FROM NOVEL TO THE SCREEN

I have to admit, one of my longtime dreams as a writer has been to see one of my novels or short stories adapted to the small or big screen. Perhaps this is every professional writer's dream. This has yet to happen with any of my fiction works, but as my dear mother always tell me, "Hope springs eternal."

I have, however, been able to live vicariously through a number of writer friends who have been so fortunate to see their fiction brought to life on television or motion pictures. Most of them speak of the exhilaration of watching on screen what originated in their heads.

Some, however, have complained about the script and production being totally different from the book. Or the wrong actors cast for the part. Or other issues that kept the experience from being totally satisfying.

It reminds me of another saying that sometimes seem apropos, " Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."

Then there is that "grass always seem greener on the other side" adage.
I think that as human beings, we are never completely content, whether we make all the professional advances we seek or not. It seems we often expect more of others than ourselves. Or feel that there has to be more to success than this...

I would be less than honest if I said that getting my book adapted to the screen would be everything I could ever want as a writer and promise not to complain too loudly if everything along the process was less than perfect.

What I can say, though, is I hope to get the opportunity to be where some of my writer friends are today in terms of books to movies or TV series, if only to see for myself if the end justifies the means.

In the interim, I will continue to put out print novels and eBooks and wait for my cell phone or e-mail to buzz from some scriptwriter or producer who wants to turn my novel or short story into a visual masterpiece!

What are your thoughts about screenplay adaptation?

Have you ever had a work optioned, adapted, or produced? If so, was it everything you hoped it would be?

Writing Endings

This is my first post for 2011. I planned to begin the post by extending Happy New Year wishes to my co-novelnauts and readers, however, I decided yesterday that since my year has not had a very auspicious start, I will celebrate the Chinese New Year and start 2011 all over again on February 3.

But this post is about endings not beginnings. It was originally written for submission on January 12, so enjoy.

Today my mother-in-law will be laid to rest. It is the essence of an oxymoron; the concept that one so full of inner strength and energy should be forever still. The truth is that until this day, this final step, we still expect at any moment to hear a call from her room, as she reluctantly summoned us to attend to a need that she was unable to fill herself.

I wrote about her death a week before it happened. It felt morbid when I did it but it came to my head and I had to write it. I did not show it to anyone and I never completed the story although I saw the end, her release from pain, very clearly in my mind. I knew that, as powerful as the pen may be, I couldn't hasten her end simply by writing about it, but I still felt a twinge of something like guilt when she passed away somewhat unexpectedly a week later.

The truth is that story endings have always been a bit of a nuisance for me. My joy comes in the creation and the writing, the unfolding of the story with details that are often as much a surprise to me as they will be to the reader. When the characters have resolved all of their conflicts I am ready to move on; I am not interested in the small talk of happily ever afters. A recent reviewer commented that the end of my books seem a bit rushed and she may be right.

Sometimes I say too much, revealing every detail to the reader so that they know my view of the way things happened. I recently read Runaway by Alice Munro. She has a knack for ending her stories with just enough information to keep you guessing about what the story was all about and what happened to her characters next; great fodder for a book club discussion. I like the concept, although I must say that after her fourth short story, I was yearning for a change of pace and a little more closure.

I also recently read Dancing Nude in the Moonlight by Antiguan author and friend, Joanne Hillhouse, which I loved for its clear, lyrical, entertaining depiction of inter-cultural love, but I felt that she too may have struggled a bit with the end and I saw how I would have arranged it a little differently.

Both of these books have encouraged me to take another look at how I write my own story endings and I hope that I can improve upon them and grow.

Bitter Dreams

Dreams sometimes come true. Eventually. In1984, while I was in graduate school but spending late nights fiddling around with fiction, a title occurred to me. That title was “Bitter Steel.” At the time I’d written only a few stories and fragments of stories, none very memorable, but I decided—with the irrepressibility of naïve youth—that Bitter Steel would be the title of my first collection of heroic fantasy tales. I even remember that it was late at night while walking across the University of Arkansas campus that the thought came to me.

Fast forward to April of 1993. By that time I’d sold half a dozen stories and had some successful contest entries under my belt. Most of my success had been with heroic fantasy stories, but I was no longer as naïve as I’d been in 1984. I was a long ways from setting the writing world on fire. I’d discovered how tough it is to write publishable stories, and how hard it is to find time to write when you’re also trying to build an academic career. It began to occur to me that I might never have a short story collection published. I printed out all the fantasy stories I had and spiral bound them for myself under the title Bitter Steel.

In 2009, I pitched an idea for a collection of my heroic fantasy tales to Borgo Press, which had published my Talera trilogy. Borgo liked the idea, and in 2010 that collection was published. I could do nothing else but entitle it Bitter Steel.

I went back this week to compare the published Bitter Steel with the spiral bound home version from 1993. I was amazed to find that 9 of the 14 stories from that original collection made it into the published version, although all of them have undergone revision. Four others have also been published, and only one has never been seen by anyone but me. I’m kind of pleased with the life of these tales.

No matter how naïve it may seem, dreaming is important. There were quite a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I thought about giving up on writing. I had novels written but not published, stories selling but only to small markets, a growing list of agents unimpressed with my submissions. People were telling me that the sort of stuff I liked to write was old fashioned and out of style. Progress never seemed better than three steps forward and two back, and sometimes the other way around. But I never could quite forget the dreams I had almost from the first moment I tried to write, dreams that I would find success, that I’d see my name in print. And not just once, but many times. In 1984, I dreamed of Bitter Steel. In 2010, I saw it come true. I’m glad I held on.

My Must-have Snack

I was speaking to a group of parents who sought medical care for their young children. Some of them stayed at the Ronald McDonald house and they extolled the great support and the many activities provided at the Ronald McDonald house for kids with special needs. One lady could not stop singing the praises of that establishment, and shared how her four year old son became inspired to volunteer because of what he saw there.

As the discussion progressed, most parents agreed that the only downside to this establishment was the rules. But because of the great environment, they would be happy to give up those freedoms. The rule that presented the most difficulty in compliance was the restriction of food in rooms. One mother then confided that she sneaked diet coke into her room. As she described, it was the one joy that put everything in perspective. I understood completely.

I too have a must-have snack that put everything in perspective. It’s a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats (HBO). Every night after putting the kids to bed and cleaning up the perpetual messes, I sit down in front of the TV with a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats in steaming hot creamy whole milk. Most times, I have no idea what is on the television, and I don’t really care. I am having my me time. I am enjoying spending time in the company of me.

When I dip into that cereal, it’s like all the troubles of the world just dissipate and everything gains perspective. I am transported into a different world where there is clarity of thought and all is well. It doesn’t matter if I accomplished all I set out to do today. It doesn’t matter that the problems will be waiting for me again tomorrow. Because once I have my HBO, everything is at peace.

And then I can write my chapter.

I know I’m not the only one who has that one delight that for a brief moment puts everything in perspective. So what is you must have?

Guest author Donna Hill: Beyond the Book

Donna Hill began her writing career in 1987. Her first novel was published in 1990. Since that time she has more than 50 novels to her credit. Three of them were adapted for television. She has received numerous awards for her body of work including the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Award, The Trailblazer Award, The Emma, and the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award among others. Donna lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Spend My Life With You, her latest release, is available wherever books are sold.


As a writer, you spend hours, days, weeks and months researching, writing, plotting and planning. You have an idea for a novel that you want to share with readers. You put your heart and soul into it. Often you sacrifice time with family and friends and time for yourself. Finally one day you write, “the end.” The sense of accomplishment (and relief) defies explanation.

If you already have an editor, you turn your precious baby over and pray that it will be treated with care. If you self-published, you have to find and editor, a printer, and a means to distribute your book. Now you can take a breath. Your book is written, your story is told. All of those hours, days and months have paid off. WRONG. The real work has just begun.

Writing the novel is the easy part. Getting it the attention that it deserves is where the real work comes in. Whether you go with a traditional publisher or strike out on your own, marketing and promotion will be the difference between your “masterpiece” being read by hundreds of readers or just your best friends and family.

Even after having been in this business for more than 20 years, for me it never gets easier. With each book the same amount—and sometimes even more—effort and enthusiasm goes into the promotion of the book.

With the book market being so tight and so competitive and continually changing, as an author, if you plan to be successful you have to keep working long after the last page is typed.

If I had my way, I would just write my books and stay in my room. (As quiet as it’s kept, I’m really kind of shy). But I know that if I want to keep being moderately successful at this writing thing, I have to keep doing the work. So I’ve put together a list of things that I have found to be terribly important:

• Build your contact list. Think of all the people that you know, starting with family and friends. Get email and snail mail addresses when you go to events.
• Get a good-looking, functional website, easy to navigate. Not one that looks homemade with ads on the side. Wordpress has great templates.
• Secure your domain name. Domainrooms is a good source and inexpensive.
• Get business cards. Try Vistaprint. You can get 500 for a few bucks. Keep them simple. Name, contact info (email, website). Getting business cards with a picture of your book is cute but limited. Get cards that will work with the next book you are writing.
• Join some of the online book clubs. Contribute to the conversations. Don’t just show up when you have a new book, or only post when you want to promote yourself.
• Set up your Facebook account, Twitter, Shelfari and Blog.
• Plan to attend literary events. (Pick and choose wisely. You can’t be everywhere)
• Find out what bookstores are in your area. Make sure that they stock your book. Offer to do a stock signing.
• Stay in touch with your readers.
• Tour on a budget! Do virtual tours. They are great ways to be all over without leaving home.
• Open a Skype account so that you can “visit” book clubs online.
• Open a Cinch.com account to record readings from your novel to upload to your website.
• And while you are busy promoting your new baby, get to work on its sister or brother. If you’ve written a great book and promoted it well, your readers are going to want more.

Good luck!

—Donna Hill

The real deal

I'd be appalled by all the misconceptions about the writing life proliferating out there if I hadn't harboured a few myself in the not-too-distant past. As it is, I try to debunk the myths where I meet them but it's a never-ending, thankless job. Some new writers don't want to know the realities: the rosy dream is so much more alluring than the unglamorous grittiness of a writer's life. I've already strained one friendship trying to get the guy to understand that self-publishing and then sitting back and waiting for the royalty cheques to roll in was a fraught path. He thought I was trying to kill his joy and eventually learned - the hard way.

For those who really want to keep it real, here I go again, debunking a few of those myths about the writing life.

Myth 1: There's an ideal time of day to write, the general wisdom being that you do it early in day and get it out of the way.
The Real Deal: The best time to write is whenever you can, and every writer has to work out a routine that suits him best. Doesn't matter when you write, only that you write.

Myth 2: There's an ideal place to write.
The Real Deal: Just like the myth about the ideal time of day, there's no ideal place. Writers are lucky in that we can work anywhere we wish - on the train, in the playground, at work during the lunch break, in bed, in a corner of a noisy cafe, in front of the television with a baby screaming in the background... The writer's retreat in the woods by the lake is nice, I'm sure, but very few books would exist if we all waited for the ideal place to materialize in order to get down to it.

Myth 3: You have to wait for inspiration.
The Real Deal: This one is a major murderer of productivity. If you develop a routine and write every day, or most days, inspiration will know where to find you. If you don't do this, you can waste a lifetime waiting for the muse to strike.

Myth 4: Don't worry about grammar and spelling; the editor will clean it up for you.
The Real Deal: That's not the editor's job, and if your work is littered with errors the sad fact is it will most likely never reach as far as an editor's desk. Not even if it's the greatest story ever told.

Myth 5: Once you're published, it gets easy from there on.
The Real Deal: It gets harder. Don't look at me like that; it does. In addition to the challenges of writing and marketing your stories, you'll have a whole lot more to worry, obsess and stress about: print runs, non-appearance of advance cheques, editorial impasses, agent issues, promotion, signings, bookstore placement, sales figures, sales rankings, reviews, piracy, earning out the advance, late royalty statements, the state of the industry, the second book, the third book, the fifteenth book...

Myth 6: Fiction writers make good money.
The Real Deal: A few (four? five?) fiction writers make serious money. A handful make enough to live on. All the others, 90-something percent of them, even many who find themselves on bestseller lists, cannot live off their earnings from writing. They have regular jobs to make ends meet.

Still want to be a writer? Good for you! You're the real deal - so pull out that pen or keyboard and get started. It's a hard knock life, but we writers won't exchange it for any other.

—Liane Spicer

Life and Other Things Like It

I’m writing this while I sit in a sound mix at WNET/13. My editor’s down the hall building roll-ins to drop into the Pledge breaks we spent the last week editing and getting in shape for export and delivery to the PBS system on Monday. Film and TV production is a weird and interesting life -- I think moving around every two years for most of my Air Force brat childhood prepared me for a transient work life -- going from job to job freelance, being thrown on a plane or train and heading who knows where for a day, a week, or however long it took to get the job done. Then everyone back home to look for the next gig.

Writing is almost the opposite of this. I stay home, in one seat, going to a nearby restaurant or café with my laptop for a change of pace. To do anything for air, I need a production budget; I need a crew to shoot, then an editor and mixer for post-production, even if I pre-edit the pieces myself on my laptop of home computer. All I can have is what the station can afford to make the airdate. You need to learn to negotiate -- if you and the director or editor have a different view of what’s being shot or cut, you have to learn to express yourself in a way that gets it for you -- and you have to be right -- or when problems arise, you get the smirk of someone beside you who told you that wasn’t going to work. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but in the end, if everyone on your team is trying to get the job done, you make your deadline with something that does what you were sent out to accomplish. But you need people, you need facilities -- you need more than yourself.

When I sit down to my keyboard to work on my fiction, I can have anything I’m able to imagine and describe, anywhere, in any time, or even anyone. I’ve written chapters set in the Northern Africa of a thousand years ago, in contemporary New York and 14th century France, populated my novels with fictitious characters and mingled them with my versions of historic figures drawn from my research. There is total, complete freedom, something I don’t have anywhere else in my life. Is it any wonder I love to write? It’s the one place I know I can soar as high as I can take myself.

It isn’t always easy. Easy writing is seldom the best writing you do -- but it’s always a pleasure, albeit occasionally a twisted one, even when I’m wrestling with a story or characters to get them to move in the direction I want them to go. As with a TV crew, sometimes, you win, sometimes you lose -- but if you listen to what’s being said and why, sometimes you find yourself someplace better than you wanted to be in the first place.

For now, my life is still divided between my day job work and my life’s work. I hope one day to be able to sell enough books to life exclusively on earnings from my writing, but that’s a luxury a relative handful of fiction writers on the planet have. In the meantime, I’ve at least found a balance between the two that keeps me both eating and writing, even if not always as much of either as I may sometimes like.

As long as I keep writing, keep making time to write -- no one “finds” it any more than we “find” money -- I will be happy with my lot in life. Writing may not pay my bills by itself yet, but it does fill a need in me that nothing else does as well. A need for adventure, exploration, romance, mystery and occasionally even -- literary sex...how else do you think writers get new characters? (If characters in my first novel hadn’t hooked, up, I wouldn’t have half the characters in my second! And that one ends with two more babies on the way...) As long as writing fills my free time with all of that, it will always have a place in my life.