Question Corner with Lorraine Mace - Answers to questions on that, which and where

Seb from Inverness sent in a question over when to use that and when to use which. I know this is something that vexes many writers, so hope the answer helps.

Seb says: I’m not a novice writer by any means, but I can never decide what the rule is over that and which. Is there a simple way to remember?

Okay, the basic rule is this: if the sentence doesn’t need the clause (it makes sense without) you use which. If the sentence does need the clause you use that.

The car, which is green, has a manual gearbox.

The car that is green has a manual gearbox.

The two sentences look identical at first, but the meanings are not the same.

The car, which is green, has a manual gearbox. This tells us there is only one car and it has a manual gearbox. The clause (the words inside the two commas) isn’t necessary to illustrate the meaning. It is additional information and doesn’t affect the fact there is only one car and it has a manual gearbox.

The car that is green has a manual gearbox. This sentence suggests there is more than one car, but it is the car that is green that has the manual gearbox. The phrase ‘that is green’ is necessary to show clearly of all the cars on the forecourt, it is the green one that has the manual gearbox.

The proper phrase for it is a restrictive clause because another part of the sentence depends on it. You can’t remove that clause (that is green) without changing the meaning of the sentence.

Nancy, who is currently living in Barcelona, is doing a non-fiction writing course. As she says: living abroad, it’s not always easy to carry out research. Do you know of any good reference sites?

As I wasn’t sure what topic or categories would be of benefit, I’ve collected a range of online reference sites, all of which are useful for those of us who have limited access to English language libraries and museums, but are equally useful to readers who aren’t resident abroad.

Dictionaries

Ask Oxford has built a database on grammar, usage and words, as well as giving a quote of the week, word of the day, spelling help and origins of words and phrases. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/

Cambridge dictionary is useful: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Merriam Webster www.merriam-webster.com/ is another good online dictionary and http://thesaurus.reference.com/ is useful when an alternative word is needed.

Quotes and Sayings

www.quotesandsayings.com/ is a wonderful site to find quotes by subject or author, excerpts from speeches and poetry, and a good selection of proverbs and sayings. The site also provides the full text of several books by Arthur Conan Doyle and the following works by Shakespeare: All's Well that Ends Well, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest and his Sonnets.

Museums

www.24hourmuseum.org.uk is a gateway to various UK museums, galleries and heritage attractions.

www.britishmuseum.org/ provides access to a database of about 5,000 artefacts from the British Museum's collections.

www.cornucopia.org.uk/ produced by the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council, this is an online database of more than 6,000 collections in the UK's museums, galleries, archives and libraries. 

www.iwm.org.uk/ The Imperial War Museum covers conflicts from the First World War to the present day.

www.museumspot.com/ is an American site that provides information on museums and galleries worldwide.

www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ the National Gallery Search allows you to explore by artist, subject, theme or title. 

www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/ the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television gives details of the collections which include the world's first negative and the earliest television footage.

www.npg.org.uk/live/index.asp the National Portrait Gallery lists collections by name of artist or sitter, by medium, or by subject. 

www.nhm.ac.uk/ the Natural History Museum has details of the museum's collections, information about research, details of services and access to the catalogue. 

www.tate.org.uk/ the Tate Online gives access to works in the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. 

Fee-paying sites

The British Library http://www.bl.uk/ gives online access to this incredible resource and offers copies of documents for a fee.

www.britannica.com/ is the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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Lorraine Mace is the humour columnist for Writing Magazine and a competition judge for Writers’ Forum. She is a former tutor for the Writers Bureau, and is the author of the Writers Bureau course, Marketing Your Book. She is also co-author, with Maureen Vincent-Northam of The Writer's ABC Checklist (Accent Press). Lorraine runs a private critique service for writers (link below). She is the founder of the Flash 500 competitions covering flash fiction, humour verse and novel openings.

Her debut novel for children, Vlad the Inhaler, will be published in the USA on 2^nd April 2014.

Writing as Frances di Plino, she is the author of the crime/thriller series featuring Detective Inspector Paolo Storey: Bad Moon Rising, Someday Never Comes and Call It Pretending.

Writing Critique Service

www.lorrainemace.com

www.flash500.com

Frances di Plino

Bearing fruit by Jane Ayres

Any business, small or large, will regularly review and evaluate output and productivity.  What is selling?  What isn’t?  Is the reward commensurate with the time expended to produce it?  (Okay, this is a perennial issue for all creators, not just writers.  Creating can be hugely draining and time consuming; also frustrating and difficult, as well as spiritually satisfying.   And we aren’t supposed to be doing it for the money (!) But that is for another article….) Back to the topic.  So how many writers analyse their output in terms of volume and results?  For example, have you ever gone through your records detailing work sent out (you do keep records, don’t you?) to ascertain the ratio of work published to work submitted?

My core work is writing short pony books for children and teenagers, which I have done for more years than I care to remember.  However, I am a big advocate of not putting all your eggs in one basket, so have always tried to establish a parallel writing career that is independent of this; particularly since the publishing industry is so fickle and dynamic.  I have written articles, comic strips, poetry and advertising copy, but my first love was always the short story form.  When I started to analyse my non-pony book output, I discovered that on average only 12% of my speculative submissions resulted in publication, and this was consistent over several years.  Was I producing quantity rather than quality?  Or failing to target my work effectively? Investigating further, I undertook a breakdown of the successful output, to see if any trends were apparent.  The results were illuminating.  I spent a lot of time and energy writing short stories but had disappointingly few accepted. Repeated editorial feedback indicated that my fiction lay uncomfortably between “commercial” and “literary” – a situation I guess many writers will be familiar with.  However, to my surprise, writing features and articles, which I had never seen as my strength, had actually proved more successful and earned more money.  This boosted my confidence writing non-fiction, and as a result of this analysis, I decided to concentrate more on feature writing. 

Being a glutton for punishment, I then scrutinised competitions.  I had given myself three years to make some headway with short story writing competitions.  Where had it got me?  In my best year, I’d been awarded 2 prizes out of a total of 18 competitions entered.  The following year, I’d more than doubled my output, and entered 46 competitions and was awarded one prize.  Ouch!  I hadn’t realised I’d entered so many and when I totted up the total entry fees, I was shocked. Ouch again.  Admittedly, I had recycled some of the unsuccessful competition entries, and several of these were, eventually, published elsewhere.  But I was in a situation where I needed to pay the bills, so in terms of time and money, entering competitions was a poor use of both. 

So what did I learn?   Well, what you enjoy writing and what you are good at writing are not always the same.  And that can be quite hard to accept.  Writers need to be flexible and open to trying anything.  You can’t afford to be precious, especially if you intend to rely on income from writing in the future.   I also learned what I should be doing to use my time efficiently and effectively.  (Note the use of the word ‘should’.  I am still the mistress of procrastination!)

I would urge any writer, particularly if you are seeking to earn an income from your words, to regularly undertake this kind of analysis and evaluation.  Writers need to think about their occupation as a business, and successful businesses understand what they are producing, what sells (or doesn’t) and the reasons for it.  Or at least to try.  And from a creative viewpoint, it can actually be quite a liberating process.  It is easy for writers to pigeonhole themselves, and discovering that you have hidden talents is always exciting.

About the author:

Jane had her first short story published in a UK pony magazine when she was 14. Her latest title, Valentine Horse, is available from Amazon. A passionate cat lover, Jane is donating all author royalties from her e-book Coming Home to the charity Cats Protection. See the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aweX0y3lvL4&feature=youtu.be

Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jane-Ayres/e/B004MWCTD8/

Blog: http://www.janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/124661.Jane_Ayres

Writing Your Non-Fiction Book – The Complete Guide To becoming An Author By Trish Nicholson

Reviewed by Anne Stormont 

An author who practises what she preaches.

Claiming to be the complete guide to anything is a bold claim indeed. The author promises in her introduction that she will lead you ‘a step at a time’ through the whole process of producing and selling your non-fiction book.

In my opinion, the author’s claim is valid and her promise holds true.

This guide book would work just as well for as fiction writing as it does for non-fiction. It is aimed at the complete beginner but there’s plenty that could be useful to the more experienced writer, most especially indie author-publishers.

The book is divided into three main sections – Planning, Writing and Editing, and Publishing and Marketing. At the end there is a comprehensive list of useful websites, books and a glossary.

The advice offered is both general and specific and, indeed, as you read the book you see the author putting her that into practice.

There is genre-specific guidance – for everything from travelogues to blogs. As Nicholson herself says there’s, ‘enough scope here whether you intend to write on particle physics or brewing parsnip wine’. And there is more general advice on editing, routes to publishing and how to sell and market your work.

The book takes you through planning, plotting, point of view – yes these three are just as important in non-fiction as in fiction. There’s advice on workspace and finding time to write. The author also covers how to carry out research, how to avoid plagiarism and explains about copyright. Again, all relevant to creators of fiction as well.

Personally speaking, I found the sections on blogging, having a website and the use of social media to be particularly useful, as was the section on routes to publishing. I also especially liked the sections on how to write blurbs of various lengths depending on their purpose, and on how to pitch your work both to publishers and readers.

Nicholson recommends that you read the book straight through and then re-read as you write. And she says that ‘If you have followed each step with me so far you have achieved by now a thoroughly prepared manuscript, a decision as to how you will pursue its publication and the beginnings of an author platform’.

As I said at the start of this review, whether you’re a novice or an old-hand, drawn to writing fact or made-up stuff, a prospective or actual traditionally or independently published author, you’re sure to find something of use here.

I hope to have shown that this book goes beyond the mission of its title. This is an essential ‘How To’ manual for writers of every sort.

Find out more about Trish and the book here www.collca.com/wynb on the Collca Publishing website.

Drawing Inspiration by Dan Holloway

I have probably bored you to death over the years with my endless protestations that I would have been an artist if only I could paint, or I would have been a musician if only I could find a finger among my ten thumbs.

But in reality, the writer’s lot when it comes to the art world isn’t always that of the yearning wannabe. Ekphrasis is one of the oldest and most respectable practices in the writing toolkit. So old, in fact, it even has a Greek name, literally meaning “speaking from” or “out of.” What it entails is easy to state, and something we all do – but what I want to look at in more detail here is how we can use it to bring a little magic to our work, to add extra layers and resonances that we would only usually expect to find in other branches of the arts.

Ekphrasis is, in straightforward terms, writing that is inspired by a particular artwork, or a piece from another art form. It is often a painting – the most famous example would be Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring – but it could also be a song (as in David MacArnold’s extraordinary poem Almost Blue, based on Chet Baker’s piece of the same name) or anything else. It is often used as an exercise in writing classes because it is excellent for getting you to look at the world differently, for training your eyes to create seamless imagery and emotional potential. We rarely use it quite so consciously outside of the classroom setting, though we should. Because when it’s done well, it is precisely the qualities of imagery and metaphor that can lift our writing to another level entirely.

I want to look at three ways in which a piece of art can add to your writing, not by writing about it so much as by looking at what it is you first responded to in it. It is always easier to work with an example in these situations, so I will share with you one of my favourite photographs from one of my favourite photographers (and my long-term collaborator) Veronika von Volkova (http://www.vonvolkova.com).

This is a photograph of a shop window in Paris’ Rue Charlot, which is probably best described as what Bond Street would be like if it was relocated in Dalston.

Veronika’s photographs have been known to inspire whole poems of mine, and I’ve set the mood for more than one collection around her images, using them as a compass to guide my selection – if a poem or story fits with how a picture makes me feel then I include it, if it doesn’t, I discard it.

But since I have returned from the world of poetry to that of novel writing, I’ve been surprised that I’ve found myself using her work as inspiration even more, when I want to get the tone of a passage right, or to focus in on an aspect of a scene to find the one detail, a single metaphor for my character’s journey I need to give the reader.

Emotional Tone

One of the hardest things to do in a novel is to control your emotional tone. This can present itself in two ways. It could be that you are having a problem with a particular scene. Or it could be that you are finding it hard to maintain an emotional consistency across a sustained piece of writing. These are, of course, very different issues, but going back to a piece of artwork can work wonders in overcoming each (this is one reason I recommend people create detailed mood boards consisting of playlists, pictures, pretty much anything before they start their books – it creates a perfect anchor for moments when you feel the wheels coming off – and tools like Pinterest make it very easy to do).

One of the reasons emotional tone is so hard to convey in writing is that a page of prose lacks the immediate impact of a picture or a piece of music. Words are filtered, and all work together over the course of many paragraphs to create a particular effect. It is, therefore, hard to keep track of exactly what we are doing. Take an action scene, for example. It is very easy to convey tension or excitement in a piece of music – think the crescendo of Bolero, the pizzicato of Psycho. Or in a photograph – jaunty angles convey motion, a panoramic shot of a climber on a precipice conveys an instant message, and so on. But with words we often falter because of the greater filtering necessary to understand their impact. So, we can believe we are creating tension and excitement in a passage only to find either (most commonly) we have extracted all tension by over-describing exactly what is so exciting (“I could hear the footsteps of the man chasing me. They were going even faster than mine and that meant I knew he was catching up with me. I still had 200 metres before I was safe but he was catching me so I probably wouldn’t reach safety.”); by telling the reader rather than showing that the scene is exciting (“I was so scared that he would catch me. I could feel the tension grow with every step I took.”); or by grossly overegging something that, in moderation or a different context, would work incredibly well because you are unable to grasp instantly when enough is enough like you would with a picture (“I ran. Footsteps on concrete. Not mine. Quicker. The sound of blood in my ears. Cars rushing by. Lights flickering. Footsteps approaching faster. Faster. Muscles cramping. Blood roaring. Sentence fragment piling on sentence fragment.”)

What taking your lead from an artwork will enable you to do is to analyse exactly what it is that conveys the emotion, and armed with that knowledge you can apply the same mechanics to your writing – the mountaineer appears so vertiginous because of the close-up detail of his fragility against such a wide backdrop, for example; and the violins of Psycho are so shocking because they burst in so suddenly and leave just as quickly. By reverse engineering an artwork, you can find the ingredients to transfer to the scene at hand.

When it comes to the broader question of the tone of the work as a whole, it can be even harder to see when something doesn’t fit. After all, it’s crucial that scenes have variety, otherwise they lose all impact. But that variety comes within a context, a voice, a tone, something quite subtle that you want to provide the overarching structure for your work. If you can find a piece of art or a song that conveys that structural mood, you will have the perfect way of ensuring that all the component parts behave themselves.

Veronika’s photograph of the Rue Charlot conveys the mood of my current work in progress absolutely perfectly. The mix of melancholy, strangeness, reflection, loneliness, decay and possibility all converge to create a feeling with which I want the novel to be infused. Within that there are scenes that will be exciting, heartbreaking, touching, funny, hopeful, exhilarating. But all of those individual emotions are drawn from the same palette. Making sure a scene fits that palette, just as I would do when selecting poems for a collection, enables me to create something that works as a whole and not just as a collection of scenes.

Imagery

It sounds rather obvious to say that art can help you with your imagery. But actually, it is in our descriptions that we often commit our most heinous writerly sins. Our finest phrases are often contained in descriptive passages. And they often lose all of their effect because we drown them in a sea of detail.

Description is, to illustrate the point by saying what I’ve already said well enough, the pudding we most frequently overegg. And the reason for this is simple. We find it hard to get a handle on how much detail is enough. And so two very understandable traits combine to suck the power from our prose – the desire not to leave the reader floundering, and the desire to recreate in full the splendour we see in our heads.

My characters often walk the city streets at night. And city streets are my all-time favourite landscape. I could go on for page after page describing the detail of the neon, the cracked concrete, smeared windows, sweet sickly smells, disfigured flyers and decaying shop fronts. And if I’m not careful, I do just that. Which is great. And I create some unctuous sentences in the process. But they are almost all unnecessary. Which is where I find Veronika’s photography so helpful. She has a particular eye for cityscapes. I can almost always find a picture of hers that says exactly what I want to say. And analysing it, I will almost always find particular details that makes it work so well.

In Rue Charlot, there are two things that make the photograph so evocative, such a perfect metaphor for a character wandering the streets in search of her identity. First, there is the flattened palette disrupted only by the distant lights. And second, there is the use of reflection, drawing our attention subtly to the fact that we are looking through glass that separates us completely from what is on the other side. By picking up on those in my writing I can avoid all need for interior monologue (the street becomes a metaphor for my protagonist’s inner state).

Cornerstones Mini Masterclass

with Kathryn Price, Co-director at Cornerstones Literary Consultancy.

Each issue, Cornerstones Literary Consultancy explore and critique a reader's opening page. If you would like to participate in their Opening Page Mini Masterclass, send your opening page (400 approx words) as a Word Document attachment to submissions@wordswithjam.co.uk with the subject ‘Cornerstones Masterclass’. Pieces for critique are chosen at random from those submitted to Words with JAM.

The Bloody Bodkins

Liscarrow House
September 1741

John Bodkin braced himself as he walked through the door, but the smell of stale blood assailed his nostrils. Blood was everywhere in the hallway: spattered on the carpet, on the great clock and on the hanging mirror. He hardly recognised his family home.

A shiver ran up his spine as the estate agent pointed to two crumpled bodies at the end of the dimly lit hallway.

John stared at the slit throats of the bloodied bodies. It took a few moments before his brain registered what his eyes were seeing. Good Lord! It’s the butler and the housekeeper. A cold sweat washed over him and his gorge rose. He dashed out into the fresh air. Placing his hands against the wall of stone, he fought to retain the contents of his stomach.

When he had regained control over his stomach, John saw three servants leaning over the body of a dog in the farmyard.

“What happened?” John asked.

“Someone came in the night and slit his throat.” The estate agent shook his head. “The same happened to the other guard dog.”

“Robbers?” John asked.

“It doesn't look like anything was taken from the house.” Joyce’s voice quivered, “Too soon to know what was or was not stolen.”

John said, “Where is Uncle Oliver?” Surely, his uncle would know what had happened.

Joyce paled and said nothing. John trembled. He re-entered the house that he knew so well and followed Joyce upstairs. He stopped at the entrance to the bedroom of the Master of Liscarrow, Oliver Bodkin.

“You should not go in,” Joyce said.

John steadied himself. He turned the knob and slowly pushed the door open. My God! Uncle Oliver lay in the bed, high on the pillows, with his eyes and mouth opened wide. Dark blood had congealed on his throat. His heavily pregnant wife, Margery, lay beside him, her throat slit too.

“I do not believe this!” John cried. It cannot be true. I must be dreaming. How could such an outrage have occurred in the quiet village of Belclare in the county of Galway? He felt the strong arm of Joyce around his shoulder.

“A terrible day, Mr John,” Joyce said.

Critique by Kathryn Price

This is a potentially gruesome and gripping opening scene. The blood-spattered farmhouse; the characters’ horrified reactions; the chilling mystery of what has happened – all these things ought to combine to make this a truly page-turning start.

However, at present, the scene doesn’t carry as much impact as it could. Partly this is an issue of pace, which we’ll discuss in more detail below. It’s also to do with the style and tone; there’s more that could be done here to make the language work harder, to do justice to the content with carefully chosen dialogue, internal thought, and descriptive detail.

Let’s look at the language in the first few paragraphs. Straight away there are a few clichés or familiar phrases creeping in: braced himself … a shiver ran up his spine … a cold sweat. The effect of cliché, particularly when it comes to emotions and reactions, is as a kind of short-hand. They’re handy stock-phrases to efficiently pencil in an emotion, but because they’re so familiar, they don’t really evoke sensation in the reader; our eye tends to gloss over them.

In this instance this is combined with some over-writing: the smell of stale blood assailed his nostrils … he fought to retain the contents of his stomach … when he had regained control over his stomach (note the repetition here, too). Overwriting is almost the opposite of cliché – it can take many forms (including over-wordiness, choosing complex instead of direct vocabulary, using melodramatic language) but its net effect is very similar to cliché. It tends to deaden our emotional reaction, because our attention is drawn to the way the emotion is expressed rather than the emotion itself. When it comes to violently emotive subject matter, simplicity of expression is often best.

To conclude the exploration of style, it would be worth taking another look at the way the POV character’s thoughts are woven in. There are a few choices when it comes to third person, but the most naturalistic tends to be the free indirect form, where thoughts are incorporated into the narrative voice, in third person past tense.

So, instead of:

“I do not believe this!” John cried. It cannot be true. I must be dreaming.

This would read:

“I do not believe this!” John cried. It couldn’t be true. He had to be dreaming.

This tends to feel smoother because it doesn’t involve the intrusion of first person present tense into an otherwise third person past tense narrative.

Look, too, at the content of John’s thoughts (and reactions). Whilst disbelief is quite natural in the circumstances, How could such an outrage have occurred in the quiet village of Belclare in the county of Galway? seems overly specific – would he really think in such terms, or might he instead think of the murders in a more personal way: How could this have happened here, in the village where he’d spent his whole life? How could it have happened to them … to him?

This sort of word-by-word, line-by-line tightening and polishing can make a huge difference to the power of a scene and it’s worth applying throughout the manuscript to ensure every word is as strong as it can be. However, this opening would also benefit from some additional material to slow down the pace a little and ratchet up the tension.

At the moment, everything happens very quickly. Within the first sentence John has smelt the blood; by the second paragraph he’s spotted the bodies. In the third paragraph, It took a few moments before his brain registered what his eyes were seeing. Good Lord! It’s the butler and the housekeeper. Then, further down:

“You should not go in,” Joyce said.

John steadied himself. He turned the knob and slowly pushed the door open. My God!

Let’s look at these sections in turn, considering what makes good pacing. There’s a common misconception that if something is tense and exciting, it should also be fast-paced. However, often greater tension is built by slowing the pace, allowing the reader time to immerse themselves in the scene on a sensory level, feel what the protagonists are feeling and wait – as the protagonist must – for whatever is going to happen to play out.

One way to restructure this opening to maximise tension would be to look at the sequencing. A few paragraphs in, John spots the slaughtered dogs, but if he’s just gone into the house (and back out again) wouldn’t he have seen the dogs already? Why not move the scene back a bit; show him arriving at the house and seeing the dogs first – thus foreshadowing the horror of what he’s about to find inside?

In addition to this, slow things right down. We need lots of sensory input as well as thoughts/reactions from John. What does he see/smell/hear? What colour is the blood (rust/wine/river-dark)? John’s choice of adjectives will tell us a lot about him, too. Give the reader time to build expectations before you reveal the truth.

The same applies to the later examples: if it ‘takes a few moments’ for John’s brain to take in what he’s seeing, then show us those moments rather than telling us about them. What does John’s confused brain initially make of the scene? Which details register first?

And, if the housekeeper tells him not to go in, then show us John’s response to this rather than just telling us that ‘he steadied himself’. What does he think he’s going to find? Does he dare to hope that one or both of them might still be alive? Might they be terribly injured and about to die before his eyes? Show us his thought-processes in real, naturalistic language, and let us absorb the moment of tension and fear before moving on.

The key thing to bear in mind with this opening – and indeed, with any piece of writing that relies on horror and tension – is that readers like to be teased and tantalised. The horror you’re about to reveal is your trump card, the reader’s pay-off – hold it back for as long as possible and it will carry that much more weight.

Things People Get Wrong Every Day

Number 12: The Book is always better than the film, by Derek Duggan

So, you know how it is – you’re at a party listening to someone who is justifying your misanthropy. Your fake smile is hurting your teeth. Your partner said she was just going to the bathroom for a moment, but that was half an hour ago. You haven’t said a single word in all that time, but your new best bud hasn’t noticed. You imagine being able to open your mouth wide enough to just lean forward and swallow them whole and the tremendous pleasure you’d take in shitting them out the following morning. Somewhere along the line they’ve gleaned you’re a writer and they’ve been telling you all about the sort of book you should be writing and how they only read quality stuff like Danielle Steel or Jackie Collins and then, out of the blue they’ll say – Books are always way better than films. They’ll back this up by telling you how the film of The DaVinci Code wasn’t a patch on the book without ever considering that while the film was so bad it could only have been made worse if Jeremy Clarkson had been in it, it was certainly no worse than the scuttering pile of arse gravy of a book it was based on. Eventually you just think Fuck this and kick them in the banjos/flange before making your excuses and leaving.

There are so many cases where the film is at worst on a par with the book it’s based on and in several cases vastly better. This year, for example, sees the big screen release of Noah. Seriously, Noah, for fuck sake. (The tag line is – I’m the father of a soaking son and the husband of a drenched wife and I will have my big boat full of animals in this life or the next!). Now, no matter how bad that film is - and I’d rather let Christopher Dean do a triple axle spin thing on my knackers than see it - it will still be better than the book it’s based on – Genesis (which is about how God made Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel and stuff).

And what about The Hunger Games? The films manage to skirt over some of the frankly staggeringly awful plot holes in the book (although not the biggest one about the selection process – please see prior rant in a previous issue) and it had that fantastic laugh out loud moment when all those people watching the screens did the really corny salute thing. Add this to the fact that despite the film being a whopping 142 minutes long, it’s still a lot quicker than having to sit down and actually wade through the books.

Next year we are to be treated to the big screen version of Fifty Shades of Grey. I struggle to imagine a way in which the film could be any worse than the book. Again, possibly if Jeremy Clarkson was cast as Grey - Do it to me, do it to me like you’re shooting a badger while setting fire to a gypsy camp.

Sometimes you can see a film that is so tremendously bad and yet inexplicably popular that you think the book must have been very good and they’ve just made an orangutan’s anus of the film. But don’t be tricked. This sort of thinking can lead you to do terrible things like reading Twilight, or Eragon. These are perfect examples of instances where the reader’s imagination is so strong that they actually imagine the book they’re reading isn’t cock cheese.

There are times where, although the book and the film are different in many ways, the director has managed to capture the atmosphere of the book so successfully that you don’t notice the changes. Lasse Halstrom did a superb job of making his 2000 film Chocolat exactly as boring as the book it was based on by Joanne Harris.

Of course, there are many books where both the book and the movie are good, even if in some cases they’re quite different. A case in point is Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which was filmed as Bladerunner. One of the main reasons I wanted to mention this particular writer here is so I could tell you that in all truthfulness I am a massive Dick fan. The movie doesn’t stick strictly to the book, but it’s equally successful. And this is also the case with Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. I’m also quite a big Boulles fan. Between Dick and Boulle my weekends are always exciting and I can often be seen with a Dick in one hand and, well, you get the idea with that one.

So, to sum up, what are the main ways in which many films are better than books?

1. They cut out all the shit bits (although sometimes leave lots of shit bits in – all camping stuff in Harry Potter for example).

2. They’re not as long – all descriptions of each individual fucking rock that Frodo and the gang passed on the way to Mordor have been thankfully left out of the 150 hour movie, for instance.

3. Some films of books have Liv Tyler in them whereas no books actually feature her.

I hope that clears up any misunderstandings.

Glad I could help.

Adaptability by Anne Stormont

Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change – Wayne W Dyer

Adapt and Evolve, Adapt and Survive – both are well-known mantras. Both can be applied literally as essential to the continuance of Life on the planet. They can also be applied in a more metaphorical sense to survival in economics, politics, the world of work and in daily life in general. And a willingness to adapt also has a positive relevance to art, to its makers and its consumers.

For human beings, the capacity to adapt contains within it flexibility of thought and attitude, as well as elements of imaginative, lateral and original thinking, a degree of faith and optimism and a willingness to try and to persevere. It also has a lot in common with resilience.

As far as writers are concerned, adaptability is essential. It’s essential in their approach to the creative process and it’s essential in their attitude to the finished product.

For me, as a writer, the dream scenario is to have one of my books picked up for adaptation to television or cinema screen. A flight to London to meet the head of BBC drama, or maybe even to Hollywood to chat to Spielberg. Ahh... 

A dream for me, but a reality for more successful authors; authors such as Markus Zusak whose international bestseller, The Book Thief, has just been made into a film. In a recent interview in the Scotsman newspaper (with journalist Clare Black  www.scotsman.com ) Zusak spoke of how pleased he was to see how well the young actress playing Liesel his protagonist captured the spirit of Liesel and how she translated it directly to the screen. But he also seemed a bit bemused by the process of seeing his work adapted for the big screen. He played no part in the creation of the screenplay and he says although there were times when the process was exciting, there were also times when it was daunting too.

For a writer, having your work adapted to another medium must indeed be both thrilling and difficult. You have to trust your ‘baby’ to someone else, to someone you’ve never met and who will do unknown things to it, most likely change it in ways you could never have foreseen. For better or worse it will be an emotional experience.

Children’s author Mairi Hedderwick, author of the Katie Morag books, speaking on Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, said that she cried tears of joy when she saw her little heroine brought to life on television. I could certainly relate to her sentiment. Just seeing your work in print is amazing enough, seeing your characters alive on the page. But to see them brought to life in three dimensions must be truly amazing.

As an admiring reader of both the Katie Morag adventures and of The Book Thief, the prospect of seeing a much-loved novel transferred to television or cinema can be an uncertain one.

In common with many readers, I can be a bit ambivalent about adaptations. From being swept away by Gone With The Wind in glorious technicolor as a teenager in the 1970s, having read the book several times, to adoring the recent stage and film versions of Michael Morpurgo’s Warhorse – much against my expectations – I have found that my enjoyment of a book can be enhanced by its film versions.

I also approved of the television dramatisations of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie detective stories, but I wasn’t so sure about the transfer of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels to the small screen. And I wasn't completely satisfied by the film versions of Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, having loved the books.

But you could argue that at least the adaptation process of books to screen exposes the material to  a much wider audience, to people who would never have considered reading the books in the first place. I’m sure many more people have seen the television versions of the works of Dickens and Austen than have actually read them.

Children too can benefit from seeing screen adaptations of books. From Heidi to Harry Potter, films show the power of story, fire the imagination and possibly even lead reluctant readers to engage with the written word.

And where would the BBC and indeed the film industry be without book adaptations?

So there’s a lot to be gained by converting the written format to the dramatic, both for the writer and for the reader. It’s true of other media too of course. Stage plays become movies, think of all those musicals. Paintings become novels – The Girl with the Pearl Earring for example. Television reality shows become fictional stage plays as did the Jerry Springer Show, when it became the musical.

I reckon all this cross-fertilisation can only be a good thing.

But when it comes to the art and craft of writing, what of the inherent adaptability needed by a writer?

Cross-fertilisation is a good thing here too. Authors spend a lot of time alone at their desks. But in order for new ideas to take root and grow, a writer must get out and about. Writers must always be open to new ideas, new approaches, new ways of doing things. If you want the creative juices to flow, get out of your comfort zone, go to art exhibitions and to museums, open yourself up to the visual, go to concerts, to the theatre and to the cinema. Read genres you wouldn’t normally read. I recently, reluctantly, viewed the movie of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I hadn’t fancied the book having read reviews of it­ – in spite of its bestseller status. The movie blew me away. I then read the book. It blew my mind – in a good way.

And in the twenty-first century digital world, authors must adapt to new ways of publishing and marketing. Routes to publishing are now very different to even ten years ago. The traditional steps of getting an agent who got you a publisher are now no longer essential. Now the adaptable author can be their own publisher. Adaptability has democratised publishing. The cream, more often than not, still rises to the top both in the ‘indie’ and traditional spheres. There’s still a place for the traditional publishers, but they don’t hold all the power. Indeed mid-list traditionally published writers are often actually opting to go indie in order to keep their work out there and to take back some control over their careers. Things have changed and publishing itself must adapt to survive.

 The adaptable reader no longer needs to buy actual paper books, not when books are cheaply available in e-formats. The adaptable and discerning reader can also flit between the big-boy publishers and the author-publishers. What matters to them is quality writing, not provenance.

Change for the sake of it is a futile act. But change for the better is good. Adopting an adaptable and open frame of mind is the way to thrive through change, and is a way of maintaining an element of control. This is as true for writers, readers and publishers as it is for anyone else engaged in the business of human life.