The Multitudes

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly spent some time interviewing and observing creative people and noted that:

Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."

Imagine the conversations an "individual" has with the "multitudes" in her brain. "Is this a good enough conflict?," she asks. "Nah," the other says. "Crossing bridges isn't interesting. Burn it!" Yet another raises her hand. "But that's not a revolution. Isn't that mere anarchy?"

Csikszentmihaly also observed that if most people are either introverts and extroverts, most creatives are both. They are also proud and humble at the same time, and this comes from an awareness that they did something important, but that others have also done more than they had. It's quite a contradiction.

He also says that the most excruciating thing for creatives is when they can't create. At all:

Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

Page to screen

Maud Newton of the IFC admits that "adapting fiction for the screen has always been a tricky endeavor." Hollywood wants the glitter of literature and transform it into box office gold, but there are missteps all the way. Newton says: "For every "Apocalypse Now," "The Big Sleep" or "Rebecca," there are scores of butchered classics and box office duds." She cites the recent foray of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the big screen. But even Javier Bardem's energy can't save it. Instead, Newton points us to another film that has Bardem in it--"No Country For Old Men," a Cormac McCarthy novel which the Coen brothers adapted for the screen. So an actor, no matter how great and gifted, can't make the jump from page to screen work. The material may be a literary classic, but it's not an assurance it'll be great movie material. Newton thinks that "No Country for Old Men" worked well for the screen because it's probably not as lush as the Marquez novel. McCarthy's prose was "so stripped-down novelistically, it tended to read like stage directions."

So if you follow that line of thought, the sort of prose that will also work for the screen is something that is stripped down and with room enough for improvisation and development. A short story really is a good candidate, and surely editor Stephanie Harrison will agree. She put together the book Adaptations, which contains 35 short stories which were the basis for Hollywood movies. The book is divided into sections, with parts for independent movies and comic books and the "difficult" ones to adapt, like Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers." All the writers who tried to adapt Hemingway for the movies said one thing: The guy writes on water. Lots of style, but all the action is suggested. But your mind is working overtime to fill in what was left unsaid. And that is where you put in all those other scenes not in the story.