My Books in Other Forms

Writ­ing a book is one thing. But what hap­pens when peo­ple wish to take that book and turn it into anoth­er form? Film, audio, the­atri­cal play?

Over the years books of mine have been turned into plays, and audio books. There have also been efforts to turn the books into film, but none have ever mate­ri­al­ized. I have been asked for per­mis­sion to reshape some of my books into operas. Noth­ing came of those ideas, either. A school request­ed per­mis­sion to turn Pop­py into a bal­let. That hap­pened. It was, shall I say, curi­ous. And there have been adap­ta­tions of some of my books into the­atri­cal plays.

I have no doubt that there are authors who ful­ly engage in such projects. I have gen­er­al­ly declined to become involved 1) because I don’t usu­al­ly know the form, 2) I fear it will take up a lot of my time, and 3) noth­ing much hap­pens anyway.

When Noth­ing but the Truth was first pub­lished, because of its for­mat, I had many requests to turn it into a play. At first I said yes, but then was bur­dened with the need to read these many stage-revi­sions. What I did then was go to a play­wright friend of mine, Ron Smith, and asked him to do an adap­ta­tion. That he did, and it was made avail­able to the pub­lic as an “autho­rized” script. It’s still avail­able, and from time to time it’s per­formed. Not that I have ever seen it on stage.

Oth­er books have been turned into the­atri­cal form. In most cas­es these are adap­ta­tions, not very close ones, either. Crispin was once staged. I nev­er saw it. I did see a stage pro­duc­tion (pro­fes­sion­al) of True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle. It seemed as if I was see­ing a car­toon of the book, a musi­cal com­e­dy with­out the music. Oth­er such adap­ta­tions have been made and from time to time they are per­formed in schools. I’ve nev­er see one.

Film is anoth­er mat­ter. When I have signed such con­trac­tu­al options, I am not giv­en script con­trol, but usu­al­ly have the right to react to the film script. When I first see these scripts, they are usu­al­ly pret­ty close to the book. Revi­sions have proved far less con­nect­ed to the book. In any case, the projects have not gone forward.

(Note: when you sell a book to film folk, you are also sell­ing the char­ac­ters. So that if a film is suc­cess­ful the option hold­er is allowed to make anoth­er film with the same char­ac­ters with­out ever engag­ing the author.)

Audio books are a whole dif­fer­ent mat­ter. Such record­ings are usu­al­ly pre­sent­ed as unabridged, com­plete texts. Indeed, they are. More­over, the read­ings are pro­fes­sion­al­ly done, indeed, very well done. Nonethe­less, I find them hard to lis­ten to. They seem so very dif­fer­ent than the book that is in my head. Very fine, but dif­fer­ent. Dif­fer­ent cadence. Empha­sis. Emo­tion­al tone. I recall that the first time I lis­tened to such a record­ing, my thought was, that seems bet­ter than what I wrote. They’ve done some rewriting.

I checked, but it was all my words. It just sound­ed so very different.

Could I refuse all these projects? Well, yes. But the think­ing is always, it can’t be that bad. And the most impor­tant thought is, at least it might bring peo­ple to the orig­i­nal book.

Which is where I began.