We have been working hard on our project designed to bring the 8-novel Angel Mountain Saga to the screen. Lots of challenges and opportunities!
One of the things on which we have needed to concentrate is the perception that diaries (fictional or real) are difficult to adapt for the large or small screen, because so much of the narrative is told rather than shown, and the only things that happen are directly experienced by the narrator. There is something in that. We may never get a clear mental picture of the narrator, because there is no way that he or she would ever describe his or her physical characteristics in a diary intended for personal satisfaction, let alone his or her personality traits. As an author speaking in the “voice” of the heroine Martha Morgan, I had to drop in snippets in reported or remembered conversations about her beauty and her other physical attributes, and had to make it clear from her choice of words that she was passionate and compassionate, erratic and even eccentric, stubborn and incorrigible — and much else besides. But I have never yet had a reader who complained about “not knowing” Martha — and in fact many have said that through the diary format they had been given access to her spirit and her soul. That level of intimacy and emotional involvement between heroine and reader is something that every writer seeks to achieve.
By the same token the diary writer never describes those who are nearest and dearest, and the reader has to create mental pictures of family members and friends. As for the enemies, and those who are bit players in the drama, the reader knows that the heroine’s descriptions of them will be biased and very subjective, leaving the possibility that there is more to them than we might know…...
Also, in many diaries there is not much emphasis on the narration of unfolding events, or the development of a drama, but much more emphasis on the feelings and reactions of the writer — hopes, fears, anticipation, elation or disappointment. Even black despair, for a narrator who has to cope with her own personal black dog………. That having been said, there is an immediacy in diary writing that does allow a story to be driven forward at high speed, with surprises delivered suddenly and withy maximum impact, without any early warning signals.
Those are the challenges. But think of the opportunities! A fictional diary lays down the essential events from the beginning to the end of the narrative, and because a novelist follows the same set of rules as a screenwriter, there will be a basic three-act structure. In an adaptation, there will be far too many characters and too many events, and many people and happenings will have to be dumped. Key locations will have to remain unvisited. But in all of that there are huge creative opportunities — in the tweaking of the story and in the fashioning of character. A great screenwriter like Andrew Davies seems to have the innate ability to cull out from a complex narrative the essential components of a story that will appeal to a wide variety of viewers. He will have a clear picture in his mind of the hero or heroine and all the members of the supporting cast and he will use many devices in the process of making them believable and interesting. And as for the villains, the screenwriter will effectively have carte blanche, because their back stories (about which a diary writer or reader knows little) can now be invented and built into a screenplay as a B-narrative or a C-narrative. And writers like Andrew Davies have never been afraid of introducing new storylines or even new characters, if they think that these tweaks will enhance the power of the central story.
The best of all possible worlds — a story loved by hundreds of thousands of readers, an imperfect heroine who is loved by everybody, and a vast range of opportunities for a creative retelling in which many characters who were previously in the shadows can be brought out into the light and thus brought to life.
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