WRITEALOT: #screenplay

Showing posts with label #screenplay. Show all posts

Monday, 20 November 2017

Book review - Mariette in Ecstasy

Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) is an unusual book in both format and content, which may explain why it took four years or so before it was published in UK (my paperback, 1995).

I bought the book as I thought it might help in my research endeavours for The Bread of Tears (see below), but as it happens I’d amassed enough material to progress my Sister Rose novel so this book stayed on my shelf unread for many years. Finally, I got round to reading it.

Hansen writes in the present tense, and the point of view is omniscient, which seems apt considering the subject matter is the religious life in a convent. It begins as though it was a poem:

Upstate New York.

August 1906.

Half-moon and a wrack of grey clouds…

Wallowing beetles in green pond water.

Toads.

Cattails sway and unsway.

Grape leaves rattle and settle again…

Wooden reaper. Walking plough. Hayrick.

Mother Celine gracefully walking, head down.

Crickets.

Mooncreep and spire.

Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther water-spout…

… and so on…

Each separated by a scene-change space. Fortunately, these spaces do not contain the usual three asterisks; if they did, the pages would be peppered with them to distraction. Some scene shifts are only three lines of text, others one line. The shifts may be necessary as the point of view moves from one character to another: there are thirty-five nuns listed, their ages from 17 (Mariette) to 75.

Mariette is a postulant nun, the younger sister of the Reverend Mother Céline, 37; their father is the local doctor. Mariette’s beautiful and seems perfect in every way, a good hard-working pupil. And then she begins to bleed from hands, feet and side: genuine stigmata or a hoax? The various inhabitants of the convent are divided, some believing devoutly, others distrustful.

Hansen’s prose is in many ways like a screenplay, especially in the chosen tense, the visual descriptions and the scene shifts. A few critics point to the writing being ‘precious’; though I didn’t find it so: poetic in places, certainly. He masterfully captures the period, the daily life of a convent and its claustrophobic atmosphere. His powers of description put the reader there. Take, for example, two glimpses:

She sees cracked, parched lips and a trace of sour yellow; a forehead as hot, perhaps , as candle wax; frail eyelids that are redly lettered with tiny capillaries; green veins that tree and knot under the skin of her hands. (p91)

Mariette is giving her father the attention she would give a magician. She has imagined him through childhood as the king of a foreign country, but he has changed into a too-heavy man with a glossy moustache and unhealthy white nails and grey cinders of skin blemishes on his winter-reddened face…. (p96)

While not an easy read, with an inconclusive ending, it is a compulsive story. Across the Pond the book has garnered much praise and many favourable reviews over the years.

Ron Hansen is also the author of The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford (1985), the film being released in 2007. Mariette in Ecstasy was filmed (1996) but was not given a wide release.

***

The Bread of Tears

When she was a cop, she made their life hell.

Now she’s a nun, God help them!

Before taking her vows, Sister Rose was Maggie Weaver, a Newcastle policewoman. While uncovering a serial killer, she suffered severe trauma, and after being nursed back to health she becomes a nun. In her new calling she is sent to London to run a hostel for the homeless. Here, she does good works, and also combats prejudice and crime.

As she attempts to save a homeless woman from a local gang boss, events crystallise, taking her back to Newcastle, the scene of her nightmares, to play out the final confrontation against drug traffickers, murderers and old enemies in the police.

She finds her spiritual self and a new identity. She is healed through faith and forgiveness. It’s also about her surviving trauma and grief – a triumph of the human spirit, of good over evil.

This is a gritty and at times downright gruesome thriller. Written in the first person, Morton has achieved a true sense of feminine appeal in Maggie, the narrator, and despite her religious calling, she comes over as quite a sexy woman… I found myself totally empathising with this full-blooded, gutsy woman... All the characters and horrific events in this crime thriller are extremely visual and well-drawn, making this a riveting read. It would make a brilliant TV series! – Jan Warburton, author of The Secret, A Face to Die For

The Bread of Tears is available as a paperback and an e-book here.

Monday, 16 October 2017

Book of the film - Wonder Woman

Novelizations of films have been around a long time; one of the first being King Kong (1933). In the 1960s and 1970s they became very popular. What’s the appeal? Before the advent of home video (VHS and then DVD), a novelization was often the only way to re-experience the film. And yet, even now, when DVDs are available at very reasonable cost, there's still a commercial market for film tie-in novelizations.

It's no mean feat to write a novelization. Bear in mind that the usual length of a film script is much shorter than a novel; my film script for my vampire crime thriller Chill of the Shadow came to 120 pages, 22,500 words, while the book’s word-count was 80,000. Those additional words provide the reader additional visuals, backstory, and characters’ introspection.

The main problems for the writer of a novelization are that they may be working from an early script and they have a very tight deadline, possibly as little as a week or two. Novelizations are invariably published prior to a film’s release. This can be seen in Dewey Gram’s version of Gladiator, an excellent book: there were scenes in his novelization that did not appear in the theatre release, though ultimately they were reinstated in the Director’s Cut.

Prolific author Nancy Holder has done a sterling job with her Wonder Woman novelization.

The book begins, as does the film, in the present, in Paris, where Diana Prince, the Curator of Antiquities worked in the Louvre Museum. She receives a package from Wayne Industries, a sepia photograph – ‘a moment of triumph frozen in time, shared by the four unsmiling, heavily armed men who bracketed her. Though the monochrome photo couldn’t show it, the eyes of the man standing to her right had been intensely blue, as blue as the sea that surrounded Themyscira, the island of her birth…’ A hundred years ago. When Wonder Woman came into being.

Then we travel to the past, to Themyscira, and the childhood of Princess Diana, a wayward child who is fascinated by the history of the Amazons, the inhabitants of the island, a place where no man lives. Long-lived, they train as warriors in order to combat the last surviving god, Ares. Holder evokes humour and mischief as Diana, the only child on the island, grows into young womanhood.

Scenes shift neatly, until Diana witnesses something other than a bird plummeting from the sky and falling into the sea. She dives to investigate – and rescues the pilot, Steve Trevor, from a sinking airplane. Happily, the Amazons are fluent in many of Earth’s languages. The interchange between the pair is of wonder on both sides, leavened with mystery and amusement.

It transpires that Steve is a spy, fleeing from German General Ludendorff and his warped scientist, Dr Maru. This evil pair has concocted the means to prolong the War to End All Wars at a time when Germany is seeking armistice.

Diana joins forces with Steve to combat this menace, and in the process witnesses the inhumanity of war - and also the selflessness and bravery exhibited.

Skilled actors can convey emotions and to a certain extent their character’s thought processes. And in the movie they do just that. Holder then gives their thoughts and fears life on the page, whether that’s the naivety of Diana or the pure evil of Ludendorff and his acolyte.

If you haven’t seen the film and yet are curious about the character, then this book will offer an intriguing and adventurous tale, well told. If you have seen the film, then this provides further insight for several characters, not only Diana, and as you read you will visualise again many of the scenes.

An exciting story, told with pace, wit and affection. A pity about the poor editing.

Editorial comment
As stated above, it’s highly likely that a tight deadline was set for the book, so in the rush a large number of errors have not been corrected. Considering it would only take a couple of hours to read the book, I still find the quantity inexcusable. To begin with, I glossed over most typos, but eventually I felt compelled to highlight some; the following should have been spotted:

‘Diana moved passed it…’ Should be ‘past it’. (p78)

‘So let’s you and I remind them, shall we?’ Should be ‘you and me’… (p95) [Drop the other subject (you) and what are you left with? So let I remind them, which is silly; So let me remind them, however, works.]

… she didn’t feel the cold as he died. (p144) Should be ‘as he did’.

‘Steve leaped off his horse…’ and then 11 lines further down, ‘He swung down from the saddle…’ (without having remounted!) (p209)

‘… she gripped the horse’s mane and pressed her things against its flanks,’ (p211) Instead of ‘things’, it should be ‘thighs’

‘Diana gave the horse a nudge with her spurs…’ (p211) Where’d she get her spurs from? She’s wearing Amazon boots under her misappropriated dress and at no time did she fasten on spurs. ‘Nudged with her booted heels’ would work.

‘…Every sense fired as she the truth crashed down on her.’ (p237) That rogue ‘she’ should have been excised.

‘The weapons were being stored back in the aft (of the plane)…’ (p242) ‘back aft’ or ‘aft’ would suffice.

‘The team’s objective had just spit into two…’ (p242) That ‘spit’ should be ‘split’.

‘… and he ran them hand along the magical rope.’ (p253) ‘them hand’ probably should be ‘his hands’ or ‘those hands’.

***

Note: There is also a DC Icon young adult novel about Wonder Woman, Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo, which has received good reviews on Amazon.

Friday, 31 October 2014

FFB – Death is another life becomes Chill of the Shadow

I got fed up waiting for a publisher to grab this book, despite the good reviews, so have self-published it as a paperback and e-book under the title Chill of the Shadow. (amendment: 27/10/2017)

This time last year, I was trying to promote my vampire cross-genre thriller set in modern-day Malta, Death is Another Life. It has been out-of-print since March this year, so maybe it qualifies as a Friday's forgotten book. My hope is that, like the creatures of the night, it will rise from the grave of limbo and be born again by another publisher. I would retitle it Another Life and use Nik Morton this time around.