Why GIVE A BOY A GUN Should Probably Not Become a Movie

Ever since GIVE A BOY A GUN was published in 2001 there have been (very) informal discussions and questions about the possibility of it becoming a movie. In general you’ve been leery about the possibility (not that it’s really been seriously broached by anyone in Hollywood) because you’re afraid it may be taken as an example rather than a warning.

For some reason that you can’t quite explain, you believe a book about school shootings is less likely to inspire someone to shoot than a movie. There just seems to be something about these stories becoming a movie that leads to a greater sense of reality.

Even though GIVE A BOY A GUN was published in 2000, queries from students and aspiring screen writers have remained pretty steady, and the work has been adapted for the stage several times.

But recently, since the success of THE WAVE movie throughout Europe last year, suggestions about a movie version of GIVE A BOY A GUN have increased. The idea still makes you nervous. This recent article in the New York Times does little to alleviate your concerns:


A 17-year-old Manhattan man has been arrested in the May 25 bombing of a
Starbucks coffee shop on the Upper East Side, and the explosion appears to have
been modeled on a scene from the 1999 film “Fight Club,” the authorities said on
Wednesday.

The predawn blast from an explosive device damaged a sidewalk bench and
shattered windows at the shop, at 1642 Third Avenue, at 92nd Street, but no one
was injured.

The teenager, Kyle Shore, of 250 West 27th Street in the Chelsea section of
Manhattan, was charged with arson, criminal possession of a weapon, and criminal
mischief, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference. He had
bragged to friends that he was responsible for the bombing, Mr. Kelly said, and
had started an underground fight club modeled on the one in the 1999 film, which
starred Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.

“His statements indicated he was launching his own Project Mayhem,” Mr. Kelly
said, referring to a plan in the movie, hatched by the protagonist of the film,
to sabotage corporations by destroying property. Mr. Shore had told a friend to
“watch the news on Memorial Day,” May 25, Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Shore was arrested near his home, and the authorities found on him a DVD of
“Fight Club” and a box of sparklers — a type of handheld firework — as well as a
newspaper clipping reporting on the Starbucks bombing.

The point being that before THE FIGHT CLUB was a movie, it was a book.

4th of July. Richie's photos

My friends Richie and Paula came up for the 4th and Richie took these photos of the display in Larchmont Harbor. Please click on them to get the full size.

A Well-Crafted Piece of Furniture

You were at a cookout over July 4th and a fellow asked you what you did for a living and you said you wrote books for young people. It is a conversation you have had many times, and this one went pretty much the same as the others. He asked if you had ever thought about writing for adults? You had and you have. Then he asked if you’d ever thought about the big time? For a moment you thought he meant trying to write a best seller, but it turned out he meant writing a movie.

Here too, you had and you have, although you have never had anything more than a made-for-television movie actually produced. But these days, the idea of writing a movie, of going Hollywood and all the implies, doesn’t appeal to you (except, of course, for the money and medical benefits the Writer’s Guild of America offers).

Instead you are happy to work quietly and by yourself in your “workshop,” feeling the way you imagine a craftsman must feel. All you dream of producing is a good piece of work.

Like a well-made, handcrafted desk or dresser.

For most of your life you didn’t pay a great deal of attention to furniture. It was there and you used it like everyone else, but you didn’t think much about how it was built. Then, a while back when your kids were small, your former wife and you took them to colonial Williamsburg, Va. And in one of the old shops you watched a craftsman work on a replica of an antique desk, complete with inlay and beveling and all the other carefully added flourishes that few people have time for anymore.

These days that is what you would like to aspire to. Not a replica of an antique, but something current yet written with that much care and attention to detail.

It’s not easy, and not just because of the time demands of deadlines. It is probably just as difficult to produce a well-made furniture as it is to produce a well-crafted book, but you suspect it is easier for the maker to identify the flaws in the furniture than it is in the book. One can easily see that one leg of a desk is shorter than the other, or that a corner isn’t properly squared. It’s less easy to find flaws in the seemingly endless strings of words called sentences that are supposed to lead to the images one hopes the reader creates in his or her mind.

Darn! Now here’s an irony. The second pass pages of Wish You Were Dead just arrived at my door with a pressing deadline. So rather than have the time to try to turn even this blog into something well-crafted, you must turn your attention to that book.

What You Learned from Soap Operas

You realize that this will probably not reflect well on you as a writer, but you once spent two years writing soap operas. This part of your career began around 1988. YA books, often referred to in the 1980s as problem novels, had stopped selling. Close to every problem a teen could encounter had been written about, some many times over.

At that time, the hottest thing in the YA book world was a series called Sweet Valley High. A second series for slightly younger readers, The Babysitters Club, was beginning to look like it would be even bigger. Editors were interested in ideas for series, but you didn’t actually understand how a series worked. Except for Ian Fleming’s James Bond, you’d never read one.

For most of the 1980s you had only written one kind of book. It always had characters who had a problem and learned and changed and grew as a result of dealing with it. When it was time to start the next book, you began with a whole new group of characters and a completely different problem. But a series had continuing characters (until later when Fear Street and Goosebumps came along), and could easily grow to be 30 or 40 books long (Sweet Valley High eventually had 152). How could the same characters keep learning, changing and growing through that many books?

You needed to find the answer, but you also needed to make an income. The solution to this problem, it appeared, was to write for soap operas. In truth, you’d never actually watched a soap opera, but you knew that they had continuing characters and that some of the shows had been going five days a week since before the invention of television (Guiding Light, where you would eventually work for a year, began in the 1930s as a radio serial and moved to television in 1952). In addition, soap opera work paid well. Quite well, in fact.

Through a friend you learned that CBS had a soap opera writing program, and, through a friend of that friend, you managed to get in. The training program may have been geared toward writers with less experience than you (the people at CBS weren’t certain they’d ever had a published writer in the program before), but that didn’t mean there weren’t things to learn. Or at least new ways to look at the craft of telling a story.

Two ways of approaching character would stay with you for the rest of your life. The first was, whenever you are writing a character, always keep one question foremost in your in mind: what is this character’s motivation? What does this character want? Characters drive stories, and motivation drives character. The second was much simpler, but also valuable. If character A encounters character B after an interval of time, be sure to go back to the last time they were together and see how they were feeling about each other.

You can’t recall how long the training program lasted. All you remember was that quite soon thereafter, you were was hired to write for Guiding Light. And that’s when your education in writing for television really began.

Raw Feed for Bootleg Books

You went down to Brooklyn last week to tape a segment for a show called Bootleg Books. You're not sure exactly where or when the show airs, but here's some raw footage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCRXJ5nPboM

In the future you will have to make sure you remember what your book is about before you are interviewed.

Mr. Bill says, "Moron."

The Everchanging Family

"Hey, Mr. Bill!"

"What?"

"Last week I went out to Long Island for my aunt’s art show. My mother and brother were there, too. I told them to go into The Family Changing Room. But when they came out the family was still the same."

"Do I know you?"

The Mystery Plant

Some years ago you went to the island of St. John with a friend. Together you snorkeled with hawkbill sea turtles, and hiked, and sailed. Early one morning you went bird-watching with a guide who pointed out a plant, the leaf of which, she said, would grow in air if you pinned it to a curtain in the sun.

You put a leaf from this plant in a zip lock bag and brought it home. Then you forgot about it. One day long after you and your friend said good-bye and you were feeling sad, you remembered the leaf. You took it out of the zip lock bag and put it in the sun.

Nothing happened.

After a while you decided to put it on some dirt and moisten it. Soon the mystery plant started to grow.

You showed the plant to your daughter, who had also been to St. John several times. You told her you thought it was called an air plant. She said she thought it was called a life tree.

The mystery plant/tree kept growing and you began to grow more mystery plant/trees from its leaves. On several occasions you tried to look up the mystery plant/tree on the Internet, but you were never able to figure out precisely what it was. The only thing you knew for sure was that it wasn’t The Toilet Tree that is so prominently featured in Is That A Dead Dog in Your Locker (ß plug).

Meanwhile the mystery plant/tree has continued to grow, and indeed, now it does look more like a mystery tree. You have several dozen of them. If anyone out there in the blogosphere knows what the mystery tree really is, you would like to hear from them.

Mr. Bill says, “Boring!”