Charlie Hicks – Author

I’ve been working on a project which I have publicly called TPOTN. And the base of this was to take a screenplay I wrote last year called The Phantom of the Nativity and make it into a novel. Simple you would think. I have the script surely all I’ve got to do is follow the script and convert it into a novel worthy of publishing.

Yeah! it didn’t quite work out that way if I’m being honest. Actually the novel is and I quote myself “Fucking Terrible!” As I read through the first draft of Act 1, I expected it to be on the rough side. What I didn’t expect was for it to be so unreadable that I gave up reading my own work.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I am if anything open honest and frank about most things. For me this blog allows me to reflect on the past and learn lessons from it. It is a very high tech journal as it were. Or as my wife calls it ‘Mutterings of a mad man!” And occasionally just like Billy Connolly, I have a habit of veering off at a Tangent and eventually returning to somewhere where I left off. It’s these little unexpected diversions which make life so much more interesting, wouldn’t you agree?

So what was it I was discussing here. Oh yes when things don’t go as expected. You see there are times when the unexpected can have delightful effects, and then there are times when you are screaming at inanimate objects for no apparent reason. For me this week was one of the latter ones. I had spent hours and hours crafting the 1st Act of The Phantom of the Nativity, only to realise it was utter complete crap. Now I know some maybe saying, yeah but Charlie a good edit would sort that out. But honestly in this case it wouldn’t.

let me explain where I felt it all went wrong on this project. The original screen play for the Phantom of the Nativity has a lot of visual comedy in it. This visual comedy doesn’t just enhance the story, it is integral to it. There are visual cues and clues all the way through the play. They are so interwoven that without them, it would be boring as hell.

So why didn’t it work in a novel format. It is quite simple really. It is very difficult to write those visual elements which feed and enhance the story in a novel. I know of only 2 or 3 authors with such prowess and I’m not one of them. Yes I know my limitations, and I work around them in order to achieve the end result I have in my mind. Sometimes those work arounds are beautiful works of inspired art, other times they are clunky like a clapped out old car struggling to make its way up a steep hill. In The Phantom of the Nativity screenplay they flowed in and out of the storyline perfectly, enhancing it, and adding a depth to the characters and the story that would make it a compelling show to watch. In the novel though, they felt much like the old car struggling up the steep hill. They clunked and grinded their way into the story, many feeling forced in to try and add the same level of depth that the screenplay had. It made the book unreadable, a chore. For Satirical comedy to work it has to flow effortlessly, seeming to come naturally from out of the ether as though it should and had always been meant to be. The novel had none of this. If I’m being truly honest it felt like trying to read an Oscar Wilde piece. So much explanation that you forget where the story has been and is going to.

Now I could have reworked the whole of the story to make it work, but as I thought long and hard about this I realised that even if I did that the novel still wouldn’t work. There is too much visual comedy in the piece to make it happen. So I looked at what I had done, and something struck me. There were element s in the novel which if implemented in the screenplay would actually make it better! So I have scrapped the novel project for the Phantom of the Nativity and am concentrating on making the screenplay better. This wasn’t what I expected to happen, not by a long shot, but it has actually turned out for the best in the end. I have realised that my efforts and energies would not be best served by continuing to write the novel version of the screenplay, because it simply wouldn’t work, however much I wanted it to to, or tried to force it to be.

This isn’t a failure, it is a valuable lesson learnt, that, what we may think of a brilliant and inspired idea; may actually be a complete crock of shite! We need to accept failure as much as we have learnt to accept success.