A week of adaptation...

It's mid-July, which makes it an awkward time to start a monthly commitment. I'm also posting this a day later than planned, which means I'm off to a great start.

For quite a while now, I've played with this idea of unauthorized adaptations as a tool for practice. As much as any other writer, it's the incredible stories I watch, read, and listen to that inspire my writing, both its content and its form. When I first sit down with a new idea, I often find myself thinking, "I'd like it to feel like the story of X, but more in the style of Y...". This week, I'll spend at least one hour each day, Monday to Friday, typing an adaptation of a work I admire. I'm setting no word count requirement for myself, but I will use a digital stopwatch, and I'll pause it when I lose focus or step away. To be perfectly honest, sixty minutes or more of focused writing still isn't the easiest thing for me. I'm pretty good for forty-five minutes to an hour a pop, but my track record beyond that is spotty. I'd like to improve it, so I'm isolating the problem as much as possible.

In this adaptation – novel to screenplay form – I don't need to make anything up. I don't need to do any rewriting at all. I am planning to just start transcribing dialogue for some pages, before I even try condensing and describing any imagery. Easy, right? Hopefully so. The point is first and foremost to keep me tied to the desk and to get me acquainted with a little more volume, in terms of work load. I hope to slowly dial it up in future weeks, but consistency needs to come first. The second point is to look closely at a story I admire and possibly learn a thing or two by transcription and transformation. If creative changes occur to me, I'll roll with them. This is an unauthorized adaptation after all, and no one will end up seeing it. (For now, I intend this blog series to serve as a tool for personal challenge and reflection, not as an outlet for my narrative writing.)

It's something to do for a week. I'll reflect on how it goes and make another commitment next week. If it's a trainwreck, then oh well! At the end of this month, as August begins, I'll have two teensy experiments under my belt, and I'll strap in for a month-long commitment.

I've delayed answering an important question, which is: What book am I "adapting"?

The Trouble with Peace by Joe Abercrombie.

I make it no secret that I am a big fantasy nerd. I love swords and sorcery, and Abercrombie is a certified king where it comes to fantasy. His most well known trilogy is probably his earlier work, The First Law series. While that series takes place before the events of The Age of Madness (the trilogy that includes The Trouble with Peace), I don't necessarily recommend it to my friends. Abercrombie's sense for energetic violence and for colorful character description are both in full, endlessly entertaining swing, but the overall arc of the story is a tad simplistic, and the story lacks strong female characters in a way that makes it feel dated. But the good news is I think his Age of Madness books make up for that! In more recent years, he's improved on all fronts, and he's telling a much more interesting, socially complex story. The Trouble with Peace is the second of the trilogy, but it's my favorite, so I'm jumping in there.

I'm looking forward to it. Not necessarily the writing I produce this week, or next month, or even the rest of this year. It could all be bad. But I'm looking forward to becoming more like the person I hope I can be. Whether or not that has anything to do with writing at all.