Five Fridays in August II

"Ripped from the Headlines~!"

While I everything with "2" or "II" in the title really should have the subtitle "Electric Boogaloo," I wanted to be (semi-)serious about this.

This post was going to be about writing while on vacation, then we ended up not going away for a long weekend. Instead, I'm going to make it a follow-up to last week's post about our visit to the superhero exhibit currently at the Baltimore Jewish Museum.

The exhibit was great. (One of these days, I'll get an Instagram account to share them. Until then, all you kids get off my lawn.) We saw a lot of old and cool comic covers, sketches of internal pages, bios of the creators, and even some interactive exhibits. 

One really caught my eye and inspired this post. It showed a newspaper from around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Comics had shown a desire for the US to enter World War II even before Pearl Harbor. The caption under the paper read, in part, "During the Golden Age, many comic book stories were ripped from the headlines."

"Ripped from the headlines." I think I heard that about several Law & Order episodes over the years. "Based on a true story" is similar. But what do they really mean? How closely based?

For ages, fiction writers have been inspired by true stories. We change the names, fudge the details a bit, tweak the setting to fit our particular genre and locale, and voila! We have a story. I've done it too. A currently unpublished novel of mine was based on a news report of gang killings in my hometown of Baltimore. Another was based on a news report of a man who confessed to a murder (spoiler alert!) he didn't commit.

Here's what I'm wondering. We don't read the paper anymore, in general. Newspaper circulation is declining faster than the number of people who don't know J.K. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo's Calling. (Brief aside: I really wish "Rowling" rhymed with "calling." That sentence would sound awesome if it did.) Today, we get our news from the Internet and cable TV. Local newspapers are online and many charge a subscription fee. How many of you read your local paper online? The thing is, websites and channels like CNN tend to have a national focus. If you're writing thrillers where the fate of the country is at stake, that can be a fertile ground for you. If your stories are more homespun, you have to search deeper.

With the decline of newspapers, is it harder to "rip things from the headlines" these days? Do the Big Three cable news channels and websites still stoke your creative fires?

Things to think about. Happy writing.

Screen Print(ing)

Recently, I watched Jack Reacher on a plane. Up until that point, I had not ready any of Lee Child's novels.

A few days after watching the movie, I looked for and saw the first Reacher book (Killing Floor) at a bookstore. I picked it up. I'm currently reading the fifth one. My brother, whose reading pace would shame Evelyn Wood, started after I did and has bought and read them all.

It's a cliche (and a nearly universal truth) that the book is better than the movie. But can't the movie inspire us to read the book? Maybe I would have gotten around to the Reacher series eventually. However, I enjoyed the movie and sought out the books.

How many people who had never read Tolkien did so because they saw a Lord of the Rings movie (or The Hobbit)? What about the Harry Potter series? I saw all the movies before I read any of the books. Granted, Ms. Rowling doesn't need my money to buy her next vacation mansion, but a popular movie or TV show can ring more sales for the author. Stephen King has sold a zillion books (note: this is the actual number). A lot of them have also been made into movies and TV miniseries. While those have helped keep King's pockets lined with green, how many sales did he get because people experienced one of his stories on the big (or small) screen for the first time?

Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are already rich, to the point they probably won't notice if someone gets into their books because they saw a movie. For a lot of authors, though, the sales boost that can come from a movie or TV show could be huge.

My questions to you: do you write with an eye toward getting your stories turned into TV shows or movies? Do you see the scenes unfold as if you were watching them on a screen? Does this manifest itself in your word choices, action scenes, etc? How do you think that affects your writing?

When I finished my first novel, a friend told me it would make a good action movie. I didn't think that was a compliment at the time. It may not be. But it certainly couldn't hurt.

Happy writing.