Karen Sandler

Tag: hunger games

  • 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.

  • Dystopias & Apocalyptic Dreams

    Two or three times a year, I have a post-apocalyptic dream. Not recurring; it’s different every time. Some disaster has occurred on earth. I’m living with my family under a freeway underpass or in a cave. My life as I knew it has been thoroughly altered.

    Just by itself, Freud would probably have had a field day with a dream like that, but to add to the weirdness, I really like those dreams. I always wake up with a sense of Wow, that was cool! In the dreams, I have it together, I’m powerful and doing a great job taking care of my family and battling whatever the forces are that created the apocalypse. The dreams give me a sense of well-being. Yes, very peculiar.

    I’m guessing that one thing I like about the dreams is the story aspect of them. While I’m in the dream, I’m living that post-apocalyptic life. I’m a part of the landscape, living it first-hand. When I wake, the storyline doesn’t necessarily hold up, but while I’m in it, it’s like experiencing my very own post-apocalyptic movie.

    No surprise that I love reading post-apocalyptic and dystopian books. My first YA, Tankborn, is a dystopian novel. Emptied, a work in progress, is post-apocalyptic. They’ve both been a blast to write.

    So what’s the difference between post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories? Are they essentially the same thing? Definitely not. An apocalypse is a sudden event. Life goes from complete normalcy to utter chaos within a very short time. An asteroid hits earth and the resultant dust cloud & radiation wipes out millions. A disease escapes from a secret lab and kills three-quarters of the population on the planet.

    The story would then proceed from that event, the characters struggling to survive in the midst of disaster. Alliances would be formed, enemies would sprout up to to try to defeat our main characters. By the end, our heroes would have vanquished not only the villains but the desolate landscape itself.

    The creation of a dystopia is a much more gradual process. In a dystopian novel, the evolution of the society it portrays is all backstory, and the main story reveals only hints of how that society came to be as events proceed. If the author were to detail the entire history of how the society developed before she got to the action, her readers’ eyes would glaze over and they’d toss aside the book or delete the sample from their Kindle/Nook/iPad.

    So we jump right into Hunger Games‘ staging of gladiator-style games in which youths fight to the death without knowing exactly the path society took to get there (although it’s a believable extrapolation). The Adoration of Jenna Fox doesn’t detail the decades of scientific development it took to get from today’s medicine to the mystery of how Jenna came to be. Ditto for the Uglies series, where Scott Westerfeld uses another masterful extrapolation to create an entire society that revolves around beauty and fame, in which becoming beautiful is an everyday rite of passage for teens. But none of these worlds/societies happened overnight or due to any sudden, cataclysmic event.

    An apocalypse could lead to a dystopian society, could be the trigger for it. The Forest of Hands and Teeth would qualify, in which a virus of some sort leads to a plague of unconsecrated (i.e., zombies), which then leads to a quasi-religious dystopia. But in Forest, that society took a couple hundred years to develop to the present day depicted in the book.

    If there are examples out there that prove me wrong re: the definition of dystopians vs. post-apocalyptics, I’d be interested in hearing about them. I’d also be interested in more dystopians triggered by apocalyptic events. Leave the titles in a comment.

  • The Right to Choose What I Read

    I’m new to young adult literature. That is, I’m new as an author. Of course I read YA books as a kid, pretty much picking and choosing at will from the school library. That’s how I ended up reading decidedly non-YA books like Kafka’s Metamophosis and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when I was 14. Thank God for a mom who didn’t fear provocative literature.

    Since I’m such a newbie on the block (my first YA, the dystopian Tankborn, comes out in September 2011), I’ve sat back a bit regarding the “kerfluffle” over an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Meghan Cox Gurdon. In her editorial, Ms. Gurdon declares, among other things, that today’s young adult books are dark and depraved. I’ve been unsure how to respond since I’m still working hard to get up-to-speed in YA. I’m learning as fast as I can, reading almost exclusively YA at this point, looking for the best, but also picking and choosing the books that most appeal to me.

    And here is my first quibble with Ms. Gurdon. Not every book is going to appeal to every reader. I’m okay with dark as long as there’s a wonderful character arc and there’s a sense of hopefulness at the end of the book. That’s why, although I voraciously read Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and am half-way through Catching Fire, I’m thinking long and hard about whether I will read the third book or even finish the second. I can be an emotional wimp and based on what I’ve heard of book 3, I might not want to go there. It’s a fantastic series, and I’m sure I’ll miss a lot by not reading all three, but I might just exercise that freedom of choice I have and put the book aside. Does that mean the books should be banned from schools or that teens shouldn’t read them because I choose not to? Of course not. That would be silly.

    Should a young adult have that same freedom to choose as I do as an adult? For the most part, yes. A teen reading is a wonderful thing. Yes, some books might not be age appropriate, depending on the teen. When I was writing romance, my love scenes were fairly explicit. If a mom at a signing asked if my books were suitable for her daughter, I usually suggested they might be okay for a mature 15 or 16 year old, but I made it clear how “fleshed out” the love scenes were. The mom and the teen could make a choice based on that.

    That’s not to say the daughter might not find and decide to read my sexy books herself. Is that a problem? It might be if the son or daughter felt uncomfortable with what they read AND didn’t feel they could talk it over with their parent. But if a parent and child have an open and free flowing relationship, Mom or Dad can talk over the content of a book with their teen, both before he or she reads it and after.

    The thing is, so many of the YA books I’ve been reading in my effort to become more educated in the genre are tremendously thought-provoking. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series and the issues of beauty and obsession with fame that it raises. The Hunger Games‘s treatment of not only oppression and insurrection but our fascination with reality TV. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind‘s handling of the dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice and where it could lead. These books are the Faranheit 451 and 1984 of our day.

    Who wouldn’t want their teens reading these books, considering these issues, critically analyzing these metaphoric stories? Teens are already thinking about these and even weightier issues, considering the world they live in. A novel can be a safe place to explore the darker side because it is fiction.

    Just my humble opinion.