Why are Movie Adaptations so Iffy? (Mailbox)

Why do movie adaptations of books so often suck?

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer a couple a week.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  Talking to me on the street may end up in your "question" being a mailbox and your name becoming Cedrick.]   

Cedrick asks:   

I just sat through The Dark Tower, and man I really wanted to like it, but...just no. I think the last time I thought a movie was really honestly true to its source material was The Shawshank Redemption. Even Lord of the Rings added all that Arwen bullshit and took out some of the best stuff. Don't even get me started on The Hobbit. What the fuck! They usually make such crappy changes to movies. Why can't movies just do a book fucking....RIGHT?

My reply:

They're not bad, Cedrick. They're just not BOOKS. Only books are books. I love movies, and I love books, but they're very different.

Full confession: this question didn't exactly get sent to me. It was more one of those questions that someone asks me and I pretend I got it as a letter. ("Surely that conversation I eavesdropped on overheard on the bus COULD be a letter someone sent in!") It was actually from a conversation I had around the time that I was doing The Book Was so Much Better poll a couple of months back. I'm not even sure the person's name was Cedrick, but they looked like a Cedrick, so I'm running with it. I'm writing it because last week Facebook has split down roughly the middle over whether A Wrinkle in Time was a terribad Disney adaptation that chose form over substance or a touching adaptation that cleaved close to the soul of the original while giving it a well needed makeover from it's 1962-strong-Christian-overtones source material. (And I'm sure that none of the comments on any social media will try to rehash that discussion because that's not really the point of this article. Yep. Just sure of it.)

Book nerds always want perfect movies and they'll pretty much never get them. Yes, of course there will always be the usual cavalcade of reasons movies suck from budget problems to director firings to producers trying too micromanage an artistic vision. But even accounting for the regular reasons movies suck, most word nerds won't get their fantasy come true, and there are several reasons for that but we can unpack the big ones.

1- Movies are just different.

If you want to piss off a film student, show them that meme with the iceberg.

That's the one.
Oh look...an angry mob outside my window. I wonder what they're on about.

Man oh man, will this make them turn that really pretty purple. You will get pages long screeds about how reductive this is. (Why don't they ever make a film about it, I wonder.) They will make counter memes and call you names. Whole empires will be crushed. It's inspired really.

The thing is, it's both true AND reductive. A movie is a different medium. You could just as easily reverse the words here and also be right. A movie shows you different things that a book can't.

You can't describe every last detail of a room the way a camera panning across it would, and if you tried your audience would be in a coma before the forty pages you needed were half over. One sweeping panoramic shot can take the place of pages of clunky attempts to describe a place's geography. Acting–especially good acting–can bring life and inflections to words. (Ever READ a Mamet play? Everyone either doesn't finish a sentence or says it at least twice, all while "MMMMM" ing their way through the scene changes.) A filmmaker has tools at their disposal that the pure linguistics of the written medium simply doesn't. Similarly showing a character's inner thought processes is a lot different unless you want to do shitty Dune-style voice overs. And a book can clear five minutes of vital exposition in a short paragraph. And no amount of prose rhythm or wordplay genius is likely to make it to a movie. Books have tools at their disposal that films don't. Different media will always create a different story.


2- You have to take out something. And not everyone's going to like what you pick.

You know the reason Shawshank Redemption moved to film so well? It's actually a surprisingly simple and oft unknown fact about movie adaptations. Obviously it had star power and a good director and a lot of things going for it, but the main reason the adaptation was so loyal to its source material is that it wasn't a novel.

It was a novella. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption clocks in at 38,000 words. Which is about 85 pages or so. (I'd have to dig up my copy of Different Seasons to verify this, but the PDF is 88, so I'm guessing that's about right.)

88 pages became a 2:22 minute movie. And they STILL took some minor stuff out. (Red's trial and such.)

And while they changed a few things, they were able to make a NEARLY two and a half hour movie and cram in almost the entire narrative. The same is true of Stand By Me. With short stories you have to add a bunch of padding and with novels you have to take a HUGE amount of stuff out. It's impossible to hit all the beats. And we're not just talking about Tom Bombadil and the scouring of The Shire. The shorter a source is, the more likely its movie will be loyal to its vision.

Now if an 88 page novella becomes a two and half hour movie, how much do you suppose you have to cut from a 200 page kids book to get a 100 minute film (which is around the average for younger audiences)? What about a four hundred and fifty page book with a run time of a couple of hours? Or a seven book series into a single movie?

You have to take things out.

And anyone who really likes that book isn't going to like one moment of it being cut away. ("What?? How dare they leave out Fiyero's diarrhea in this remake of Wicked.") And whatever choices you make, not everyone is going to agree with what you cut and what you kept. The ascension of serial television might see a great adaptation on Hulu or Netflix or Amazon, but we're probably not getting one down at the AMC-14


3- Not every change is for the worst.

We all know the Jonah Jameson Hollywood exec caricature lighting his Cuban cigar with a hundred dollar bill and saying: "Needs more sex! I'm not doing Wuthering Heights unless it has a car chase in it. Get me pictures of Spider Man!"

Reality is a bit more complicated.

This movie is crap crap crap megacrap.
I'll give you $200 million to produce it if you add a giant robot lizard. Kids love robots.
Image credit: Columbia Pictures CorporationMarvel/Enterprises/Laura Ziskin Productions

Yes, many decisions Hollywood makes are based on what will make a movie more profitable, and some of them display a remarkable lack of source-material knowledge (somehow I don't think Demi Moore gasping and grinding on the New England rice* harvest was quite what Hawthorne had in mind), but they do occasionally take a chance or release something that doesn't just sound like sweet angels printing money.

*Wait....what?

Hollywood is a business though. You want art films that lose money, you can go to film festivals or dig around on Youtube. Honestly. I'm not kidding. Some of that stuff is Br-fucking-illant. And yes, you might have to spend some time wondering why the clown is making pancakes, but a lot of it will just be fantabulous compared to Hollywood formulas. This isn't just my artsy fartsy side either. They're often compelling and fun and extremely well done.

When it comes to making movies out of books though, you probably need a budget that even a grad film student with a shiny grant isn't going to be able to match. And Hollywood has to try make back its significant investment, pay about ten gagillion guild and union members, and turn a profit because it's a business and THIS. IS. SPARTA CAPITALISM.  (Though some movies make back LOTS of money, most movies lose money, and so Hollywood is constantly trying to refine its recipe.) And that means someone's going to do some market research and try to figure out how to make the movie more accessible. "Accessible" is a little different than "add a giant robot."

Now here it's important that we acknowledge that two roads are diverging in a yellow wood.

When I say "not every change is for the worst" I want you to understand that some of them truly goddamned were. Turning Gatsby into basically a music video, dragging out a kids book into three indulgent movies (with shitty CGI), putting the white person front and center in the narrative even when they weren't, casting Mike Myers, whacky voice overs to replace "thought" text, stripping the religious undertones from a book about religious undertones and just turning it into a movie about a really kick ass polar bear, or abandoning the religious OVERTONES in a book that is an allegory about Christianity and turning the movie into a story about white kids running around killing Mediterranean looking bad guys, trying to completely change the tone from satire to serious or from serious to satire or from satire to satirizing the serious people who don't get that it's satire....well, you get the idea.

And then there's THIS shit.
New Line Cinima

Some changes suck and are terrible and are made because cis het white dude executives think cis het white dudes are "everyman" (and will sell) and white dude lenses on the world are the only ones that count.

But that's not always true these days...

Sometimes these changes really are inclusive and increase the access (not just the marketing image of whiteness, male gaze, toxic masculinity). Some of these books were written before civil rights or the ERA. They maybe have themes that are more resonant for the era in which they were written like anti-tribalism, capitalism, or exceptionalism. Perhaps they are are sausage fests and lily whitewashed whitefests. They espouse toxic masculinity. They have characters who are homophobic, transphobic, racist, or misogynist in a way that adds nothing to the story. Changing certain things to make the story more enjoyable to a wider audience is not always a bad thing. And I know you have some feels about Arwen, but she's probably in that movie because someone said: "This fucking wangfest needs more than just Galadriel and Eowyn!"

We've been telling stories a little differently to reflect the social values of the time since Beowulf and before.

Or sometimes it's just a case of what has happened in between within media and/or the genre. Having your villain be just a brain in a 1962 book is different than after 55 years of that being a sci-fi trope that got so cliché it became lampooned and then a big joke.

"Michaelangelo...dude, one smack with the chucks ought to
totally detubularize his pizza movie night."

And if our author is not beloved to the point of being understood in their own time (like maybe Shakespeare and a few others), some changes might get made.

Other than a few hundred thousand raging book nerd purists (and I want to make it perfectly clear that I am one of those raging book nerd purists), not a lot of people are going to see some anachronism that's dry like Russian black bread or steeped in postwar Christian allegory or because they loved the book. They're going to want the relatable (to today's multicultural audiences) protagonist, the resonate (to today's topicality) conflict, and...maybe that one scene that was a little navel-gazing could be given some panache.

Or you know....a car chase.


4- Once the changes start, it's really important to figure out what matters

Okay so now you, intrepid filmmaking team given a budget by the studio that isn't enough but will have to do as long as you add an action sequence that isn't in the book at around 30 minutes to keep the pace from plodding and losing the audience.

You also have to change a few things because it's 2018 and no one wants that purely cissexist heteronormative source material.

And you have to take a lot out to make a movie that isn't nine hours long.

You HAVE to make changes, so what will it be? What do you change? What if you pull an important character or relegate them to a minor role then farm their lines to someone else. What if the new person wouldn't say it that way? Which subplots will you be getting rid of? Is the narrative more important or the theme? Which characters do you focus on?

How do you go about deciding which core ideas are essential to the soul of what this book is? Once you've decided that and a vision begins to crystallize, it becomes a lot easier to decide what's not going to make it into the movie medium. ("Okay, I want to focus on the story of what it means to have free will, then I'm going to take out cyber babbel parts that focus on the tech and what it can do.") And whatever you pick, it's going to disappoint some of the people who know your source material well enough to know what you left behind.

5- And then you get the creative licence.

Not because a cut had to be made or a thing changed for today's audiences or whatever, but just something the filmmaker decides to change. Because that's something artists do. Because movie adaptations are essentially one artist retelling another in a whole different media. And a lot of times, even if their change is right on the money for a general audience and and right for someone who'd never read the book and right for a casual fan and right for a the folks who found the change interesting and delightful, they still annoy the folks who just wanted to see the print come to life on the screen with absolutely no alterations.

This is why the more reread and beloved a book is, the more likely you are to probably hate the movie. Those books you read once and can't really remember are the ones you'll not shed too many tears over.


All of these are the reasons why occasionally you get a movie like Blade Runner, The Godfather, or Princess Bride that arguably ends up being better than its book. (Rare, but it happens.) A team identifies a far more resonating facet of a story to focus on, and a lot people run around never even knowing there's a book.

So when we book nerds go to see movies, we can accept that if we're lucky, we're going to see a bit of audio/visual media roughly similar to the book we like with some familiar moments that hopefully cleaves close to the spirit of its source material. If we're not so lucky, the filmmaker has made some changes that pretty much ruin the whole thing. But either way we're not going to get "THE BOOK ON SCREEN™" so it's important to remember that we're watching the movie for a MOVIE'S sake and that it's an adaptation.

Mailbox Week Coming

Hi everyone!

So this weekend turned into a swirl of side gigs and long nights.

Next week, in addition to a couple of other posts, I'm going to try to plow out some of this backlog of mailbox questions.

Question: Is Talent Important to a Writer? (F.A.Q.)

Short answer: Not really. At least not the way you're probably using the word. But maybe. But not as much as work.

Longer answer: This is less of a frequently asked question, and more of a frequently hot topic. 

Some comic or writer or something expresses irritation at having their years of studying, their decades of practice, their unpaid hours upon hours of building an audience all reduced to "talent*" that someone envious of them wishes they simply....had. ("If only I had TALENT, I could be more like you....") Or it goes the other way: talent comes up, and people are 100% cocksure it is absolutely vital (and usually that they got it), and that anyone without it is simply wasting their time.

[Generally, no one cares if someone calls them talented, by the way. Particularly not once or before saying their name wrong at the Academy Awards. It's a fine word with a lot of metonymy. But when someone starts to actually convey that they think that the artist simply has some mystical ingredient that makes them good, and there hasn't a boatload of work––that's when many artists start to get a bit "Well actually…" about it.]

And while the existence of talent might be a complicated topic for a series of conversations, the artist who is having decades of toil reduced to some innate aptitude that one is either born with or not isn't likely to find this exchange quite as charming as intended.

But should they point this out, another group shows up.

There's a real loud faction out there advocating hard for the idea of talent — and let me go ahead and spoil the ending for you: they're almost exclusively not the successful writers/artists/whatever. They want talent to be real because they want to believe they have it and that it is going to set them apart. Toss the lot in a crucible, and you'll find the writers on the other side of paychecks and publication generally have a vastly different picture of what got them there than "talent," how important a role "talent" plays, and particularly what could be done by a determined person (no matter how old or "untalented" when they start) if they wanted to become good at some kind of art.

Dissing "talent" seems to be an existential threat to the former group. I don't know if it's because then that means it's a wake-up call that they'll have to get off their asses or just that almost anyone who works hard can become what they think makes them special, but they treat the idea poorly even though it is ubiquitous among those they often seek to emulate.

[Note: I mention this periodically in this post, but I want to acknowledge it explicitly now: Not everyone can write. There are limiting factors that it is sheer ableism to ignore. Physical realities of human bodies (including human brains) make it a skill that not everyone has and incredibly difficult for others to cultivate.]

First of all, it's really hard to figure out what "talent" even means.

This is like trying to measure intelligence–what you end up with is a messy glob of data that has profound cultural biases, favors certain kinds of bellwethers, and reveals a tremendous inability to separate nature from nurture.

It's a little easier in kids, but not that much. But by the time a linguistic aptitude shows up, it's very hard to know if that's some innate circumstance of genetics or if it has more to do with parents who talk a lot and use big words. By the time someone can be said to have a "talent" in writing, it would be nearly impossible to know if that was merely a result of their particular swirl of genetics or if had to do with their parents' love of books, with a dedication to library visits, with trips to museums, with the quality of preschool, with their culture's value on particular art forms....whatever. (And if you're noticing that a lot of this "talent" dovetails strongly with having upper class resources, that's very perceptive of you.) Even the famed geniuses folks want to hold up as proof of talent, like Mozart, had a childhood of dedication, practice, ruthless drive, and parents who could afford to be supportive. (And by "supportive" I mean an ambitious helicopter parent living vicariously through their kid.) Look at the actual lives (even of wunderkind), and it complicates and undermines the narrative of casual, unpracticed genius.

Not every writer writing for the same amount of time will produce the same quality prose even if we could somehow account for stylistic differences (we can't), but consider this: Fifty years ago the dominant thought in creative writing programs was that genius could NOT be taught. You either had it or you didn't. Then a bunch of education experts broke down what people meant by "genius" and discovered that actually most of it could be learned in a classroom. What will we understand fifty years from now, I wonder.

What IS clear is that very little under the superficies of what people call "talent" can't be trained, practiced, refined, achieved through careful revision, or taught, even much later in life, whatever their "opening" skill set, and that seems to break with the idea that you're either good at something or you're not.

Trying to figure out whether you have talent or not is almost meaningless. Defining it and understanding it is nearly impossible and it won't take the place of work anyway.


Okay, well, whatever you call it, some people have a leg up, right?

Sort of?

Some people start with a leg up, though it probably depends on what you consider the "starting line."(First grade? Graduation from high school? 20 years old? Graduation from college? 30?)  Certainly, some people, through some unknown cocktail of nature and nurture may have an advantage over others, but this will not last if they do not continue to work, particularly if they count on that advantage to keep them better than those who work hard. A hard-working writer with less initial advantage can catch up, and eventually excel beyond them.

In fact, this happens quite often.

What seems to be clear is that, barring physical limitations, getting really good at a skill like writing might take a while and a lot of effort, but it doesn't require one to be innately "good" and can be started at any point. And while an athletic skill started after forty might mean someone is never going to the Olympics, they can still get quite good; and furthermore, writing tends to have a longer window of opportunity before it is made difficult by biological degeneration in most humans. Some folks write bestsellers and literary masterpieces into their fifties, sixties, and even nineties.

An aspiring writer never deemed to have "talent" and lacking a casual skill in writing could begin in their thirties to read voraciously, practice writing, commit themselves to improving, learn the craft, study narrative and storytelling, teach themselves the grammar they still struggle with, and, in short, immerse themselves in reading and writing, and within a only few months would be writing at a level far beyond someone who was told they were "talented" in high school and got all A's in their English degree, who then went on to be a general manager at the Coco's in Arcadia, rarely reads anymore these days, and almost never writes except to poke at a half-finished vampire vs. zombies novel tucked in a drawer every once in a while when the inspiration hits on their days off. 

Even if the latter still nurtures the quiet belief that they have talent. 

Within a few years, the former might have an audience and perhaps be making some money while the latter is basically doing the same thing as ten years earlier except hoping that this time around they'll get that promotion to district manager. Where's the talent now?

Even the most ineffable qualities of many writers — like imagination and language play that can't necessarily be taught — CAN be practiced like a muscle and most folks will get better at it in time. There are some neurodivergences that would make this particularly hard, and such folks might have to stick to more clinical writing. Still, what certainly merits out over and over again is that if there IS something like talent, it means absolutely bupkis next to hard work.

Is there something? Anything?

Sort of?

There are some obstacles (like learning disabilities). It would be ableist to claim that everyone will have exactly the same difficulty/ease becoming a successful writer. Of course some people have a physically harder time writing. And certain disorders make organized thought take more effort. It stands to reason that other folks will have an easier time. (But if you want an example of someone with two major learning disabilities [dyslexia and fucking RAGING ADHD] who has substituted hard work and passion for innate ability, and gotten to the point where they're making money writing, you're reading them.) 

Obviously, there are some people who have proclivities to tell stories or display linguistic aptitude. There are people who have the discipline to sit and write alone, calmly and for hours; the kind of self-control that other people can't even fathom. There are people who are exquisitely precise with language. And there are people with a penchant for keeping large ensemble casts of characters in their heads. (This may have more to do with whether they end up being a tech writer, a poet, or a novelist than whether they can write at all, but certainly these inclinations exist.) Maybe we don't know if these predispositions are all in the genes or have something to do with early childhood (maybe we're all wrong, and it's prenatal vitamins or zodiac signs [Libras, baby! We're all entirely a monolith of writers.]), but they're there early enough to affect a whole lifetime.

However, the most meaningful "talent" when it comes to who merits out at being a "successful" writer (by whatever bellwether is being used to define success) seems to be genuinely enjoying writing (and reading), and being passionate about doing it and getting better at it. It's the people who like sitting down every day to do some writing and who enjoy the endeavor even when it feels like work who typically have enviable careers or accolades, not the people who run around trying to find a Talent-O-Meter to use on themselves. If someone likes writing and has been doing it regularly for years, they're likely to be seen as "talented" by most of the world that uses that word as a synonym for "skill that took a lot of hard work to acquire."

Mathematical aptitude exists too, but you rarely hear physicists worrying about their talent.


But what about prodigies and the completely talentless? Surely they are real?

Sure.

And if you were one, I guarantee you'd already know it.

The Shakespeares and Faulkners and Morrisons and Rumis of the world may be beyond the grasp of most to approach, and we may never compose such delectable prose, but keep in mind a few things:

1) These people may have had something "talent-shaped," but they stayed at the top of their game with hard work. If Shakespeare had gone into the goat breeding business and only ever wrote "when the muse moved him to words," we'd probably be down one Globe theater, all reading Beckett and Wilde in high school, and people would have to say my sweet and charming innocence is as pure as something OTHER than the driven snow (which, baring the occasional threesome, it totally is).

2) An okay writer can become a good writer with work. A decent writer can write something poignant. A good writer can have a career, and even write a masterpiece with enough revision. Almost none of us are Shakespeare or Morrison, but most of us can develop our skill.

3) The truly "talentless" writer is probably as rare as the Shakespeare or Morrison. It's the entire other side of the bell curve and just as rare. Most people who love reading and love writing (and are not just floridly expressing love for something they never do) are pretty good at it. Not that everyone is pretty good at writing, but most of those who are not don't actually want to be writers, and many of them don't read very much. It's like having someone with actual amusia (not just an unpracticed ear) who wants to be a (non-percussion) musician. It happens, but it's very, very rare that someone with amusia actually passionately burns to recreate the note-y part of music (the beat and the lyrics would be more likely). Most of us who love writing have gone through a hazing process that we weren't even aware of over the years, and we are going to get better if we get our asses to work.

Now if you're using prodigies to prove that there must be a bell curve that some people fall further to the right on, that's probably true in theory, but even if you could separate it from passion and hard work (spoiler: you can't), on a long enough timeline, it won't matter. Genius might give you a boost, but the work will always merit out.

Why do we have such a hard time letting go of this idea?

I think there are a lot of reasons. Cultural mythos narratives of exceptionalism. The ubiquity of prodigies–often messianic "chosen one" prodigies–in popular media. A deep societal demand that we be "really good" at something "productive" because that's what good capitalists do. A strong correlation that belief in talent has with unearned advantages (such as being born rich or being a white man) that probably leads to feelings of entitlement. And the fear of something called "effort shock," which frankly (when it comes to writing) should terrify the total fucking shiznit out of anyone who doesn't love writing for its own sake.

Did you know that it goes back to a class issue? It's why painters often DO want to be called "talented" instead of skilled. Painting used to be skilled labor. Then it was turned into a "fine art" that only the aristocracy sat around doing and suddenly sprezzatura demanded that they needed another word that meant anything other than "long hard hours of practice."

It's a seductive world to imagine that if we aren't good at something, it's because we lack some je ne sais quoi we can't control, not because we haven't put in sufficient effort. Similarly, it's more compelling to imagine there's an "IT" (and we have IT and could tap IT at any time, should we so choose) than to imagine that lots of folks could quickly and easily match and then exceed our skill if they started working hard.

What does matter?

Ironically, most successful writers (the ones you've heard of–the ones you might have a book of on your shelf or recognize the names of) have a very different formula for what got them to where they are. They don't spend a lot of time worried about talent. Not that there aren't any arrogant writers who talk about how awesome they have been since the moment of their conception (there totally are), but for the most part, most writers pretty consistently talk about a different handful of contributors to their success. Some leave out one or two (though never the first one on this list) but these are the recurrent themes.

Tons of hard work: I don't really know any writers (personally or through stories shared by those I've never met) who got to where they would consider themselves successful, and who don't ALSO have similar stories of the long, grueling hours they toiled away at perfecting their craft. A few of them undertook some part of this process in the service of another writing career (tech writing or content writing), some learned in years of college and MFA programs, but all of them have put in the hours. Some have put in decades of "unpaid internship" hours before they see their first paycheck or fan. Some had to walk five miles as children to get to the library that was their sanctuary against the bullies (uphill both ways, right, Dad?). Some worked full time jobs, came home and cooked dinner, put the toddlers to bed and crept into the hallway (since there was no dedicated office and that is where the TV was least distracting) to write for a half an hour a night. 

But all have worked hard and none relied on talent to carry them.

They do the work. And they recognize that the more work they do, the better their output becomes.

Unearned (but not innate) advantages: Oddly we come full circle to the idea that much of what we call "talent" might actually be privilege. A lot of writers acknowledge that their humble beginnings of writerdom sparked by having access to a library, parents that read to them every night, or a writer in the family. Maybe they had a tiny bit of nepotism in the form of an uncle who is an agent or editor, or a trust fund to burn through in those initial years of writing without pay. (Some obviously have more advantage than others.) They acknowledge the role something that was neither earned nor innate had in shaping their destiny as a writer. They may not call it "privilege," but they acknowledge it.

And some will call it privilege–recognizing that publishing is whitewashed, sexism and heteronormativity influence what sells, class restricts access, and even their titanic amount of work might not yet have found fecund soil were their circumstances different.

Luck: Most writers seem to have a sense of fortune. Maybe it comes from telling ourselves so many "believable" stories that genuine coincidences are things we would tell ourselves are implausible and deus ex machina. ("Ridiculous that this book offer would just HAPPEN. Please revise!") Not that these writers think anyone, regardless of skill, standing at the same place at the same time, would have gotten the same opportunity, but it seems a lot of us aren't quite sure we quite earned every twist of fortune that came our way. (I often talk about how lucky I got to have my Facebook page explode–I would not be where I am today without it.)

Maybe just a little bit of nerve: The writers who are making money (or maybe not, but enjoying success by their own yardsticks) all seem to share just the tiniest bit of moxie. Most struggle with imposter syndrome. Many fret about their peer reviews and are devastated by criticism. (~raises hand~) But at the end of the day, they do believe they have something worth saying and they keep putting themselves out there for the world to see (.....and point at.....and tear apart).

Almost none, ever, talk about their talent.

Best Dystopia [Diverse] (Nominations Needed)

What is the best (worst?) dystopia (not written by a cishet white man)?

This poll is from our Year of Diverse Polls, and as such it can't includes authors who are cishet white men. Please adjust your nominations accordingly.

The world is in ruins. Or maybe it's not in ruins but there's just something a little off. Or maybe it's perfect, but the price is the torturous misery of a single innocent child. Or maybe there's some ham handed analog for racism that's going on between the white kids' strange methods of dividing themselves up by SAT vocabulary words. In any case it's a dystopia, and it is doing its literary work to hold up a twisted mirror to our own society.

The Rules:

1- As always, I leave the niggling to your best judgement because I'd rather be inclusive. If you feel like J.K. Rowling writes dystopia, I'm not going to argue. (Though you might need to "show your work" to get anyone to second your nomination.) If you think Pern is a dystopia, nominate it. I won't be enforcing any rules about it being future Earth or anything.

2- Since dystopias are a setting, they can be for a single book, a series, or several series.

3- You may nominate two (2) dystopias. Two is the number of nominations. Neither one nor three shall ye nominate. And four is right out. I will NOT take any dystopias beyond the second that you suggest. (I will consider a long list to be "seconds" if someone else nominates them as well.)

3- You may (and should) second as many nominations of others as you wish. So stop back in and see if anyone has put up something you want to see go onto the poll.

4- Please put your nominations here. I will take dystopias nominated only as comments on this post. (No comments on FB posts or G+.)

5- You are nominating WRITTEN DYSTOPIAS, not their movie portrayals. CGI is making the Insurgent movies pretty fun to look at, but if you find the books to be a little contrived, you shouldn't nominate them.

6- No more endless elimination rounds. I will take somewhere between 8-20 best performing titles and at MOST run a single semifinal round. So second the titles you want even if they already have one. (Yes, I guess that would make them thirds, fourths, etc...)

A Year of Diverse Polls

ETA NOTE: I link this post in every version of calls for nominations and calls to vote and results for the given polls. Yet every time, someone who clearly hasn't read it jumps into the comments on my Facebook page to talk about how they would never let an author's whatever affect their love of a book. (Yes, of course you don't. That is exactly the point. Read on.) Let this added edit serve as a clearly marked disclaimer and warning that such comments will be cheerfully deleted and if its progenitor brings any "you liberals/you SJWs and your" or "THIS is the real racism" crap to the table as well, the cheerfulness will extend to their banning. 

Please consider there is an entire menu of articles here called Social Justice Bard. If you think using "SJW" as a pejorative on FB is going to get you *anything* but banned from my page, please allow me to divest you of your misunderstanding. 

I have a big announcement for our next twelve months (or so) of polls. This post is going to be half announcement and half rules that I can link back to each subsequent poll.

For the next twelve months and change, Writing About Writing will be running polls in the spirit of K.T. Bradford's challenge to stop reading cishet white dudes for a year. Every. Single. Poll. we run here for the next year will have an overarching rule of no cishet white dudes.

Recently I reran this post and our very last poll (about women and gender variant folks of color), and one of the most common bits of....feedback (yes, let's use that nice, steril word) I got was that people don't know and/or care who an author is when picking a book up. They just buy stacks and stacks of "good books" and somehow against all statistical odds their shelves fill with cishet white dudes. Magically.

The point of this exercise is that maybe it's time to think about these things. Maybe the publishing industry is so whitewashed because folks with reasonably good intentions will perpetuate the agendas of folks with absolutely shitstain horrible intentions if the former don't make an active, conscious effort to work against the latter. Maybe cishet white guys have a lot of unearned advantages in publishing (and everywhere else) and leveling the playing field just the tiniest bit will lift up everyone else and if it hurts any of them, it will really only be the mediocre ones.

Besides, it sounds like you all could use some fucking recommendations if you literally can't think of a book by a person of color OR a woman OR someone under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella that would be worth reading. So for the next year, we're going to do all our greatest hits–just without the cis het white dudes.

Here are the guidelines for our next year of polls that I will link with each new poll:

1) I'm not here to gate keep identity. If someone has talked about their race as non-white (in more than a "I'm 1/8th Cherokee" kind of way) or their sexuality in a meaningful way, they're in. They don't have to be living a particular life for us to believe them. (For example, I'm not here for any bi-erasure because someone has a traditional looking marriage.) On the other hand, James Franco....not so much.

2) Passing privilege is a very real and extremely complex and fraught phenomenon where people trade erasure of their identity against the experience of oppression in our society. (I pass as a cishet white dude even though only one of those things is arguably true [and even that I would caveat to anyone close enough to listen to the buy-me-lunch version]. However, I wouldn't be muscling to get onto these polls either as I know my life mostly operates as if I am a cishet white dude.) Let's all admit right now that we don't know (and can't know) all about every biographical detail of every author. We will stick to what we know and what these writers share openly with the world and remember that the spirit of this whole endeavor isn't to be "technically correct" but to encourage ourselves to read outside our normal comfort zone of voices.

3) Similarly "whiteness" can said to be a complex and fraught phenomenon with a moving umbrella of who "counts" and who doesn't. White hispanics, for example have a very complicated relationship with whiteness and it's not so simple as just ethnicity, just skin color, or just nationality. Historically, for example, Jews have very much been OUTSIDE of whiteness, in the last generation or so they tentatively been within whiteness, and are beginning to get pushed towards the edges again by the Nazis, white supremacists, and other members of the extreme right. I don't claim I haven't been raised and treated as white even if my mother's mother's maiden name was Rosencrantz. My point isn't to exclude any one group that is starting to lose their white privilege in the last couple of years to rising bigotry, but many authors (say, for example Neil Gaiman) have enjoyed much of white privilege for most of their career.

4) I know this will likely lead to a lot of polls with cis het dudes of color or cis white women or cis white men who identify as queer.  And folks from these groups sometimes focus on their own experiences with marginalization while being a little insensitive to others'. However in keeping with the spirit of Bradford's challenge, we're only ousting the cishet white dudes this time.

Best Modern Fantasy by a Woman or Gender Variant Author of Color (Poll Results)

The results are in!

Though I would have prefered to see a wider spread between second and third place, but at least it's not a dead heat–and the winner is clear.

Text results below.

Keep your nomination hats tuned to the diversity frequency. I have a big announcement for early tomorrow, and I'll start taking nominations for our next poll shortly after that.


The Fifth Season - NK Jemisin 44 29.14%
Kindred - O. Butler 29 19.21%
Inheritance Trilogy - NK Jemisin 28 18.54%
Who Fears Death - N. Okorafor 19 12.58%
Children of Blood and Bone - T. Adeyemi 14 9.27%
Bloodchild and Other Stories - O. Butler 10 6.62%
The Star Touched Queen - R. Chokshi 5 3.31%
Brown Girl in the Ring - N. Hopkinson 2 1.32%

Admin Weekend

I'm going to do an Admin Weekend (focus on clearing out my e-mail and cleaning up menus).

It's just reruns on the various social media this weekend, but for folks following close, I wanted to let you know why. Got a big week planned starting Monday.