Thursday, October 21, 2010

Movies From Books

I'm watching John Green talk to his computer live. I love how intimate it is. It's not edited or anything. He's just reading questions off his screen from the chat and answering them, and we're sitting at our computers listening to him. We're 800-odd people hanging out together in the same digital room. I usually don't find out about these shows until after they're over. (Oh, he just said he's leaving soon. Ha.)


He talked about how, while the money would be nice, he doesn't really want movies made from his books. Right now, they're popular with us nerdfighters, plus some other people, plus the people those people have told, and it sort of trickles around. With a movie, it suddenly becomes the over-merchandised thing with an entire table to itself at B&N. The experience of reading the book becomes less personal, and because visual stimulus is so powerful, the memory of the movie completely takes over how the book would otherwise be perceived.
I never thought about it like that before. It makes me want there to never be a movie based on a book ever again. The Harry Potter movies definitely took something of the books away from me. I've lost my original images of all of the characters except for those never or rarely seen.


(Insert segue that I can't actually use or else it would give away something I'm about to say before I say it.)


In English today I had to take a state-mandated Practice Writing Assessment for the Real One we have to take in March. It was a "Definition Essay," (which I'll explain in a moment), and  the topic was "the meaning of overcoming adversity to teenagers."
In a Definition Essay, they give you a topic and some quotes to use. You're supposed to start out with a quote, state your definition of the topic, give a historical example  that backs it up, a literary example, and a personal example, and then conclude, or pick historical or literary, a personal, and then a counter arguments paragraph.
I did the latter format, and I wrote about things I love: Harry Potter and NaNoWriMo.
Somehow I always manage to work one of those in, or a John Green quote. I probably could have found one for this had I Internet access at the time.
I really hope I didn't have to define adversity, because what I actually defined was what the surmounting of it means to teens.

1 comment:

  1. Holy Cow! I managed to make it onto this one too, I actually saw his twitter 6 minutes after he posted it, rather than 21 hours later like usual. So I was one of the other 840 or so other people. I don't know how John can sound so well thought out and off the cuff at the same time...

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