Daddy Wants a Shine

Last month I read The Shining, and these last couple of weeks I've watched both the movie and television miniseries. Like many movies I didn't see until I was older, The Shining was ruined for me by The Simpsons, but in a good way. That was definitely the spark of my interest in The Shining story, but more recently I've become quite interested in the Intellectual Property(as it were) as I think it's a great example of what goes wrong when trying to migrate a story across mediums. The movie and the miniseries both take a decidedly different approach to adapting the story and as far as I'm concered, they both failed in doing so.

Let's look at the book first. Now, this is actually the only book by Stephen King that I've read, so I'm not going to presume to be an expert on him or his writing style, but I've read a lot about him and his insights into writing and I think all those insights are on display in this book(for better and worse). Cheifly, what I liked most about this book were the characters. I think King's greatest strength as a writer is his ability to present the character voices quite distinctly, especially though third person narrative. This makes the book pretty accesable and quite easy to read. Though this, King presents a haunting tale of a man struggling with alchohol and authority issues, driven mad when he's manipulated into giving into his vices. It's a good book, if a bit rambly in it's approach to the climax(which is really good).

In his book On Writing, King states that stories should not be plotted out beforehand, and that the writer should instead focus on the "seed" of the story and let it grow itself. I both stenuously agree and disagree with this(Ambivalence!). On the one hand, I think that a good idea, with well rounded and developed characters should be able to write itself(to a degree, naturally). In that, the writer should never really reach a point where he can't decide what he wants the character to do. If the character is fully developed, the writer should know how the character will react to most situations. On the other hand, I think it's a terrible idea to to write a story without a clear idea of what you want to say and how it's going to be said. Now, keep in mind that this dilema could easily be solved with some strong editing, but that's not always the case.

In the case of The Shining, I feel that some tighter plotting could have made the book much better. The chapters almost seem to hop without any concern for the flow of the book. I don't think it's all that distracting, per se, but upon finishing the book, it felt really long for only having a few (what I would call) key scenes. King also likes to dwell on backstory, which adds leagues of sympathy to the character of Jack Torrance, but the story seems to lose some subtlety in doing so.

But all in all, it's a fantastic story. Ghosts, a madman trying to murder his family, a pshychic child, it's no wonder Hollywood would want to mine this for a movie. But there's no way you could trancribe a suitable screenplay by using everything in the book. It's litttered with backstory, it's a very long, slow build to it's climax, and some of the supernatural elements are seemingly impossible by the special effects standards of the time. So, how does Hollywood do with an adaptation?

More to come later.