“The ice is gonna break!”
I love Stephen King. I love David Cronenberg. It’s no surprise, then, that David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel THE DEAD ZONE is one of my favorite horror films. The movie stars Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who falls into a coma following a car accident. When he awakens from the coma, five years have passed and Smith learns he now has physic powers. With a single touch, he can learn a person or object’s past and future.
This gift, as you might expect from a King story, is “well, actually”ed into a curse - Smith is tormented by visions of tragedies he is powerless to stop. Things come to a head when Smith learns a wacky politician named Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen proving his own precognitive powers as he channels Donald Trump) will one day become president and bring about World War III. Ruh roh!
I’ve watched Cronenberg’s film multiple times over the last few years - frequently turning to it to try and understand what led to Donald Trump being elected president. Conversely, I had not read King’s novel in twenty years. On a lark, I downloaded the audiobook last month, listening to it while on my morning hikes.
It’s remarkable to compare the novel to Cronenberg’s adaption. Both are basically the same story beat for beat - but they are told in wildly different ways. Cronenberg’s film is a propolsive opera - a tragedy that shoots forth like a bullet train. It’s focused on specific moments in Smith’s life - taking a very episodic structure to go from the accident through a series of precognitive flashes that act as a breadcrumb trail leading to Johnny Smith’s downfall. Watching the film feels not too dissimilar to looking at a series of Polaroid photographs. You get broad strokes of and emotional impressions of a person’s life, even if some of the finer details are a little fuzzy.
King’s novel, on the other hand, is a slow circling of the drain - a drawn-out bloodletting. The tragedy is still there, waiting at the end of the book, but you take your time getting there. Along the way, you spend pages and pages learning about the characters that orbit Johnny Smith’s life - and I loved them all. I could have read a whole book about the complicated and troubled relationship between Smith’s mother and father. The novel - at times - feels as much the story of Smith’s former girlfriend Sarah as it does Smith’s story.
I’ve long loved the work King does in building up his side characters. I love how every character in a Stephen King story feels important. Every character - regardless of how small a role they play - has a story of their own, with dreams, fears, failings, and hopes. This makes it all the more tragic when King delivers his promised horror. You know there are no disposable NPCs in a Stephen King novel. Every dead body is somebody who lived and breathed their life as best they could.
Revisiting King’s novel was a great reminder that the art of adaption means killing your darlings. Do I love the small details that King packs into the edges of his novel? Absolutely. Do I miss them when I watch Cronenberg’s THE DEAD ZONE? Nope. Cronenberg and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam knew exactly what they needed to do when it came to adapting King’s novel for the big screen. Watching a movie is a different experience than reading a book and the filmmakers had to approach the adaptation with a different set of needs and requirements.
Last night I stumbled upon a fascinating thread from former BREAKING BAD and BETTER CALL SAUL writer Gennifer Hutchinson.
Click the link above for more thoughts from Hutchison and others, including some great additions to the conversation from Joseph Fink, co-creator of WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.
Combined with my recent revisit of THE DEAD ZONE, the thread hit pretty close to home. I first wrote WHERE WOLF as a novel. I would write a chapter a day on a mostly daily schedule during the first few months of the Pandemic and lockdown. I had a general idea of where the story was going but I also made up large chunks of it as I went. As such, WHERE WOLF, as a novel, was pretty messy - and I’m not just talking about grammar mistakes. When I finished it, I was proud of it - but I knew it could be better. I almost immediately jumped into adapting it into a fiction podcast script - thinking that creating a podcast would be relatively easy to do from home without spending too much money or resources.
Boy, I was wrong.
I adapted the novel into a twelve-episode podcast and it was indeed a better story. I consolidated characters, cleaned up plot points, improved the dialogue, and - in general - delivered a much more streamlined, entertaining version of the story than had previously existed. But it still didn’t work. Partly because I couldn’t get the podcast to sound like I wanted to in my head due to not understanding the technical side of sound recording and mixing. Even more so, though, the podcast project’s failure was due to the fact that I did not truly understand the format. As Fink talks about in the Twitter thread above, I approached the script as somebody who doesn’t really listen to a lot of fiction podcasts and it showed. I didn’t know how to handle narration and audio play pacing and the whole thing - while better than the novel - was still not quite where I wanted it to be. So I started again.
I took the podcast script and adapted it into a medium I did understand - comics. I’ve been a fan of comics my entire life. I read everything - action, drama, horror, comedy, indie micro-press and big stupid superhero crossovers. I read monthly serialized comics and I read big honking graphic novels - the kind you could kill a mouse with if you threw it like a weapon. Unlike fiction podcasts, I know how comic books work and I found that adapting WHERE WOLF into a comic book came easy.
And the result was even better!
The story works in a way that it never truly worked before. I have the space to get into characters’ backstories and motivations while also maintaining the story’s necessary pace. I’m very proud of this current state of WHERE WOLF but … I’m not done yet.
For … reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about how WHERE WOLF would work on screen. How could the story be translated into a television show? Or a movie? Is there a better format in which to adapt the story into? What would I have to sacrifice to make it work best in either format? What could television or film bring to the story that I wasn’t able to do with a novel, or a podcast, or a comic book?
Adaptation is hard, but I’ve found it’s an extremely useful tool for telling the best possible version of your story. I’ve been working on the script for THE CURSE OF THE WHERE WOLF (the name I’m currently using for WHERE WOLF 2) and I’ve been writing it directly as a comic book script. This has been easy for me to do because I know the characters and I know the story I want to tell. Truthfully, the whole process has been surprisingly easy and I saw no need to attempt to write the story out as anything but a comic book script.
I’m almost done with the script, and I’ve started thinking about what my next writing project is going to be. I know I want to write a YA fantasy comic book but I think I’m going to start by writing the story as a novel first. I’ll then take that novel and adapt it into a podcast script in order to get the dialogue just right. I’ll then take that script and turn it into a comic book script. I hope this will end up being the best way to approach the material, and I’m not just putting unnecessary work on my plate.
My hope is that doing these three steps will allow me to really wrap my head around a story whose plot points and characters I’m still trying to figure out. I fully well might be just spinning plates and wasting time but - if my experience with WHERE WOLF taught me anything - the art of adaptation is the process I need to do in order to tell the best possible version of the story.