Books on Film: Romeo and Juliet

Few stories are as widely recognized and well-known as Romeo and Juliet. It's a story so famous, the two names have become synonymous with young love, and doomed love, and particularly love that is both young and doomed. Romeo and Juliet is one of the most tragic stories ever penned, and one of the most filmed stories to date.

The Book

Maybe that's because Romeo and Juliet was written to be performed, not read. It's one of Shakespeare's plays, one of his most notable, and it's assigned reading for just about everybody who gets to a certain level of high school.

It's about two young people on opposite sides of a long-standing family feud. Romeo is mooning over the loss of Rosaline, an attractive girl who has spurned him. In an attempt to cheer him, his friends Benvolio and Mercutio sneak into the grand ball being held at the Capulet house. Romeo is a Montague, mortal enemy of all Capulets.

At the ball, he forgets all about Rosaline. He discovers true love, real love, when he has a chance encounter with Juliet. The two meet and nearly kiss, boldly talking of doing so (it was bold back then, believe me), before each discovers the other's last name. 

They can never be together. They cannot even talk to each other. The ball ends, and Juliet goes up to her room to sit and sigh in sadness. But Romeo comes back, finding that he is unable to stay away. The famous balcony scene then plays out, with each swearing their love and devotion to the other. They agree to be married.

Meanwhile, Juliet's cousin Tybalt has discovered that Romeo was at the Capulet ball. He challenges the latter to a duel, but Romeo will not fight him. He cannot fight him, for he plans to wed Juliet and that makes Tybalt a kinsman. Mercutio, however, is affronted by the scene which plays out and he accepts the duel. Mercutio is mortally wounded in the duel, and Romeo ends up lashing out at Tybalt.

Mercutio curses Romeo, and Tybalt, and both of their houses. Two men now lay dead in the streets of Verona. The Prince exiles Romeo, who goes to Juliet at once. He spends the night with her, and they make their marriage official before he goes into exile.

Juliet's father plans to marry her to Count Paris, threatening that she will no longer be his daughter if she does not relent. She goes to the friar for help. He decides to help her fake her own death with a drug that will put her into a deep coma for two days and 40 hours. He will also send a message to Romeo.

She follow instructions and take the drug the night before her wedding to Paris. When discovered in the morning, she is laid to rest in the family crypt.

The message never reaches Romeo. Instead, he gets a message from one of his own kinsman that Juliet is dead. Romeo buys poison and goes to the crypt. There, he kills Paris in a confrontation and drinks the poison. He dies, and Julie wakes. She sees her love dead on the ground, and stabs herself with his dagger.

But you've probably heard the story...and if not, you can find it in more film versions than I could possibly list. It's one of the most filmed books on film, and it's been adapted and twisted and modernized a hundred times over. It's been satirized, it's been spoofed, it's been copied in entirety. Only a few of these film versions, however, are at all worth mentioning.

The Films

One of the oldest film versions of Romeo and Juliet is still one of the best. It was made by George Cukor in 1936, and was nominated for four Oscars (which was a big deal back then, since they had fewer categories). This version stars Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, two of the biggest stars of the day. The film nearly didn't get made. Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM at the time, thought Shakespeare was just too complicated for ordinary moviegoers to understand. But when Jack Warner, over at Warner Bros., announced that he would be releasing A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mayer changed his mind. He green-lit the project, and an adaptation was born.

Great detail was paid to costuming and set design for the flick. Researchers went to Verona to look at paintings and study design. Academics were even brought to the set to help advise filmmakers. But critics complained about the casting. Shearer and Howard were certainly not young, teenage lovers. John Barrymore, in his 50s at the time, played Mercutio as a young flirt, and he no longer looked the part. This version is Shakespeare rearranged, with several scenes playing out of order. Friar Laurence's role is reduced, and some other scenes are expanded. We also get to see Rosaline in this version; she never actually appears in the play. 

Mayer's gut reaction was right. The film wasn't a critical success, and it was bashed for being too "arty." Filmgoers didn't turn out to see it...just as they hadn't gone to see A Midsummer Night's Dream, released the year before by Warner Bros.

Hollywood didn't make another Shakespearean adaptation for more than 10 years.

Franco Zeffrelli took the play on again in 1968, and he went in a totally opposite direction for his distinctive version. Unlike Cukor, Zeffrelli cast young, good-looking actors for the title roles, and made the most out of the brand-new Technicolor technology. He had better luck with his take on the film. It was the 60s, so he emphasized the elements of youth, of two young people who only wanted love...not their family's war, man. It was a message he hoped would resound with the 60s counter-culture.

He hired Leonard Whiting, 17, to play Romeo. Olivia Hussey, 15, was cast as Juliet. Both were studied stage actors, and gorgeous. This version of the story focuses on the young lovers and injects more energy into the dialogue. Romeo's duel with Paris is cut out, a decision that many filmmakers make when adapting the story. No one wants to turn Romeo into a bad guy.

A distinctive version of the story wouldn't be made again until 1996. Re-titled as Romeo + Juliet, this adaptation was directed by Baz Luhrmann. Claire Danes stars as Juliet, Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo. This version uses most of Shakespeare's original dialogue, pressed against the background of a more modern-looking Verona. The swords are guns, the fashion is interesting and the soundtrack is filled with lush, 90s-era pop hits. It's more mob-meets-Shakespeare than true Shakespeare, but it's a damned good version. The ending will absolutely make you cry, even when you know it.

But my personal favorite is probably the most wildly adapted version of the story you'll find: West Side Story. Written in the 1950s for the Broadway stage, it was adapted in 1961 as a musical film...and it's fabulous. Natalie Wood stars as Maria (Juliet) and Richard Beymer as Tony (Romeo). The story is moved from Italy to New York City, and centers on two rival street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. 

The Jets are a group of street toughs, greaser kids who are all white by race. The Sharks are made up of Puerto Rican immigrants who are fighting to eke out there turf in the big city. None of Shakespeare's dialogue is used, and a bunch of well-choreographed songs are added, but the flavor of the story and most of the plot is exactly the same. Maria is still a sweet, young girl, untouched by love until she sees Tony. It's absolutely the most relatable re-telling of the film, and relevant even today if you can look past the 1960s fashion.

How good is West Side Story? It was nominated for 11 Oscars and won 10 of them, including Best Picture. It's won more awards than any other musical ever made, and there have been a lot of them.

But maybe you should watch all of the notable film versions of the story, just in case. You're going to be asked to read the book, if you haven't already, so you might as well see it on the screen, too.

Writing 101: Asking for Help

I've recently been engaging myself with an effort to be more active in writing and reading forums, so I've been confronted with the topic of asking for help a lot lately. And I've got to say, a lot of writers are doing it way too often.

Ask, and Ye Shall Receive

Let me be clear. Asking for help actually takes some courage, and it can do you good to learn how to trust in the kindness of strangers.

But there's a line between asking fir help and being lazy...not to put too fine a point on it. Because, while there is some nobility in the asking, there is much, much more to be gained from finding the answers yourself. And maybe all this beseeching isn't from laziness st all. I'm hoping it's simply because too many people don't know how ti find the answers.

They're in luck, because I'm really good at finding them. And if you already know how to ask for help, you are well on your way to becoming a master as well. You just need to know where to ask the right questions.

 

Getting Answers

To be clear, it's always going to be easier to ask than to look. You will get a lot more out of looking, however, so lets figure out how to to it.

First, don't ever go to Wikipedia to find out anything. You can go to other, more trusted, online encyclopedias to find general information. Wikipedia should be used only for resources. Just search for any topic, scroll to the bottom, and look for the links. 

Instead of asking questions on forums, ask search engines -- but don't go to the twelve hundred different bloggers who think they know the answer. University extension websites, the History Channel website, encyclopedias and websites ending in .gov can all be considered to be reputable sources. Online articles from trusted sources like the New York Times are also trustworthy. 

But don't ever trust one source, no matter how good it is. Confirm your information in at least three places. Otherwise, it's not real.

Do your own research, and learn how to answer your own questions. There's a lot of reasons you've got to do this as an author. First, you can't necessarily trust people on forums -- they might be clueless, or making things up, or simply incorrect in their information. But more importantly, it's your job to find your own answers. That's half the fun of writing, and an important part of the process. Through research, you might uncover all sorts of interesting tidbits you end up including in the book. You might get inspired by brand-new ideas. And you might learn something, which is always a good thing. 

But most of all, you're going to find a question one day that your forum friends can't answer. You will hit a brick wall. You will feel lost. That will happen. If you learn, right now, how to deal with it, you won't get knocked flat by it when it happens at the worst possible moment (and it will).

Writing 101: How to Use the Word 'Best'

I know it seems silly. Best an easy word, with only four letters and a single syllable. But plenty of people end up using it the wrong way...a lot. It's irregular, and it can be easy to confuse with another word that's similar. Make sure you know how to use the word best properly, because using it the wrong way looks really, really bad.

Better Your Writing with Proper 'Bests' 

Good. Better. Best. We were all forced to write it during primary school years; I had to draw corresponding pictures to go with. Special attention is called to the word best because it's irregular; there is no bestest. People only say this colloquially, it's not actually proper English.

The word best simply means most excellent, something that stands above and beyond whatever else it is being compared with. For example: This is the best blog I have ever seen, or Jade is the best blogger! 

But like I said, it's irregular. Bested is actually a word, but it might not mean what you might think it means. To be bested is to be defeated. For example: "How'd the tournament go?" "We were bested by a superior team." It's just another way of saying that the best team won.

What best doesn't mean is favorite. When something is your favorite, it's the one you like the best. For example: "Party in the USA" is my favorite Miley Cyrus song. Yet often, you'll see it this way: "Party in the USA" is my best Miley Cyrus song. This is glaringly, offensively, incorrect. 

It's okay to say something more declarative, such as: Party in the USA is the best Miley Cyrus song. See the change? The best is correct; my best doesn't exist in this instance. You can say I gave it my best effort or even I gave it my best. You can't say This is my best TV show (unless you are a TV writer, director or producer, but let's not get into all that). 

 The point is, favorite and best are not interchangeable. Best can only be used to mean that something stands above the rest; it is superior. To say something is your favorite is to say you like it better than anything else. When in doubt, as always, use your synonyms. When writing the word best, if you feel a little confused, switch it with the word superior. If the sentence still makes sense, you're good!

Always put your best writing forward by using words in their proper place.

Writing 101: Writing in Black and White

Have you ever told a lie? Had a drink before you were legally allowed to do it? Taken something that wasn't yours? Did it make you a completely evil person? Have you ever met a completely bad person? 

So why would you write a character that way? If you're writing in black and white, you're not writing at your best. The world, and every person in it, is filled with shades of grey. 

Good vs. Evil

Novels often pit a hero, a good guy, against a villain, a bad guy. This is the oldest literary plot device, the most basic foundation of many stories, and there's no reason you can't use it in your novels. Just remember not to get too literal about it. Rarely are people all bad, so inherently evil that they have no spark of human kindness or compassion, guilt or regret, anywhere inside them. Writing a villain that's totally evil is going to make that villain feel two-dimensional, a caricature rather than a character.

But you can get away with it. Villains are supposed to be bad, and writing a really bad one can make your story that much more thrilling. The argument can even be made that people who are nothing but evil have existed in the real world. Some have said this about people like Charles Manson and Adolph Hilter. But you aren't going to find a person in the real world who is all goodness, and you'd better not present me with a character who is. 

We all have flaws, and we all want to read about characters who are flawed, too. Why is that? Because in your story, if the character who is all good defeats the character who is all evil, that's great. But it's not going to be relatable to me in any way, because I'm not all good and I know it. I make mistakes. I fall down. I say the wrong things. I eat that third piece of cake when no one's looking. What are the odds that I want to read about a character who never screws up, never falls down, never fails and does only good things?

You guessed it: zero. Readers root for heroes the hardest when they can see bits and pieces of themselves in those heroes. It's much easier to cheer for a guy who's a little bit shy and unsure of himself, a guy who gets tongue-tied in front of the pretty girl, rather than the guy who does everything right and knows just what to say every single time. It makes the hero's triumph much more satisfying when the hero overcomes not only the villain, but his or her own flaws and failings. 

And sometimes, villains aren't really evil people. They might be at odds with the hero, sure, but in their version of the story, the villain is the hero. They're the main character of their own story, and they have their own motivations for doing all their "evil" deeds. What are those motivations? Everyone's done wrong things in their lives, told those little lies, cheated on that test, all that stuff. Make your villains three-dimensional and real. Make them human. And make them relatable, too. 

All your characters should feel like real people, and real people don't come in shades of black and white...so don't write them that way.

Jade in the Spotlight

I'm being featured on Spotlight Monday at Goodreads. Visit to find out some of my writing secrets, and how I like to relax when I'm not writing!

Review: Dance With a Gunfighter

Author Joann Pence gave me a list of books to potentially review, and I selected Dance With a Gunfighter right away. The title immediately brings to mind an incongruous image of a hardened bad guy...dancing to the sound of fiddles. I figured this couldn't possibly be what takes place -- the "dance" referred to has got to mean some sort of exciting Western shoot-out occurs. I was wrong about that, but this book didn't disappoint. 

There are a lot of dances in this book. There is the very real, literal dance referenced by the title. It's a romantic little scene: young girl, sweet sixteen, at her first dance. She's a wallflower, and doesn't expect to get asked to dance. Something about her touches the hardest man in the room, a gunfighter by the name of Jess. 

This is where the book gets confusing right away. The girl's name is Gabriella, but she's a tomboy so she goes by Gabe. The guy's name is Jess. It's two neutral names, and I have the focus of a squirrel so I spent the first 50 pages trying to figure out who was saying what to whom. My inner monologue is playing along the entire time, asking "did the girl or the guy just say that?" after every fourth sentence. But once you get that part of it down, there's still a whole lot of plot to get through. 

Maybe too much. In some spots, this book tens to drag. The constant push-pull between the characters is true to the genre, and I get that, but it's way, way too much and way too drawn out. The inference is there that their love is passionate, but it takes months and years for the couple to get together in any sort of tangible way. He walks out on her, more than once, which is a bit self-defeating on the story's part. In romances, as a woman I'm supposed to fall a little bit in love with the hero of the story. I was never close to falling in love with Jess -- whose main physical attribute seemed to be a ragged blonde mustache -- and never really identified with Gabe. 

This isn't a traditional romance story, though some of the basic formula is there. In this case, the couple faces way too many obstacles and challenges. Remember what I said about a lot of plot? Most of it is strictly designed to keep the main couple apart, sometimes in totally unbelievable ways that are just too contrived. At one point, the couple flees from a gang of bandits straight into the blistering desert. One of them is grievously wounded, and this is clearly just bad planning. Well of course they run straight into a mean band of Apaches, because that's likely, and instead of being murdered right away they're held captive for several months. This is all done on the promise than an exciting action/fight scene will soon occur, but this of course never manifests because this of course wasn't the point of that extremely long scene. The author really had to stretch to come up with new and bigger obstacles to throw between the couple. 

Other types of dances do occur, and the promised gun scenes do manifest. There is a lot of action in the book, which you'd expect in an Old West setting, but there are mystery elements as well. The author shows her writing roots in the form of a few head-turning twists. 

There's a lot the author got right. She researched her desert cuisine very well, and I was only able to find one tense error and a handful of run-on sentences -- and you know how I look for that sort of thing. Many of the scenes between the couple are sweet and touching. It's a story mainly about emotional pain, and how that affects us, and how it defeats and changes us. Weaving a love story into all that is no easy writing feat, so if some things don't feel so smooth I guess that's to be expected. 

This is a good romance with plenty of heart and sweetness, some mystery and action sprinkled in along the way. If you're into that sort of thing, you'll definitely appreciate this finely-edited, well-written tale of revenge and romance.

Find Dance with a Gunfighter on Amazon!

Being Indecisive

Being indecisive is one of my biggest flaws. I can be tenacious once I set my mind on something...but getting to that space can be a tough journey.

What Am I Writing?

For example, my newest book project. Like many writers, I get lots of ideas. They aren't necessarily any good, but I write them all down anyway. So when I finished the Deck of Lies, of course I pulled up my idea notes.

One of them struck me right away, a story that's really different for me because I settled on the idea of a male protagonist. I don't know, maybe I was feeling brave.

So for over a week I worked on two pages of this new novel, as yet unnamed. I thought about it and pictured it and made up all my cast lists and notes and all the crap I collect when I'm working on a book.

Then last night, I got to being indecisive again. I pulled up some old notes that I put together over a year ago, while I was still writing Justice. And I started working on a totally different novel. This one focuses on three protagonists who get sort of thrown together.

I'm determined to make this one stick...but like I said, being indecisive is something I do very well. So what is my next book about?

It's either a dramatic tale about class structure, friendship and societal oppression...or, it's a story about material value and money, and how it controls us.

Heady stuff, I know. It probably sounds like I'm about to go way out there with my next book, no matter which decision I make, but you can be sure you'll still find some mystery, romance and twists no matter what I end up writing next -- even if I scrap both projects and go back to my list of ideas. 

Going Non-Fiction

In the meantime, I'm also working on a freelance article for a colleague's blog. She saw the post I wrote last week when I re-capped all the things I did in 2012. I wrote in the post that I lost 50 pounds over the year, and she was interested. So I'm writing an in-depth piece about my experience with that. The working title is "The Day I Realized I'm Fat." I took some pictures and wrote a really long first draft, and I'm really excited about the piece. I'll add links to the blog once it's published, for anyone who wants to read about what I learned and how I plan to stay thin. 

It was harder to write than I expected, because I found myself being indecisive again. I didn't know how to approach it or where to start, so I finally made up my mind to just tell the story from beginning to end. This explains the title, because I start the article with the exact day I realized I was fat and had to lose weight. 

 Indie Author Month

I'm also happy to announce that I'll be participating in Indie Author Month at Aside From Writing, one of my favorite blogs, again this year. I'm doing a double feature that will highlight one of my books (maybe one of the two I'm being indecisive about) and an interview with me. Friend of the blog and author Melanie Cusick-Jones will be conducting the interview. I'm very excited about it, because I had a lot of fun doing the event last year. Some of my Writing 101 posts are featured at Aside From Writing, so add it to your readers! I'll post a bunch of links once Indie Author Month kicks off, so be on the lookout for that.

Until then, I'll be waffling between ideas and storylines...just being indecisive.

Interview with River

Find out what happened when River Scott, from the Deck of Lies series, visited Mia Darien's blog for a character interview!