The author discusses what she learned about being a good writer and editor from trying to adapt her novels into screenplays. One novel, '8 Days a Week', is included, fully adapted into both a screenplay and a stage play, for anyone who wishes to read the original and the adaptations side by side to learn better. It is not an exhaustive account but an invitation for you to try the same with your own work and adapt to the "writing language" of the different formats. THE BACK STORY: Learning to be a Good Editor This book was inspired by what I learned to improve my writing by trying to adapt one of my novels, 8 Days a Week, into a screenplay and later a stage play. I first tried to adapt 8 Days into a screenplay within the first year after I'd written it. This ultimately led me to change the last chapter from being narration-based to making it mainly dialogue; that the protagonist Sean comes more out of his head and is interacting with others more and has a better life. I later took this script and used it in a play writing class I was taking as an elective in college. I didn't mention that I'd written it a few years beforehand. I wanted to dig deeper into it anyway and I found it very interesting how the work needed to change over the course of the class and what life my classmates, most of whom were actors, put into it and how it changed with each new performer that played one of the characters. I took that script out again later for use in a screenwriting elective. 8 Days was really just the gift that kept on giving. I've been given out to before about this book because it has a limited amount of advice and then contains the actual full length screenplay and stage play versions of my novel but for me that is the point; 'here are my experiences and insights and here are the examples.' If you read the novel then read these other versions of it you'll really see what I'm talking about and hopefully try it and experience it for yourself. So the book isn't for everyone (and that's art, in a nutshell). For the photo art direction I chose a giant pile of 8 Days a Week adaptations with books. Most of the books are actually the kinds of things I read in undergrad like colonial history books. I prefer reading nonfiction, though I know it's supposed to be a veritable crime for any writer to not read extensively in their own genre before they write in it. I'm not sorry that I generally prefer to go out and experience life and write about that. And actually that reminds me of something I heard singer/songwriter, pianist, and social activist Tori Amos say in a radio interview for a station in Portland, Oregon in 1999; that she often got her inspiration from paintings and visual arts because it can a very good way to guard against accidentally borrowing from your contemporaries. The author photo is me reading one of these great books (about the history of airplanes in war) out in the back garden of where I lived at the time. I read this book out of my own interest then that fall found a way to build a research paper around it for one of my history classes. I'm wearing my alma mater's blue jersey in it. (From the back page of my website: http://www.avacollopbooks.weebly.com)
