.  You cannot imagine the excitement of watching the television in a foreign language and understanding for the first time.  It was like Christmas had come, and Santa Claus had brought it to me personally.   But what started off as a language learning exercise quickly turned into crack-like addiction and now there is not a night that goes by without watching a show called (insert bad translation) The Waltz of the Twelve Gods.

But there is another reason that I never wanted to watch soap operas, and that is because they just, well, aren’t really that good.  We’ve all seen the fight scene that left us laughing rather than concerned, or the kiss that looked more like their lips accidentally got glued together than passion had overcome them.  But why is this?  One theory is this.  The writer didn’t know how to write it.

So let’s take an example from last night’s viewing.  There is a big exit scene of the main star.  She is leaving the show.  Best way to exit has to be a death, right?  Now one thing I have witnessed in real life more times than I can count on any number of hands is death.  It tends to work that way when you work in a hospital for fifteen years.  What most people would be surprised about when things go wrong in a hospital is how calm everybody manages to stay.  OK, of course there is a bit of drama and there is a sense of urgency, but the staff involved know when somebody has a cardiac arrest there is a job to be done.  Somebody will manage an airway, somebody will start chest compressions, somebody will secure IV access if it hasn’t already been done, and in the case of where I used to work somebody will most likely call a cardiothoracic surgeon to come and help us out.  So because everybody knows what they are doing you’ll most likely have plenty of people that just look like they are hanging around.  There will be drips going up, drips coming down, somebody shouting I can’t find a vein, somebody else shouting that they are charging the defibrillator, and somebody else looking shattered and sweaty from the chest compressions.  It’ll look like chaos.  But organised chaos.  Ask anybody who worked in a ‘crash team’ to describe this situation, and this is roughly what you’ll get.  There are lots of good examples in film and television.  So how can a writer get it so wrong?  How can it look so fake?  Do the general public even know it looks fake?

Writing about something specific like a cardiac arrest needs an opinion of somebody who has actually been at one.  Without it you end up with a series of ten or so shocks (I lost count in the end) which happened through the patient’s clothes whilst the patient was wearing an oxygen mask.  Not only is this like to result in the most horrific case of hospital induced burns, there was nothing else at all happening around her.  No fuss, no drips, no help, no nothing.  It’s no wonder she died.

 At the moment I am writing Crazy Girl, a story about a woman who suffers with severe mental illness, and fortunately I have never been in this situation.  So what do I do?  Make it all up?  Yes, but not without a really good book called ‘Psychology for Writers’ and the help of a psychologist friend who I am sure is going to remove my email address from her contacts list soon.  If you don’t know about guns, find out about them before you write.  If you don’t know the first thing about being a cop but are writing about one, do some research that will add an air of authenticity to your work.  Soon I am planning to write the second instalment of Identity X and want to go to a shooting range to get a feel for a real handgun, and see what it would be like to actually shoot one.  Bringing authenticity into my writing always has to be a main aim and a central task.  This is what helps the characters come to life, to become real, and for the story to seem genuine and believable. 

I will keep watching my Greek soap opera and I know that I will forgive it for its flaws.  I can accept its issues.  Because it is above all entertaining, and that’s all any of us are really looking for in the television or in books, right?

Say what?

As a writer, it's not going to surprise you much if I tell you I love to read.  I don't read quickly, but I read constantly.  In bed, on the settee, in the kitchen, even standing in queues, which in Cyprus is like nothing you might have seen before.  There is no line for one, no order, and a whole lot of shouting about not very much.  Alright when you know what's being said, not so easy when you don't.  It resembles what you might imagine an early Athenian democracy to look like, minus the togas.  An amphitheatre of people surrounding the target, be it doorway, cashier, whatever, all pushing and shoving, handing out opinions to the air and perhaps even numbers to each other for who was first.  Of which there might be five contenders.  Anyway, I digress.

One things that is so important to me when I read a book is the dialogue.  It is the difference between me liking and believeing in a character or believing that they are just that.  Just a name on a page which does certain things or acts in certain ways to move a story along.  It doesn't matter what a writer does in the prose, if you screw up the dialogue you might as well stick a nail in your protagonist’s coffin right then and there.  If he or she doesn't speak like a real person, they die on your page.

I read a good novel a few months ago (which shall remain nameless) and the story was pretty good.  However, every few pages somebody would come across a problem and irrespective of what it was, their response was, 'oh no'.  If they ran out of milk it was 'oh no'.  If they lost their phone it was 'oh no'.  They found a dead body, and yep, 'oh no'.  I think most characters might have something a little bit more to say about a corpse tied up in a cupboard.

And then you come across an absolute gem, which is why I am writing this post.  Sometimes you don't realise what bad dialogue is until you see the absolute standout-in-a-crowd dialogue that just blows you away.

I started reading American Psycho yesterday and it is full of dialogue.  I have, perhaps, never read dialogue quite like it.  It's all over the place; I have to re-read sentences to follow where I am properly.  It's random and jerky, and there are interjections from outsiders.  Jokes thrown in which seemingly have nothing to do with just 'moving a plot along' as we are told dialogue must do to fulfil its purpose.  It feels so real that I feel I might be sat in a fifth chair at their dinner table just listening in and checking out the women nearby and then dismissing them for their petty imperfections. 

Real dialogue breathes life into a character, and this has has got me thinking about the dialogue in the manuscript that I am currently editing and wondering how I can improve it.  My only problem now is making it as good.

Movie with a great twist!

When it comes to movies, I will watch anything.  When I say anything, I seriously mean anything.  It doesn't even have to be good.  I love everything about watching movies, be it at the cinema, home, on the computer, wherever.  I'm yet to go to a drive-in showing, but for that I might have to get over to the USA.  In 1960.

Every week I watch at least five movies.  So it goes without saying that a lot of these end with little extra thought about them.  But every now and again I catch a film that just strikes a nerve.  This week, with a glass of red wine in hand, I had exactly that.

Favourite movie genre?  Thriller/horror, and this week I chose The House at the End of the Street.  This is what IMDb has to say about it.

When a teenager and her mother move to a little town, the girl finds that an accident happened in the house at the end of the street. But things get complicated when she befriends a boy who is the only survivor in the accident.

Surprisingly it attracted only 5.4 out of ten rating, which by anybody's standards could be better.  Maybe overall there were a few plot holes and the atmosphere could have been a bit darker and creepier, but what stood out for me with this movie was not the amount of times it made me jump.  It wasn't the way the fog rolled in at night, or the fact that people crept out of televisions.  It was the fact that until the very last scene I had absolutely no idea of what was coming.  I had picked out a few plot twists along the way, probably thanks to the fact that I currently have my head in a book called Psychology for Writers.  But when the last scene played out I genuinely had not expected what came. 

To write a script or a book that can in the last moments kick your jaw into your chest, stop your pulse, and make you turn and look at the person next to you with a I-can't-believe-it look on your face is quite a talent.  This movie had me thinking about it the next day, wondering what flaw I had missed, and if it could really happen.

I'm not one for spoilers, so I won't tell you this twist that took me by surprise.  I have thought about it, and yes, there are a couple of things that could have benefited from a few additions in the movie.  But overall this was a great twist, and definitly a movie a thriller or horror fan would enjoy.

The book to movie adaptation...yes or no, or maybe?

I was twelve years old when I first got my hands on the Thomas Harris book, The Silence of the Lambs.  It was my school speech day prize on account of being the class nerd and I devoured it faster than Lecter would a meal served with a Fava bean and Chianti accompaniment.  I was to wait another year before I finally saw the movie, after convincing my mother that it was safe to let me watch it because I had already read the book and knew what happened.   She however, had not.  Whilst remaining unconvinced, she relented as a holiday treat as I encouraged her with suggestions that ‘it wasn’t really that bad’.  As the film started I sat glued to a ten inch wall mounted television as we both sat propped up on our shared hotel room bed.  I sat there watching the imprisonment and eventual escape of a man who visited my dreams for many of the following nights, and my mother sat there clearly wondering if she would ever be able to undo the irrevocable damage that she had unwittingly allowed to occur.  I too was scared stiff, and considered an attempt to turn it off in a display of near-teenage disinterest.  But I knew that I couldn’t muster such a credible performance and so instead sat there terrified to the end, possibly, but questionably, more so than my mother.  Honestly, I had enjoyed every single flesh eating second of it.

 It was indeed a grand moment in my book to screen adaptation education.  One of the first screen adaptations that I ever watched was lavished with not one, but five Academy Awards and remains regarded as one of the best movies ever made.  The book was celebrated.  The movie was celebrated.  All round success.  Yet Demme’s directorial interpretation was far from a carbon copy of the novel.  So why is it that whilst we consider this adaptation with such high regard, another we will toss back into the bargain bin before the credits have even had the chance to roll?

There is a huge difference is creating an image through written words and description, and creating something visual.  The smallest of well written descriptions can result in a whole scenario in the readers mind, and ultimately what is created is something that the reader finds individually satisfying.  You could take ten readers of the same passage and ask them to draw out an interpretation, and each would undoubtedly be different.  Our own interpretation follows our own rules because the image is internalized.  Once this process is complete, the director of any subsequent screen adaptation has to fight against the imaginary images already created.  An exception could perhaps be a work so detailed, such as that by Tolkien where there are so many details that the reader and director have no choice but to follow the same path.

The director also has to decide on what details to leave out, or whether to include everything.  Whilst reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, I completed a whole first chapter which concerned itself with no more than the extraction of a pea from an ear.   Chapters and chapters passed by before I had even been introduced to the mysterious Corelli.  But yet when I sat down to watch the screen adaptation these characters from the beginning of the novel make little or no appearance in the movie.  Their importance is whittled down to nothing more than a passing mention, or worse still, their whole personality is changed. 

So what is a director to do?  If they try to remain faithful to the original story it can begin to feel like an exercise in ticking boxes and a two hour run through at break-neck speed.   Alternatively, the film would be unbearably long and indeed, should this have been the approach of John Madden in his attempt to direct Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the movie would have carried an advisory notice for those with a predisposition to the development of DVT.  Taking this same example, the drastically simplified plot of the screen adaptation managed to reduce a series of complex and thoughtful personalities into a cast of threadbare characters that I really didn’t care much about.  The central element regarding the love between Corelli and Pelagia was so stripped of its depth and detail that the idea that she would have fallen in love with him almost seemed ridiculous, to the point that when an alternative and more emotionally agreeable happily ever after conclusion that I had hoped for throughout the last quarter of the book actually happened, I really couldn’t have cared less, and instead found myself wishing that she had turned around and told him to hop back onto the nearest boat and head in the direction of the Adriatic Sea.

So perhaps if you read a book and love it, seeing the movie will be an inevitable disappointment if you are looking for the same experience.  Should we expect the same from a two hour visual representation of a text that takes us at least four times that to read?  I for one should certainly have seen it coming when I eagerly sat down to watch Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.  So rather than reverting to the idea that books shouldn’t be made into movies, or berating them when we see a less than faithful adaptation of one of our favourite books, perhaps it is time to stop making comparisons.  Instead, we should open our eyes to the idea of enjoying different media in the form it was intended, and judge each interpretation on its own merits and failings rather than trying to force it to adhere to the rules of another.