#and the clever ass title of the series that I've gotta give my irl friend credit for

[inkovert]

SPILLED INK SATURDAY 》 Writeblr Discourse Series

Session 1: Book-to-Screen Adaptations

Welcome to our first session of Spilled Ink (get it? like spilled tea?), a new writeblr discourse series that I'm excited to introduce into the community. I wanted to start this series to generate some discussion and camaraderie within the writeblr community, but also because I think there are a lot of writer/reader/author-related topics and debates that crop up pretty frequently and I figured it would be interesting to hear thoughts and opinions on these matters from a writer's perspective.

So every Saturday (or potentially every other Saturday depending on how things go), I will post a topic of discussion. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you can do so one of two ways:

➸ Return to the OG post (which will always be linked in the title of the post) and reblog with your take on the topic, either in text or in the tags

➸ If you see someone's take on your feed and you want to chime in on something they said, feel free to reblog their response

I want to stress that the purpose of this series is to have healthy, open-minded dialogue about these topics and hear perspectives that you may not have considered otherwise. I think one of the beautiful things about writeblr is that it's rich with people from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences who can lend a wider perspective on the subjects discussed. That said, I'm asking that everyone who chooses to participate please be respectful when providing your opinion or when responding to someone else's. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how strong it is, but there's a difference between being opinionated and being borderline rude and antagonizing. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or hateful speech of any kind will not be condoned or tolerated. I want to set that bar straight now because future sessions will touch on topics such as race and sexuality, so I will always have this reminder at the top of the post for each session. I truly want this to be a safe space for people to share their thoughts freely and not be afraid to speak up, so just please be mindful of your words in your responses.

With that out of the way, the discourse question for our first session is:

How do you feel about the frequency with which books are adapted to movies/tv shows these days?

You know what I mean. When you open any social media platform these days and you're immediately bombarded with ads for the latest tv show or movie being released on Hulu or Paramount+. I've often wondered if writers or up-and-coming authors have any personal feelings about this. Do you find it exciting? Does it make you hopeful that your work could one day be on the big screen? Or is it a bit...irksome? Or are you completely indifferent?

Reblog and share your thoughts. Mine will be under the cut, below. 👇🏾

・❥・

I know it may seem like something absolutely trivial and harmless to some, so perfectly understandable if people are indifferent about it all. But I personally find it irksome.

I could be wrong about the increased frequency of book-to-screen adaptations compared to 10 years prior, but for me personally it feels like it's increased quite a lot. I feel like I'll see a book hyped by booktok and/or other online book communities all over my social media feed one minute, and the next minute it's announced that it's headed for the big screen. And for the author's in question, I'm sure it's thrilling, because it provides the exposure that authors need nowadays to sell their books and their brand. But it bothers me because...well, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it makes it more and more evident that the movie/tv industry is running out of ideas. How often do we hear about some 90s/00s TV show being rebooted for god-knows-why when no one asked for it? It's not a secret that the entertainment industry is running on fumes when it comes to generating original ideas for the screen. And the same way that reboots are a lazy way of pumping out entertainment for a consumerist audience, outsourcing ideas from authors because you can't think of your own is also just that - lazy. And the consequence of that, I feel, is that authors will begin to write stories with the intention that it will be visually consumed, thereby feeding into that book-to-screen pipeline.

I recently read a book from a sci-fi author whose novels I really enjoyed in the past, but with each new release of his the quality of his books decreased just a bit. And with the latest book of his I read, it was easy to pinpoint why. It was clear as day that he had written the book with the idea/intention that it would be put on the screen. I don't know how to quite describe it, but it felt like I was reading a screenplay, with certain storytelling elements ignored and with action scenes written like cue cards for an actor. It was like a slapdash job with the note "fix it in post" slapped onto it. And it was just so...disappointing. Not only as a reader, but as a writer. Writers are free to write screenplays, but they are considered screenwriters, not authors, and the craft that is required for each medium is a bit different. Neither is superior to the other, but there's a depth that goes into writing a novel or short story that isn't necessarily needed for a screenplay because the screenwriter will work in collaboration with the director and others to carry out the vision (I'm happy to have screenwriters on writeblr chime in on whether this is true, because I'm speaking off my own understanding, not known experiences). The end product of a screenplay is a visual. Whereas the end product for a novel is the novel itself, and how it stimulates the readers imagination. If we get more novels written with the intention of being translated to a visual medium, then all the typically necessary components like description, exposition etc no longer become necessary. I'm not saying that this is happening just yet. There are many quality novels that have received screen adaptations recently (Pachinko, A Man Called Ove etc), but luckily those authors were dedicated to the craft of writing and storytelling first. The movie and tv deals were an added bonus that came after. But what happens when you have an emergence of authors who have those priorities in reverse? Movie deal first to increase my exposure and worry about good storytelling second? It inevitably causes a change in the writing landscape (that I argue is already happening (see: future discourse session), and not necessarily for the better.