Writer Arrogance

[Helen]

Has anyone else ever had one of those times where you're watching a Tv show or movie, then start to put thought into the story and think to yourself "I could have done better"? I've had many of those moments, and i've started to call this feeling "Writer Arrogance", because i think that i'm being a bit arrogant for thinking that i can do better than professionals.

Most movies, whether based on a fictional work, factual or mythological get it wrong, wrong wrong! This is why I watch very little of the crap.

a) You're assuming you have absolute creative control all the way through. You don't. Not by a long shot.

There are ways to increase your creative control leverage - get the director gig or go in with a bestselling franchise etc - but those have even longer odds than selling the script.

b) There's data out there which compares the number of consider/recommends scripts get with the number of passes. And it turns out only about 1 in 100 gets a consider, let alone a recommend. Taking that at face value: writers think they can do a better job than they actually can.

 

[Guy]

b) There's data out there which compares the number of consider/recommends scripts get with the number of passes. And it turns out only about 1 in 100 gets a consider, let alone a recommend. Taking that at face value: writers think they can do a better job than they actually can.

But just because a publisher or producer accepts a story doesn't mean it's any good. I think most budding writers are quite familiar with the accounts of famous writers who were rejected time and again by publishers. And I think we've all experienced seeing a publisher's submission requirements, what type of stories they were looking for, "fresh, original storytelling" (which is a load of crap), etc., then gone to the bookstore and seen the absolute tripe that publisher deemed acceptable. A website I used to frequent that does fantasy and sci-fi short stories is another example of people in the industry whose selection process completely baffles me. I read their submission guidelines very carefully. Then I read their stories for examples of the points they made in their guidelines and saw about half of the stories they accepted completely flew in the face of their own requirements.

I think what draoi means about them getting it wrong is a director who takes a good book and butchers it in the course of making movie. To Kill a Mockingbird was a good movie largely because it followed the book very, very closely. Same with Jaws. Spielberg changed the ending, but otherwise he stuck to the book pretty closely and had a good, thrilling story. Then compare that with something like The Lost World (the Michael Crichton book, not the Conan Doyle one), where they deviated from the book so far the story was almost unrecognizable - they kept the character names and the bit about dinosaurs on an island, but that was it, and the movie was nowhere near as good as the book. They do the same thing with mythology. I've yet to see a movie version of Beowulf that I was really satisfied with. Troy was nowhere near as good as The Iliad. Directors and producers try to make the stories more relatable to contemporary audiences, but all they end up doing is screwing up a winning combination, something the entertainment industry seems to have quite a talent for. Those stories are classics for a reason. Beowulf is over a thousand years old. The Iliad is close to three thousand years old. And these stories are still being told. There's a reason for that. How many movies or books being made in our day are going to be entertaining people a thousand years from now?

 

[Malik]

Harlan Ellison's short story "Somehow, I Don't Think We're In Kansas Anymore," about the making of The Starlost, should be required reading for every aspiring writer.

 

[Bruce McKnight]

I look at my arrogance in a different light. I try to "write the book I want to read." I read a lot of books that I end up finding out that I didn't want to read. They are by successful and talented writers, but just not my cup of tea. In that regard, I think stuff like "I could write a book that I would like better."

Time will tell if anyone else will like it better...

 

[solas]

Penpilot....this is "draoi"....had to register again due to password issues I could not resolve. What I meant is the screenwriters, and perhaps directors, use too much license to change a story to fit the movie format. I know there are a few movies that follow the book but this is rare..at least in my world....get very frustrated when I watch a movie after reading the book and the story is butchered. For instance, the HBO series "True Blood" is based on Charlaine Harris's serial books of Sookie Stackhouse. I did not read the books (I took a peak recently at her latest and was not impressed) and I know of many who read the books and complained the story was changed so drastically, they did not recognize the storyline.