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 Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm about my new book cover. Since I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it, I thought I would create a central place for asking and answering.
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions:
Q: What is this book about?
A: So glad you asked:
Generations ago, a genetic experiment gone wrong—the Reduction—decimated humanity, giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology.
Eighteen-year-old Luddite Elliot North has always known her place in this caste system. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. But now the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress and threatening Luddite control; Elliot’s estate is floundering; and she’s forced to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain Malakai Wentforth—an almost unrecognizable Kai. And while Elliott wonders if this could be their second chance, Kai seems determined to show Elliot exactly what she gave up when she abandoned him.
But Elliot soon discovers her childhood friend carries a secret—one that could change the society in which they live…or bring it to its knees. And again, she’s faced with a choice: cling to what she’s been raised to believe, or cast her lot with the only boy she’s ever loved, even if she has lost him forever.
Inspired by Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS is a breathtaking romance about opening your mind to the future and your heart to the one person you know can break it.
Q: When is it coming out?
A: June, 2012
Q: Who designed this cover?
A: The design team at Harper Children’s.
Q: Is it a series?
A: No, it’s a standalone novel. I know that’s a tad unusual in the YA world these days, and especially unusual in this brave new world of “dystopias” — yes, I’m using liberal quote marks — but I’ve done two series now and I wanted this book to stand alone, like Persuasion itself does.
Q: What was the Katy Perry video still from “E.T.” that you wanted your cover to look like?
A: Right. Yes. Totally meant to post that. Here it is:
I definitely see a resemblance, don’t you?
If you have more questions, ask away in comments!
“Our ancestors,” Tatiana said, as the sanctuary was plunged into darkness, “took refuge here during the Wars of the Lost. Some already lived on these islands. Some came as the reach of the wars grew ever wider. But all were forced eventually underground. When the Lost realized what they’d done, that they were the last generation of healthy people, they struck out with unthinkable rage against any and all who had avoided Reduction, hoping to be the last ones, at least, left standing over a ruined world.” She blew out the final light. Above them, the miracle flickered to life.
“For years—some say more than a generation—the Luddites lived in the darkness. And then . . .” Tatiana’s voice fell silent, and they all stared up into the vertex of the cavern.
It was filled with stars. From every corner of the cavern, tiny, twinkling points of light glowed, a green so pale as to be nearly white.
“In the old stories,” said Tatiana, “a man built his followers a boat to ride out the flooding of the world. And when the flood was over, God showed him a rainbow to tell him that the worst was over. And after the wars of the Reduction were over, God showed us the stars, and we knew we could come out of the caverns and take our rightful place on the surface of the world.”
But Elliot knew the truth was more complicated than that.
So this is the week I’m going to show you all the For Darkness Shows the Stars cover, which is my favorite of all my covers. But before I can talk about the cover, I want to talk about the title.
A long, long time ago (in book publishing world), in 2005, I started writing a book called “Last of the Unicorn Hunters.” This title, I was told by EVERYONE, simply would not do. Thus began a months-long search for the perfect title. Many were considered. Some were mocked. A few were mocked with love and sincere affection (such as my Ludlum-loving friend’s ardent campaign for “The Horn Identity.”) I started making a list of titles that I loved. I had recently read a book called Valiant, by Holly Black, and I loved that title. I decided I wanted my title to have the same feel as that one.
Enter Rampant.
Rampant was the first book I ever sold that retained the title I sold it with. I did not realize, back at the time, that we were entering an age of one-word titles in YA fiction. Now pretty much every YA book has a one-word title. Look at the shelves: It’s one word from here to the travel section. Shiver, Matched, Uglies, Rumors, Skinned, Ashes, Ice, Need, Hunger, Linger, Divergent, Witchlanders, MOckingjay, Hourglass, Possession, Evernight, Everneath, Unwind, Intertwined, Savvy, Grace, Graceling, Fire, Liar, Leviathan, Mastiff, Devilish… and of course, Twilight.
It was so prevalent that when we went to title Ascendant, we had a bit of a challenge on our hands. Quite simply — we were running out of appropriate words. In fact, I’d already gotten emails from other writers trapped in the “one word title” conundrum of a series, annoyed that their chosen titles were considered too close to “Rampant” to be acceptable. (I’ve also gotten that email in regards to Ascendant, and I live in fear that someone will use my chosen title for the hypothetical killer unicorn book three before I get to it.)
When I went to title my next book, a post-apocalyptic retelling of Persuasion, I had one rule: No one-word titles. It was, of course, a tad ironic, given that Persuasion is one word, and a title that fit in quite neatly with the current YA trend. It did not, however, fit very well with my vision for the book.
Again, a protracted search for titles. I paged through my dog-eared copy of Persuasion, hoping for phrases that would rock my fictional world. As I did for Rampant, I made a list of words that fit with the themes and motifs I planned to explore in my book. Up spat a lot of imagery about winter and remembrance and navigation and lantern-light and compasses and stars and engineering and Greek myths and seafaring and waiting. I came up with several titles. None were acceptable. A few found their way into the book in other guises.
Eventually, I found a poem by Carl Sandburg called “Prayers After World War” which says, in part:
Wandering oversea singer,
Singing of ashes and blood,
Child of the scars of fire,
Make us one new dream, us who forget.
Out of the storm let us have one star.
And fell in love. For this, I thought, was the world I’d created. This was a world where things had been bad — so bad that people were happy to forget the past, forget the things they’d once known, and be afraid of the dreams they’d once had. It was a story about the children of the apocalypse, who had been born into a world brought low, and dared to dream that it all could someday change, dared to explore beyond their shores, dared to “make a song for tomorrow” as it says elsewhere in the poem.
But “Out of the storm let us have one star” was WAY too long for a title. Still, I loved the idea, and I kept digging. I considered phrases I liked that were along those lines:
“Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” (Hmm: Fall Among the Stars? No, too space-opera-y.)
“I’ve loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” (Hmm, Fearful of the Night? No, wrong emotion.)
“I would rather be ashes than dust.” (Hmm… love it, but can’t think of a fitting title.)
“I love the light for it shows me the way, but I endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.” (Wait a second…)
Bingo.
For Darkness Shows the Stars was born.
I wrote a proposal and sent it on to my agent. I did not think it was a title we’d be allowed to keep, given the trend in YA titles, but I thought it was one that my editor, and hopefully the acquisitions team, would find evocative, even if marketing made us change it. I consoled myself by remembering that Persuasion was not actually a title Jane Austen had chosen herself, but rather the one her brother had put on the book after her death. She’d been calling it “The Elliots.”
(My editor later told me that she had initially doubted we’d be able to keep the title, but marketing loved it as much as we did, and here we are.)
So what does this have to do with the cover? Well, when we started talking about concepts for cover art, one of the things we knew was that with such a distinctive and distinctively evocative title that we would want to play on and play up those words as much as possible. I started collecting pictures of starscapes that reminded me of scenes in the book:
And pictures that reminded me of Elliot, because I knew the other prevailing trend on covers was pictures of girls:
(Actually, now this photo reminds me of the cove of Saundra Mitchell’s The Springsweet. Right? With the dress and the lighting and the general feel?)
So I sent these all along to my editor, and then I begged — I actually begged, and she can verify this — for an interesting font treatment, because I was busy being in love with the cover of Kami Garcia and Margie Stohl’s Caster series books. (Also: true story, their cover designer used to work for Harper, and he had once been assigned to design the cover of Rampant before he left.) And more than that, because I loved this title, and I wanted it to be an important part of the cover.
But, as with keeping the title itself, I never actually expected any of this to come to pass.
Anyway, time passed, and I finished the book, and then, one day, I was watching TV, and I saw a music video that stopped me in my tracks.
More on that tomorrow.
Here I am at the NINC Conference in sunny-but-cold Florida. And, last night I ran into none other than MJ Putney herself, which reminded me I had yet to pick a winner for the DARK MIRROR giveaway contest, so I asked her to pick a random number, and she did, and that number was seventeen, which makes VIRGINIA our winner.
Virginia, I know you’re out there. Email me.
In other news, there’s an interview with me up at Reading Underground, the teen blog of the Charleston Public Library (So excited for YALLFest, Y’ALL.) Did I mention I’ll have a For Darkness Shows the Stars ARC there?
What, you say? You want a For Darkness Shows the Stars snippet? Well, okay, since you asked very, very nicely:
Olivia’s song ended, but Donovan merely turned his music into something wilder, a more obvious dancing tune. A cheer went up from the assembled crowd. Several couples even rose from their picnic blankets to dance beneath the glowing lanterns. Kai gave his hand to Olivia to help her down from the porch steps. She tugged him toward the dancers, and after a moment, he joined her. Elliot stared down at her lap.
“Aren’t they a lovely couple?,” Andromeda said.
“Please go away.”
Okay, off to conference.
So I was looking up editions of Persuasion on the internet. Never you mind why. This, for the record, is “my” Persuasion:
Or at least, the one I’ve had since 2009, when I went to the Jane Austen’s letters exhibit in New York City. Before that I had a variety of others (including one with a salmon pink cover) and then for a few years, had only the one in my leather bound “complete works of Jane Austen” collection. But this one has a large, large index with all kinds of historical factoids (and a long digression that uses the dialogue to suss out exactly how incompetent the Musgrove sailor was on Wentworth’s ship, which is amusing).
I also own this Persuasion:
And another one that I can’t find the cover to online (it’s the “Annotated” Persuasion).
Harper Teen did their Twilight thing on it a few years back, complete with Twilighty title font:
But my absolute favorite is this one I just found:
How awesome is that? Because Anne would TOTALLY paint her fingernails red. That is SUCH a 1800s-daughter-of-a-baronet thing to do, you know? And the lipstick. And the cribbed-from-wicked-lovely pose.
The best part of this version — I know, better even than the fingernails — is hard to read in this picture, but allow me to share a detail shot:
Yes, that’s right. “Copyrighted material.”
Um… do they mean the picture? Is there an essay or an annotation or something in there written recently? Because they certainly can’t mean the text. Jane Austen is no longer under copyright, which, in the U.S., is defined as life of the author plus seventy-five years. That’s why there are so many bajillions of versions of Persuasion floating around. Because any publisher can put it up at any time.
Even with blood red fingernails on the cover.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the final cover of my take on Persuasion, which is written entirely by me, and so actually is under copyright. But, hey, I’m feeling magnanimous today, so how about a snippet?
For four years she’d waited for Kai to come back, too, but he never had. Nor had he ever sent word of his whereabouts. In her dreams, she liked to imagine he’d ended up like one of the admiral’s men, content and employed. With his mechanical talent, he’d have made an excellent skilled laborer. But she’d heard too many stories of the things that happened to Post runaways. She’d heard of the dangers in Post enclaves. The brothels and the workhouses, the organ trade and the people who sold their bodies for illegal experimentation.
Elliot let her hand drop and curl inward. She brushed her left fingers over the back of her right hand, touching each knuckle, tracing the path of each vein. She couldn’t bear to think of Kai like that.
Well, that was a week. I was sitting at my computer, twittering, when the earthquake started. At first I thought it was a truck passing closely outside. Then I noticed my tomato trellises shaking away and as the vibrations grew stronger, I put it together. (Yes, that’s a B.A. in Geology, why do you ask?)
You know how they say animals feel these first? Rio didn’t even wake up.
We didn’t sustain any damage and we’re all fine, here.
A few days later, everyone started panicking about the hurricane. Where I come from, people prepare for hurricane season the same way people up north prepare for winter. It’s a given that when you hear a storm is coming, you make sure you have fresh batteries in all your flashlights, a bunch of grillable/ready-to-eat food, a full tank of gas, and a few gallons of water, just in case. The large-scale panic, I think, was entirely media-generated. Hurricanes are bad and dangerous and this one hurt a lot of people, don’t get me wrong, but the shelves empty of flashlights and batteries and red wine were a little shocking to me. Pick up some staples, and make sure you have flashlights and water. Thanks to the fact that Sailor Boy and I are part of the 9/11 Generation and we live in our nation’s capital, we’ve got a permanent “emergency cabinet” in our house (which reminds me, I need to add stuff for Queenie to my jump bag.)
Even my parents, who have lived in hurricane-central for over twenty-five years, called me to report whatever piece of yellow journalism they were hearing on the news. We were all set — but we were lucky. Our power didn’t even go out. (Compare to July 2010, when an unnamed storm knocked out power to our house for a week.) We stayed indoors all day Saturday, and now there are little leaves and twigs all over my yard, but Sunday was gorgeous. We even took Rio for a hike in the park (the creek was running way high).
The moral of the story is, respect the weather, respect natural disaster,s be prepared, and for goodness sake, Don’t Panic.
In other news, remember when I posted these stats of For Darkness Shows the Stars? Turns out they were a little premature. No, I haven’t suddenly decided to add zombies. But I did have to do a little rejiggering of the chapters during the last round of edits. so now the chapter count stands at 43 and the unchapter count at 21. To compare: There are 26 in Ascendant and 27 in Rampant. There are 21 chapters in Under the Rose, which is the longest secret society book, and the one whose length is most comparable to FDSTS (see sidebar).
That’s a significant difference, to me. I wonder if it will feel so different to readers.I think sometimes I get overly obsessed with things like chapter breaks and chapter headings and the titles of various internal parts of my novel that readers don’t really care about. I suspect a significant number of readers never read the “confessions” — let alone the chapter titles — of the secret society books.
But of course, there are all kinds of crazy ways that I’ve learned readers read books over the years. Some read all the dialogue first and then go back and read the narrative. Some read the first few pages and then the last few pages and use that as a barometer to decide whether or not to read the book. Some buy all the books in a series and then hold off reading them until the series is complete. Some always skip the prologues, or never read the chapter titles, or refuse to read anything set in italic, or only read chapters with numbers divisible by six.
Some of these reading habits make me wonder how the reader in question can ever make sense of a novel.
Me, I’m a straight through, don’t skip a word kind of reader. I would never dream of skipping a prologue or a text block or a sex scene — the author put them there for a reason, and if I skip it, I’m missing something they designed to be part of the whole. And because I read that way, I write that way, too. I mean for all the words in my books to come in a particular order, and to be read in that order. I think you’re missing something if you don’t, but that’s the way my brain works.
There are no chapter titles in FDSTS — a first for my original novels. I felt like between the parts, and the quotes, and the unchapters — well, it was starting to get a little busy in the header arena. I don’t miss them. They were right for my other series, but simple numbers are right in this case.
Enough of that. You guys are going to be SO SICK of hearing me talk about FDSTS before the book comes out next June.
Next. June. Ugh. Kidlit publishing moves at a glacial pace, y’all. When I wrote Secret Society Girl, I turned the draft in August 31, and it came out in May of the following year. At least this isn’t as bad as Rampant, though, which had a 12 month wait time after proofs. One day, maybe I’ll be patient enough to write a book and not announce it until the ARCs come out.
Hahahahahhahahahhaha. Good one.
Yes, there will be ARCs of FDSTS. Sometime this fall, I hear.
This is what I’m doing to distract myself until then:
- reading a lot
- writing a lot
I am very excited about my new project. I am jamming it full of all kinds of things I’ve been interested in recently. Pets. Frocks. Swimming. Banter. And of course, fabulous names.
Since posting the summary of my upcoming book, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS, last week, my inbox has been filling with questions from readers. I really appreciate your enthusiasm, guys! I can’t wait for next summer. But for now, a little Q&A will have to do:
When can we see a cover?
I ask that same question all the time. I’ve seen a comp and it’s purty. When I have a final cover, believe me, I’ll be posting it all over (and talking about the crazy crazy story behind it.)
Is this a series?
No, it’s a standalone. I know, bucking the trend. But I’ve published two series so far (in fact, in my writing career, the ONLY original novels I’ve published have been series) so I needed a break.
Persuasion is one of Jane Austen’s most mature works. How did you write it as a YA?
There are a lot of questions that are variations on the theme of “how did you handle XYZ aspect of Persuasion“? The sort answer to all of them is: read the book to find out. To answer this one, specifically: the main character in For Darkness Shows the Stars is eighteen years old, which is on the “upper” end of the teenage years. As noted in the summary, she’s been separated from her sweetheart for four years. As to how everything else works out — sorry, you’ll have to read the book.
The summary says “inspired by Jane Austen” but you say it’s a retelling. Which is it?
Potato-potahto. I’m not exactly sure what the legal line is between “inspired by” and “retelling” when it comes to fiction. Maybe the nice people at Balzer & Bray, who wrote that part, do. “Inspired” has a nice ring to it. If I was going to compare it to something, I’d compare it to West Side Story or Clueless. These stories have the same basic plot and most of the characters map to characters in the original work, but there are a few adjustments (sexy Anita who is the girlfriend of Maria’s brother, instead of the old staid nurse from Romeo and Juliet; or the fact that Josh is Cher’s former stepbrother instead of her brother-in-law, as Knightley is in Emma). For instance, you can tell in the summary that the Captain is not a military man, but an explorer. There’s a change right there.
If that kind of thing annoys the purists, then they will, alas, be annoyed by my book. But honestly, if everything was exactly the same, just in post-apocalyptic costumes, then what’s the point? I can totally see doing that in a stage production, but not a novel.
Can you just tell me if you left my favorite part in?
No. Please believe that as in love with the source material as I am, I tried to remain as faithful to it as humanly possible. And in places that I did deviate, I hope I remained true to the spirit of Jane Austen.
I heard a rumor that this is an epistolary novel. Is that true?
Kind of. There are letters. But it’s not all in letters. Partially epistolary is fair.
Why doesn’t 2012 get here nownownow?
I feel your pain. Trust me, I do.
Any more? I’ll answer in comments.
Because Lenore is totally persuasive, she got me to release the flap copy for my 2012 release, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS, as the launch of her Dystopian August series. In the interview, I talk more about FOR DARKNESS than I ever have before.
Read the whole interview there, and the flap copy below.
Can. Not. Wait. For 2012.
__________
Generations ago, a genetic experiment gone wrong—the Reduction—decimated humanity, giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology.
Eighteen-year-old Luddite Elliot North has always known her place in this caste system. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. But now the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress and threatening Luddite control; Elliot’s estate is floundering; and she’s forced to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain Malakai Wentforth—an almost unrecognizable Kai. And while Elliott wonders if this could be their second chance, Kai seems determined to show Elliot exactly what she gave up when she abandoned him.
But Elliot soon discovers her childhood friend carries a secret—one that could change the society in which they live…or bring it to its knees. And again, she’s faced with a choice: cling to what she’s been raised to believe, or cast her lot with the only boy she’s ever loved, even if she has lost him forever.
Inspired by Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS is a breathtaking romance about opening your mind to the future and your heart to the one person you know can break it.
Recently, I finished the final round of edits on For Darkness Shows the Stars, which took significantly longer to write than every other book I’ve ever written, with the exception of Unpublished Manuscript #4 (otherwise known as The Book I Wrote on a Broken-Screened Alphasmart While Living in a Tent in Oceana). I began FDSTS in January of 2010, which is also the month I found out I was pregnant.
Number one thing I’ve learned: If I ever get pregnant again, schedule a big vacation time into my writing schedule.
I finished a first draft in June of that year. It was… not good. There were growing pains, both on my abdomen and in my attempts to adapt a mature Jane Austen novel to a post-apocalyptic society populated by teenagers. The Austen version relies heavily on romantic conflict derived from not one, but two (perceived) romantic triangles. I didn’t want to write about romantic triangles. I particularly did not want to write about romantic triangles in the way that so widely populates the YA paranormal genre these days, even though that would have been the easy way out. The characters I’d created had bigger problems than romantic rivals. Yes, they were there, but even removed, the conflicts existed. The rivals were symbols of the vast gulf which separated my leads.
Commence draft two, in which I threw out pretty much everything except for the first 50 pages of the book. This should also be called draft 2a-2e, because I kept trying things until I reached a solution I was happy with. I felt like I was on the right path, but I had too much on my plate. There was no way I’d be able to do justice to the story in my head while pregnant, sleepless, and preparing for Q’s arrival. My editor wisely suggested delaying the book. I tearfully agreed.
After Q, after maternity leave, and after I got my writing legs back underneath me, I wrote draft three. It was better. I was even surprised how much stuff I had been able to incorporate from draft one. I sent it to my editor.
She sent back a seven page revision letter.
This time, I threw out about 30 of those first 50 pages. Turns out writing two halves of a book a year apart does not make for the most cohesive whole. For draft four I rejiggered most of the plot, clarified and simplified the worldbuilding, streamlined some structural issues, and completely rewrote the ending. The new draft was 10,000 words longer. Sent it in again.
One page revision letter, plus in-manuscript notes.
Draft five needed a whole new ending. But to get to that ending, I had to do a bunch of rewrites in other parts of the book. Another 5,000 words were added, but it was more like 15,000, since I cut out the broken ending.
And now, here we are. The book is done (save copyedits and proofreading). I’ve even (squeeeeeee) seen a cover comp.
It’s become fashionable in places for writers to boast about how little work they did on a book. “I got the idea for this while I was making dinner and I finished it by bedtime.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful when you have a “gift” story like that. I’ve written a story I love in two days. But sometimes stories take longer to get right.
And getting it right is the point.
So, if you’re a writer and you have been laboring over your draft and feeling frustrated, and wondering if it’s all worth it when there are others you see who toss off a book every week… it’s worth it. Your book is not their book. Its needs are not the needs of their book. Get your book right.
There were many challenges that went into the writing of this book. It was an adaptation and I felt a strong responsibility to Jane and all of her readers to do it justice. I was working in a new world, in a new voice, and with a complicated, non-linear and multi-faceted structure. And then of course, there was the intervention and stresses of “real life.”
And it was worth it. Because I’m so proud of the result.
Okay, enough philosophy. Let’s see some numbers (as I’ve done in the past):
- Number of months spent drafting: 17
- Number of plotlines rejected during this process: 5-8 (depending on your metric of measurement)
- Length: ~85,000 words
- Difference in length between first and final draft: +18,000 words
- Parts: 3 (one more than Jane’s)
- Chapters: 41
- Un-chapters: 20
- Pages in manuscript version of draft (Note: will be different than typeset book!): 316
- Body count: (guys, this is a Jane Austen retelling) 0
- Unicorns: (Jane. Austen.) 0
- Zombies: (Jane… oh, wait.) Still 0
- Number of main characters invented whole cloth with no correlation to Persuasion: 1
- Maximum number of Persuasion characters coalesced into any one FDSTS character: 2
- Number of Persuasion characters cut completely because I found their plot lines to be entirely too creepy in the adapted version: 1
- Number of all-nighters I pulled while working on this book: 6
- Number of human beings I gestated while working on this book: 1
- Number of times I accidentally referred to said human being by main character’s name during the revision process of this book: >12
- Amount of money I should probably keep in reserve to pay for said human being’s therapy bills once she realizes I call her by the names of the imaginary people in my head: >1 million dollars
And there you have it, folks. Manuscript #12.
What’s next?
As I wade through my final round of revisions on my latest novel, I’ve been thinking a lot about the requirements of retellings (I wrote about this some last year).
At the time, I said:
“Holly’s way of thinking about retellings freed my mind from some of the doubt demons I had about tackling my own. And basically, what I got from the conversation was this: fair game. No matter what the source material, that’s THEIR story. Your story is your own, and you can feel free to jettison, combine, and remix whatever elements you need to to make your story the best it can be.In fact, the more it is your own, the better I like the retelling.”*
And I still feel that way, after writing a retelling that both fully encompasses all the major plot points and character arcs of Persuasion while also jettisoning, combining, remixing and, most of all, adding stuff that makes sense for my version. (I’m not going to detail what that is quite yet. I’ve been working on that post in my head for the future, though!)
Recently, I was reading an article about John Scalzi’s new book, Fuzzy Nation, which is a reboot of an old SF series from the 60s. He says, in part:
“You start asking, “What do we expect from our main characters today? What do we want out of our protagonists?” Those are the things that I would be asking myself, as opposed to individual, particular story plots. The overall arc of the story, you’ll notice, is pretty much the same in both books. The way that I look at it is, here’s the opening part of the book, here’s the end part of the book. Both books inhabit a sort of plot field. And the way that both of the stories wander through that plot field is markedly different.”
That’s it exactly for me. The arc is the same, and most of the plot points (the biggies, in my mind, anyway) are the same. But there are things that concern me as a writer that didn’t concern Jane, that concern today’s readers that don’t concern hers, and that concern my heroine that did not concern Anne Elliot. There are ways that my protagonist is very different than Anne Elliot — she inhabits a different world and was raised in a way that is similar to Anne’s in many ways, but also completely alien in others.
The first time I watched The Fellowship of the Ring movie, I was impressed with the way the filmmakers (and I really give Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens a lot of credit here) simplified things by getting rid of extraneous characters. (I love Tom Bombadil and Goldberry as much as anyone, folks, but people who were first coming to the story didn’t need them.) The example of this that stuck with me most, as a storyteller, was getting rid of Glorfindel and putting Frodo on Arwen’s horse instead. It makes Arwen a more vital part of the story in a way that’s required, given the primacy of the love story on the plot, and it cuts down somewhat on a pretty enormous character count.**
I think when you sit down to do an adaptation of any sort, you have to ask yourself what aspects of the story are the parts you are most interested in preserving, and what must change in order to serve those aspects of the story within the framework of your adaptation (even Tolkien didn’t know how to incorporate the love story into his book, which is why it’s an appendix).
There’s an added psychological benefit if you’re like me, and are neurotic enough to offer an apology to the little-Jane-looking-over-your-shoulder every time you make a big change — you tell yourself you’re doing it so you can keep something else, something important, something that both Jane and you love.
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* Though when some people criticized me for that blog post, they quoted out of context an entirely different section of the post that made it seem like I don’t believe in saving anything from the original. In fact, I am quite faithful, and there are certain parts of the book that are to me, absolutely sacrosanct.
** Yes, I said that — me, who is known for populating her novels with entire football teams.
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