Re: Medium Hopping
by paultremblay on Nov.18, 2009, under David Anthony Durham, Jeff VanderMeer, Paul G. Tremblay
The short answer is that I’d love to if the opportunity arises! Not so much screenplays. I tried writing a screenplay once at the urging of friend Kris Meyer. He liked a horror short story of mine called “The Harlequin and the Train” (4200 words) and thought I should try adapting it into a movie-length screenplay. The resulting script didn’t entirely work, I don’t think, but I liked what I’d added in terms of story, so I took the adapted screenplay and adapted it again into an experimental horror novella where the reader is asked to highlight certain words of the text yellow. Heh.
The 37K word novella was published as a limited edition by Necropolitan Press earlier this year. Now, I’d love to adapt this one more time: for comics. My agent and I have discussed submitting or pitching this to comic publishers (knowing it would be a long shot), but have yet to act. Soon, though, I think. I hope.
Would I be any good at writing comics? Have I done enough to prepare to write comics? I don’t know. I’ve done enough research this year to know that writing a comic script would be an enormous challenge for me. Learning another medium’s language and rules and nuances is daunting. One can dream, though.
To add to comic/fiction crossover folks, there is Warren Ellis, and the tireless Brian Keene (horror novelist who has also written Devil Slayer comics for Marvel and is doing an original comic The Last Zombie for next summer).
Related posts:
- Medium Hopping We’re talking about genre hopping, but we also have medium or format hopping. We have authors such as Mike Carey and Dan Abnett writing comics. Jim Butcher wrote a Dresden Files comic. Neil Gaiman is writing screenplays. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and Charlaine Harris’ True Blood are...
- Re: Re: Medium Hopping Morgan, I’ve considered the screenplay thing. Who hasn’t at some point daydreamed about giving their acceptance speech at the Oscars - the one for most awesomist screenplay? (Or is that just me? That category exists, doesn’t it?) I’ve also had three novels optioned for film, so in some ways I...
- Genre hopping Hey Paul, I look at genre hopping and genre blending as two very separate things. Dan Simmons is a classic hopper. He bounces from science fiction to mystery to horror. Since he does it all well, that’s okay with me. On the plus side, hopping exposed his work to different...
- Lots of Hopping Jeff, I very much looking forward to that reading. It means me coming out of the woods for an evening in the city. Haven’t done that for a while. It’ll be good fun, I’m sure! Paul, I appreciate genre mixing. I have to admit I don’t feel cool enough to...
- In (brief!) defense of genre mixing Yes, you can hear agents cringe and editors spit out their coffees at the mere mention of genre hopping or mixing; their jobs made, somehow, infinitely more difficult because there is no pre-fab marketing niche for your novel that mixes SF, western, and cozy mystery! I say that with tongue...
