There was a cartoon in The New Yorker many years ago in which the female host
of a posh party accosts one of her guests: "I ve just learned that you wrote a novel based
on somebody else s screenplay.
Please leave my house at once.
" It s true that...
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There was a cartoon in The New Yorker many years ago in which the female host
of a posh party accosts one of her guests: "I ve just learned that you wrote a novel based
on somebody else s screenplay.
Please leave my house at once.
" It s true that
novelizations are the antithesis of literature, but when I was a teenager, desperate to learn
how to write, I read dozens of them.
Why? Because in a piece of fiction, every nuance
can be described in words.
It was fascinating to see the ways in which writers described
scenes that I d already watched on the big screen.
(In point of fact, of course, most
novelizations are written before the movie is completed.
The writers of the book versions
have probably never seen a single frame of the film, so the way they describe the action is
often quite different from the way it was actually shot.
)
For writers beginning today, there s an even better tool available than
novelizations: the new interpreted-for-the-blind movies on video.
These use th
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