Amazing what happens when you let ideas gestate.

I’ve been working for a while with someone who’s written a non-fiction book that’s attracted quite a bit of attention from people claiming they can adapt it for film or television.  Some of these producers and directors have got quite a bit of credibility, too.  None of them, to date, have waved any money about, though some have alluded to its existence.  But for whatever reasons, the writer has decided he wants to develop scripts from his material with me.  Which is a process that mostly involves chat over morning coffees — we sit outside because my collaborator smokes.

Anyway, the book has got an abundance of material.  More than enough for a film and a tv series.  And we’ve got one of each in some sort of notional form.  For various reasons, now seems to be a good time to develop the feature side of things.  So I’ve been dipping into my memories of the book, rather than the book itself, since the name of the game is now creating fiction inspired by the real events the book is about.

Memory is a malleable process.  I was struggling to recall the specifics of how something worked in the book, since the actual physical book eludes me at present, and I thought ‘well, all I have to do is come up with something that’s at least as striking as what I can’t remember’.  A funny kind of request to one’s unconscious, but sure enough it worked out, and I’ve now got reams of ideas all fitting into one big story concept that I’ve got half written and will be returning to when I’ve done this blog.

I should be used to this by now.  Years back, I was part of a theatre in education outfit, and we devised a play about dyslexia.  ‘Devised’ means that I wrote some of it, that the actors improvised other scenes until we settled on their definitive forms, and that sometimes the actors asked me to create bespoke pieces for the play.  Which led to the memorable request ‘Adrian, can you write something in Shakespearean style verse about all the aspects of dyslexia that we haven’t covered in the rest of the play’.

Gulp.

Well, there’s a commission.

And the thing is, I responded to it, writing a poetic monologue several verses long that did all that I’d been asked to do, and a few other things for good measure.

There’s a case for writing what you know, sometimes.  But there’s a lot more you don’t know than that which you do.  So hurtling headlong into the unknown is guaranteed at the very least to be an interesting journey.  And you might just bag yourself a story while you’re there.

Only, you can’t go into the unknown without taking at least some of the known with you.  I wouldn’t have been able to do a bit of cod Shakespeare without exposure to actual cod, and indeed actual bard.  So going off in search of something that made use of that knowledge, it was like having a filter for what I came across that would present it in faux-Shakespearean form.

Similarly, in adapting the heart of this nonfiction book into a story or stories, I’ve got a lot to fall back on.  My knowledge not just of text, but of author, in this case.  And unlike the author, I have prior experience of adapting stories from existing sources, plus a lifetime’s viewing of films that started life as novels, short stories, comics, or newspaper articles.  All of which gives me confidence that I can take on this job and do it justice.  Which is maybe what the author spotted in me and made them realise I was someone to collaborate with, after meeting several people they wanted nothing to do with.