Karen Sandler

Tag: books

  • RTW – What Makes a Book a Movie?

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday offers up the blog prompt What is it that makes some books ideal for a film translation? I feel a little like that kid in class whose teacher finally asks a question she knows the answer to. The kid who suddenly wakes up and waves her arm, praying the teacher will call on her.

    Well, okay, I’m not that much of an expert on books being adapted into movies. But I have written a half-dozen or so screenplays and have written and produced a few short films. My book Tankborn and its sequels Awakening and Revolution were all adapted from a film script to books (so I’m hoping they can some day go the other way too). So I’ve actually thought a lot about what kind of books make good movies.

    IMHO, the one quality that makes a book most adaptable into film is a high concept premise. What’s high concept? I define it as a premise that can easily be described in one sentence. I’ve also heard it defined as a premise for which you can immediately imagine its movie poster. Hunger Games is an excellent example. In the future, teens are chosen in a lottery for a fight to the death with other teens. Jurassic Park–scientists recreate dinosaurs using DNA and the dinosaurs fight back. I think Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies books, in which “ugly” children are converted to “pretties” at age 16, but there’s something rotten at the core of the process, is pretty high concept and would make a fantastic film franchise.

    But not every movie is high concept, nor is every book that’s adapted to film high concept. Another crucial quality is that the book is very visual. There’s plenty of action on the page as opposed to lots of internal dialogue or long descriptive passages. There’s a whole lot of the novel Pride and Prejudice that’s left out of the movie because it just doesn’t translate into the visual medium of film.

    A third quality of a filmable book is that its story already follows a three act structure. I bet if you analyzed the movies you’ve seen, you’ll see the three act structure in most of them.

    What does that structure look like? The first act sets up the characters and their story dilemma, then there’s an inciting incident at the end of the first act that sets the hero/heroine on his/her way to their goal. The stakes continually rise in the second act, and there will be a turning point in the middle that changes everything, then a dark moment at the end of the second act. Then there’s the third act’s climax and denouement.

    Think about some of the books you’ve read, and I’ll bet many of them use this three act structure. Maybe the author made a conscious decision to write their book that way, or maybe the book ended up with three act structure because it’s a great way to write a story.

    So think about your own book, or if you’re not a writer, think about a fiction book you’ve recently read. Is it high concept (can you describe it in one sentence)? Is it extremely visual? Is it already written in a three act structure? Then you might have a very film adaptable story. I hope Hollywood comes knocking.

  • Do You Know the Title of This Book?

    Last night, my husband was doing a little electrical work. We’re getting a new vanity installed in our master bathroom with some fancy granite as a countertop. The new vanity is taller than the old one. The old outlet on one side is so low it would be in the way of the backsplash. Yes, we could have the installer cut the granite to fit the outlet, but we preferred the option of moving the outlet up on the wall.

    I bring this up because at one point, my husband was trying to fish wire between those two small holes you see in the photo. There’s insulation inside the wall and sundry other things to block the cable from sliding easily from point A to point B. As he was struggling a bit to get the wire through, a memory popped up in my mind of a book I’d read (and re-read, and re-read) as a child.

    I was maybe 8 or 9 when I first read it. Sadly, I can’t remember the title. It was probably published by Scholastic since I bought plenty of books from their school catalog. I hung onto the book for years, loving the story each time I re-read it.

    In any case, the story went like this. A boy goes to the local pet shop to buy a pet mouse. But the mice cost more than he has saved up. He spots a mouse in the cage that’s missing its tail. The pet store owner agrees to sell the mouse at a discounted price (which the boy can afford) because of the missing tail. The deal was something like, Well, it’s 3/4 of a mouse, so you can pay me 3/4 of the price.

    Thrilled, the boy takes his pet home. This is a particularly clever mouse and the boy manages to teach it to come when he rings a bell. One day he takes the mouse to where his dad, an electrician, is working on wiring a house. The dad is trying to push electrical tape through a conduit. Once the dad has that tape through, he’ll attach the wiring cable to it, then fish the wiring back through the conduit.

    But just as the dad has almost got the tricky tape through, the pet mouse gets loose. When the boy reaches out to catch it, he bumps his dad’s arm. Now the tape is hopelessly stuck and Dad has to start over. He’s angry and tells his son he shouldn’t have the mouse at his job site.

    The boy gets an idea–attach the tape to the mouse (I think it had a little collar or harness) and let the mouse pull it through the conduit. The boy will ring the bell at the other end to summon the mouse. Of course, the boy’s works, and the boy and the mouse save the day.

    Why has that story stuck with me for so many years? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s because the boy was the one who was the hero. It was his patience and cleverness in teaching the mouse that solved the problem. I remember also thinking how cool it was to have trained the mouse to come when the bell rang. I liked the dad too, who despite the frustration of having his son jostle his arm, gives his son a chance to try his plan.

    As a side note, I identified with that little boy and wanted to be him. Even though I was a girl. The fact that all the heroes in books were boys back then didn’t faze me. It never crossed my mind that as a girl I couldn’t be as heroic.

    So what childhood books have stuck with you? The ones that your mind returns to at odd times, the ones that still make you smile? Extra special credit if anyone can come up with the title and author of the book I described.

  • RTW — My YA Buddy IRL

    This week’s YA Highway prompt is What IRL people can you talk to about YA? I confess it took some head-scratching to figure out what IRL meant. Yes, I’m an old fogey (hah! how many of you even know the word fogey?) and sometimes I have to look up those Internet acrynyms. For those as fogeyish as me, it means In Real Life.

    After figuring that out, it took a little more cogitation to come up with an answer. My hubby might read YA if I told him it was a fab book. He read my book TANKBORN (and even got annoyed with me when I interrupted him while he was reading it), so why not other recommended YA books? Well, you should see this guy’s TBR pile (hah again! see, I do know some Internet acronyms). He’s got books piled everywhere and he often only has time to read late evenings (when he promptly falls asleep) and weekends (when he sometimes falls asleep). Plus most of my YA books are on my Kindle and he likes reading paper.

    My younger son reads some YA (Neil Gaiman for example), but he’s often the one giving  me recs for books. Also, he’s got his own eclectic tastes and I’m pretty sure the YA books I’ve been swooning over wouldn’t be to his liking.

    Then there’s older son. Since he lives in Osaka, Japan, we bought him a Kindle so he could buy and read new books without having to have them shipped at great expense. I have lent him nearly every lending enabled YA Kindle book I own and have strongly recommended he buy others if I’m not able to lend. I lent him The Hunger Games after I read it, and when I didn’t get around to buying the other two books, he told me he would if I didn’t. So I got him somewhat hooked on YA.

    So I guess he’s my YA buddy IRL. I look forward to sharing many more books with him in the future.

  • LTUE – The Pre-Game Show

    Today’s the first day of the Life, the Universe & Everything (LTUE) symposium in Orem, Utah. I haven’t yet walked over to the Utah Valley University where the symposium is held, but last night I had a blast at the BYU campus at this event. I was a late addition to Stacy Whitman’s talk on children’s publishing. Most of the questions during the Q&A portion were for Stacy, but I got to field several. I love sharing about writing and what I know about the publishing business. Speaking to this class was a wonderful opportunity to do that.

    After the talk, we went out to Sakura, an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant. A dangerous place for me to be since I l-o-v-e sushi. I ate more than I should have, but it was oh, so good. Particularly the Twin Dragon roll. Yum.

    My impression of Utah (or Orem, anyway): a little chillier than home, desert-like (well, it’s a desert–what do you expect?) and dry-dry-dry. I thought the Sacramento area was dry. My skin was flakier than a pie crust (okay, that imagery is pretty eww). Nice people.

    Now off to LTUE.

  • RTW – Where do you buy most of your books?

    Today YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, Where do you buy most of your books? Then the post assures me that “No one is judging!” which is good because…let me screw up my courage…okay, I’ll just blurt it out. I buy most of my books at Amazon!

    Let me follow that confession up with a but…but…but… I do the vast bulk of my reading on a Kindle (okay, maybe that’s another confession…mea culpa in advance), and the only place to get a Kindle book is on Amazon. But look at it this way–every book I buy, I buy new. I’m not doing as a certain member of my household does (husband!) and making all my purchases at the library’s used book sale. Because the ebooks are “new books,” the sales all benefit the author (royalties) and the publisher (whatever they net) as well as Amazon.

    Still, there is one party left out of the equation here–the brick-and-mortar bookseller. I have an answer to that–I have a granddaughter (did you hear the birds singing and the flowers blooming when you read that? No? Surely you saw the glow from my grin?). Anyway, I love buying my granddaughter picture books. While I could order them from Amazon (and have once or twice), I like to see those books close up and in person before I buy. So I much prefer to purchase gifts for my granddaughter at a physical bookstore. Or even better yet, an indie, like Sundance Books in Reno where I bought Nosh, Schlep, Schluff and a couple others.

    (I just realized, it’s a good thing my granddaughter can’t read yet. Because of course she’d read her Nonna’s blog and then she’d know what she was getting for Christmas.)

    So yes, I’m aiding and abetting the monolithic overlord that is Amazon with all my ebook purchases. But I’m also supporting my local book stores with grandchild purchases. Hopefully the latter is enough penance for the former (can you tell I was raised a Catholic?).