TROGDOR'S MONDAY THOUGHTS #14

After finishing Moby Dick, I decided to continue my study of the classics. The next literary giant I've vowed to slay is none other than The Ingenious Man of La Mancha: Don Quixote.

Though it was written over 200 years before Moby Dick, it's available in versions with modern translations, making it a much less dense read than Melville's brick of a novel. I've found myself tickled by the tales of the overly serious yet undeniably foolish Don Quixote, actually laughing out loud several times.

(One such phrase that continues to crack me up: "I swear"—and he looked up to heaven and clenched his teeth— "that I am about to do so much damage to you that it will put sense back into all the lying squires in the world who serve knights errant!" The so much damage phrasing just absolutely kills me)

While I'm not finished yet, I have stopped and considered something peculiar about this work: it's never really been adapted. This is one of the most famous classics in the world, and no ones ever tried to make a direct adaptation. (No, Man of La Mancha doesn't count)

Of course, after thinking critically on it for a moment, I realized it sort of made sense. The story's format, as well as the events of said story; they don't really work outside of the written word. The sad tragedy of Don Quixote's madness is almost impossible to convey without the long expressive paragraphs detailing the fine points of his peculiarly specific insanity. The many beatings that befall him and his squire, while comical when described in the novel, would come across as egregiously brutal if depicted on screen.

This paradigm reinforces my belief in the importance of the written word (Shocking, I know). Quite simply put there are stories that cannot be properly told, without the medium of a written narrative.

Speaking of adaptations, there are two on my radar. One is obviously Sanderson's Cosmere, with his recent deal with Apple TV. His are stories that I feel would translate very well to the screen; the epicness of his worlds, the intensity of the action, the character moments. It's a perfect fit.

Contrarily, I'm also aware that Universal Studios has purchased the rights to make a Dungeon Crawler Carl tv series. This, I can't help but think will be an unmitigated disaster. The real draw, the heart and soul of those books is the nitty gritty details. The AI's description of weapons and monsters. The chat interactions between characters. Those details that make the book are things that I predict will be impossible to depict faithfully on screen.

My work doesn't avoid this scrutiny either.

You may be surprised at the number of times in the past where I read a NSFW comic, or saw a gif, or something like that, and a part of me went "Ooo, I like that, I should write a story about that". And then, after getting a few pages in, I realized that the scene I was imagining ultimately worked best as that comic/gif etc. that I originally saw. Me writing about it wasn't adding anything formula, I was just trying to replicate something I liked and the end result was lesser for it.

In conclusion/TL:DR - The medium of a media is as important as the content.

Cheers

-TROGDOR297