What Makes a Book Musical Worthy?

The content better be as good as the size!

 

 

Black mascara streaked down  my face as I hiccuped, sniffled, and quietly bawled my way through Les Miserables this past weekend. The music has been so inspiring to me that I have been playing it at every opportunity I've had since I saw the film. There's something about a musical that reaches into your soul and makes you feel a person's triumphs, losses, and emotions more than any other medium. However, I did not realize until the opening credits that Les Miserables was a book written by Victor Hugo. I will be curious to see if the book can emit as much feeling as the soaring music that captures a listener's heart. In short, I'm adding the gigantic tome to my incredibly long reading list.

Several books have taken on new life and have been adapted for the stage as musicals. One of my personal favorites Wicked was originally Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. Other triumphant transitions from the page to the stage include Ragtime, The Color Purple, Big River (The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin,) Oliver, My Fair Lady (Pygmalion,) and Cats which was based on a children's book called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Elliot.

Plot lines don't always match up between the play and the original. Wicked and My Fair Lady are shining examples of drastic changes from the leaves of a book to a full on drama extraordinaire. (Others in the list above may differ from their play counterparts, but admittedly I haven't seen all of the plays or read all of the books.)

So my question, one that will require more research, is what causes the spark to go off in a stage write's head? Creativity has always flowed in my veins, but it did not seem to spark the fire that takes a novel to another stage. Whether that stage be a movie, TV show, radio drama, a stage play, or a musical It's always baffled me how someone could rework a novel into something more than it was. Mind you I don't think all medium transitions are a success, but it must take some sort of inspiration to make someone take a novel they've read and make it more.

Is there some quality in a book that makes it easy to transition to a musical, or is it pure determination of the play write or composer to make music from what he/she knows? Do the novels have something in common that makes them so heart wrenching on stage? I mean it's not like we've seen romance novels become stage plays. My opinion is that Spider Man became a musical to make a profit and nothing more. Maybe it's amazing and I'm missing out, but until someone tells me it's outstanding, I will remain skeptical. What makes a novel, or any story become a great musical? If you have an incite or ideas please share them. I'd be curious to see what other people think.

P.S. Day one of my personal novel writing month. My writing buddy has been updated and we are ready to go! From here on out I drop the pen and move to the key board. With 1,612 words to write a day I've got to conserve my energy. So I'll let a computer do my word counts and keep my wrists from cramping up by sticking to tapping keys rather than writing on paper.

Happy Writings!

How Wicked is Wikipedia?

Almost every professor I had at college told their students not to use Wikipedia as a source for their papers. They did say that it was a good place to start to gather information to start research with, but never to rely on it wholly. I heard the same spiel when I was in high school.

I understood on some level that it wasn't completely trustworthy. It is after all an amalgamation of knowledge from individuals around the world and while there are monitors and editors on the site you never know how often misinformation might be added to a page.

The incident that best demonstrates the sharing of misinformation was Steven Colbert introducing and the quickly demonstrating the concept of Wikiality in the summer of 2006. Wikiality was defined on Colbert's piece The Word as, "together we can create a reality we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on."

He then went on to encourage his viewers to alter the information about elephants on Wikipedia. I was between my Junior and Senior year of high school as I watched people flock to the internet and write, "The elephant population in Africa has tripled over the last six months." Wikipedia ended up having to freeze the changes being made to the words elephant and Africa as a result.

Because this was such a highly publicized event Wikipedia responded very quickly, but the idea still stands that any article could be altered by anyone all too quickly.

That being said, I've never found any inaccuracies in my use of Wikipedia. I did as my teachers suggested and followed the sources at the bottom of each page and I used books at the library regularly. In fact I like finding physical sources more than I like using the internet when it comes to research.

Mostly I find a guilty pleasure in checking out a book that hasn't been used since before the seventies or eighties. I did it several times when I was at college and nothing gave me such a thrill as seeing a book getting it's stamp card taken out and replaced with security and due date stickers.

This week I've been doing my research on viruses exclusively on Wikipedia. Over the next few days I'll go through and find primary sources to back up the information I found.

I'm just curious if anyone has some wild or wicked Wikipedia stories out there. Rest assured, I will let you know if I find anything interesting.

Getting Away With It?

When did I think I could get away with professionally editing, without writing first?

I'm not certain when the idea first came into my head. I switched majors in college five times till I found myself comfortably studying English and literature. It was easy, the questions could be argued, and I always figured that at the very least that I could later attend law school. However, my real focus was to become an editor. After all who wouldn't love to read submissions on a daily basis and find the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nora Roberts, or George R. R. Martin?

As you can see, I have a wide range of tastes, It's certainly wider than the respective author's genres above. I thought the job would be ideal. I'm just not certain when I thought I could get away with being the gate keeper to such writers, without first offering up a smidgen of my own work. I've always had these glorified views about how things work, and I didn't have any professionals to guide me or give me a reality check.

I had never been a member of the college paper and I never bothered to volunteer a column. I wrote in a writing circle, but that only lasted one year before it fell apart in my Junior year of college. Of course I wrote analysis papers for my classes, but in the end the only thing remotely professional I could claim was a short piece of fiction that I got published in the schools annual PRISM writing contest. Even then I only got second place to a well accomplished friend who blew the competition away that year. He won something like three first place awards.

I should say, that I was an active college student. It wasn't like I was a good for nothing. I stayed active with Sigma Tau Delta, the National English Honors Association, and worked at school twenty-two hours a week on top of being a full time student. 

You would think at some point I would have woken up from my fantasy and realized that this was not all going to work out as I had envisioned. 

So, here I am, an intern with Penumbra eMag and I've been writing. Doing interviews and attempting to develop a column on early writing. It hasn't been accepted yet, but it is in the works. It's a bit of a hilarious mess really, but I'm going to figure it out and make this thing work. 

I'll have to learn to write for the masses, explore the tools available to me, and fight that tick I got in college called procrastination. This is my attempt to start publicly writing and to move myself into the mentality of writing for the masses. I may have interesting stories or little tid-bitts of information to share. But here it is November, National Novel Writing Month, and I figure this is the best time to give a professional writing career a serious go.