Books on Film: Thinner

October is swiftly approaching, and with it Halloween. It's one of my favorite holidays, and it's all about being scared. That's why I'm going to (attempt to) feature only scary books on film all month long. The first installment begins with, of course, Stephen King. After a fashion, anyway. King wrote Thinner as Richard Bachman, the worst-kept secret pen name in the entire history of the written word. But the jig is definitely up, and the novel moved easily to film.

Was it any better in the second medium?

The Book

When King first started in the writing biz, many publishers believed that authors shouldn't release more than one book a year; they thought it might over-saturate the market. According to literary legend, King invented his pseudonym Richard Bachman for this reason -- and because he wanted to see if readers were buying his words, or his name.

Supposedly. As I've mentioned, the secret wasn't kept very well, and fans aren't dumb. They quickly caught on to the fact that horror novelist Richard Bachman wrote with the exact same style as horror novelist Stephen King.

The public still didn't have wide knowledge of who Bachman really was when his book Thinner was released. Only 28,000 books sold in the novel's first publication. But some fans had already sniffed him out by the time he published Thinner, the third Bachman book, so King dedicated it to Bachman's fictitious wife and included a photograph of the author (actually an insurance agent). A suspicious bookstore clerk in Washington, D. C. searched Library of Congress records and found proof that King and Bachman were actually the same man. After he mailed a letter to King's publishers, King personally called the clerk and told him to go ahead and break the story.

He did, and in its next run Thinner sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

The novel is clearly written in King's signature style. It's set in New England, like most of his books, and it's about a fat lawyer named Billy Halleck. He's recently stood trial for vehicular manslaughter, having hit and killed an old woman while his wife was performing a sexual act on him. The old woman was part of a group of gypsies, and King-as-Bachman draws attention to this right away; it's very important. Halleck is acquitted, mainly because he's good friends with the judge. 

While leaving the courthouse, the ancient father of the old woman appears on the courthouse steps. He steps close to Halleck and strokes his cheek, whispering "thinner."

Rapid weight loss begins at once. He loses weight by startling degrees, and soon realizes that the aged gypsy cursed him. When he speaks to his judge friend, he learns that the judge has also been cursed. His skin is turning into scales. The town police chief, also part of the cover-up, has been stricken with a horrifying skin condition. Both commit suicide before the book ends.

Billy's not going down without a fight. Now pitifully emaciated, he tracks the gypsies all the way to Maine (hey! This book was written by Stephen King!). Finally, he manages to strike up a deal with the gypsy, who gives Billy a pie baked with his own blood. Whoever eats the pie will also get the curse, because it can be transferred but not destroyed. The old gypsy tells Billy to eat the pie himself, and die with some dignity.

But he's not going to do that. He takes his pie home instead to give to his wife. This whole thing is her fault, anyway. He puts it away for the night, and gets himself some rest. When he wakes, he discovers that he made a mistake: his wife and his daughter both ate from the pie while he was sleeping soundly. 

Billy cuts himself a slice of the pie as well because he feels so terrible about killing his own daughter, and that's the end. Surprisingly, the story is re-told pretty well on film.

The Film

 Thinner became a film in 1996, but this time it carried Stephen King's name. To this day, the film is Stephen King's Thinner, which technically is wrong (but let's not get back into all that). Robert John Burke stars as Billy Halleck, and this time the story is moved entirely to Maine. This time, the movie actually shows the manslaughter incident that's already past-tense by the time the book begins. We see the gypsy carnival first, and the accident is shown in second-by-second detail. The sex act Heidi was performing was changed on film, but that's neither here nor there. 

The sham of a trial is glossed over quickly, and the moment when the curse is given is agonizingly drawn out. To make Heidi a little more unlikable, a handsome doctor is introduced to the story in the movie. He makes house calls, and comes to check on Billy's terrible weight loss. The doctor is good-looking and fit, and the implication that he would like to be with Heidi is pretty loud and clear.

The horrible condition of the judge and the police chief is revealed next. Like he did in the book, Billy searches out the traveling gypsy carnival. This experience is drawn out on film, and Billy suffers nightmares and setbacks before he eventually locates them.

A deadly strawberry pie, enriched with blood, is eventually made. Again, the gypsy begs Billy to eat his own pie and die a clean death. Again, this isn't Billy's plan. He goes home and puts the pie away, believing that his daughter is spending the night at a friend's house.

He wakes up next to Heidi's dead body, and feels pretty gleeful with himself. The curse is broken, that cheating no-good wife is dead, and all is right with the world...until he goes down to the kitchen. Here, he learns that Linda has eaten some of the pie for breakfast. That's when Billy eats some of the pie himself, overcome with grief and guilt at what he's done.

What Got Adapted?

For what it's worth, Thinner is a faithful film adaptation of the book. But without any banner actors and too much extra plot in the second and third Acts, Thinner isn't a very good movie. The effects and costuming are great, but the dialogue is rough and the lead actor is thoroughly unbelievable. Don't blame the film for this; blame the book. The novel doesn't have a lot of meat to it, like its main character, and one assumes this is why King hid behind the Bachman moniker in the first place. You can skip this one on the page and on the screen. You won't find a whole lot of substance in this one, but there are a few cheap thrills that may please die-hard King and horror fans. 

From the Trenches: Lucky Day

What does it take to be an award-winning, best-selling, much-loved author? In looking at the stories of those who have walked the path of success (without falling on their faces), certain qualities shine through: grit, stubbornness, hard work...and luck. 

It helps to write something new and interesting and great...but a stroke of luck can completely change your fate. Just ask one award-winner who came within inches of never being published at all. 

A Wrinkle in a Perfect Plan

Madeleine L'Engle was born in 1918 and spent most of her childhood in New York City, where many writers have been inspired. She wasn't much of a student, and received poor grades. Madeleine preferred writing in her journal, creating poems and making up stories. It was a habit she took with her to the French Alps, where her family moved when she was 12.

She studied English in depth at Smith College, where she continued working on her own writing. Upon graduation, Madeleine moved to Greenwich Village in New York, and worked in the theater. By the time she me and married her husband Hugh Franklin, she'd already completed two novels. 

The manuscripts collected dust while Madeleine established her family, but whenever time allowed she was writing and working at her craft. The family returned to New York after a few years, but not before taking a 10-week cross-country camping trip. It was during this family adventure that she would come up with the idea for her most famous novel. She named it A Wrinkle in Time, and completed the book in 1960. 

She would have lots of wrinkles to iron out of her way before she would see it published. 

Lucky Day

Excited about her novel, Madeleine began submitting it to publishers. She was rejected...repeatedly. More than two dozen rejection letters came back to her. The book was unlike anything else on the market, and that frightened the publishers. Having a female protagonist in a sci-fi novel, in her own words, just "wasn't done," and her novel was "too different." 

Her agents gave the manuscript back to her, and it looked like her chances of being a published author were dead. But the fates changed when Madeleine attended a tea party at her mother's house and happened to meet John Farrar...of the publishing company Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She gave him the manuscript, and he loved it. Farrar decided to sign her to the company at once.

A Wrinkle in Time has been in publication ever since. It won the Newberry Medal, spawned a series, and remains one of the most popular children's books on the market. If she'd missed that party, maybe none of that would have ever happened, and we still wouldn't know about Mrs. Whatsit and her charming friends.

Madeleine L'Engle worked from the trenches in secret and for many years, constantly working on her craft and fitting it into the pages of her life. She wrote a great book, and no one cared until she was lucky enough to have a chance meeting with the one man who did. She was eager enough, and smart enough, to seize opportunity when it presented itself, and that's why we know who she is today.

The Most Popular Books Ever Written

As an author, it's essential to also be a reader. Authors are influenced and inspired by other greats who have taken pen to page to pour out prose. Every writer should have a reading habit bordering on addiction, because it's important to continuously build upon your craft. Reading is really research for new writing styles, new punctuation usage, tone and wordsmithery (not a word technically, but I like it). 

So if you want to write a bestseller someday, doesn't it follow that you should study bestsellers of the past? Take a look at the most popular books ever written (at least, to date) and see how your work compares to the best of the bestsellers. 

Still the One

The trouble is, it's hard to determine just which books are actually the best. How do you determine what makes a book great? Is it good reviews? Sales? The number of people who have read it? As it turns out, the best book in one of those categories usually ranks pretty high in the others, too.

•  Fiction Novels

Among fiction novels, there's no general consensus as to which is the absolute best, but there are a lot of opinions. The Guardian ranked Don Quixote (pronounced Key-Hoe-Tee) as the greatest novel of all time. Also on their top 100 list: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Emma, Little Women and Huckleberry Finn.

According to multiple sources, Don Quixote is the best-selling fiction book ever written. More than 500 million copies of the book have been printed and sold worldwide, though exact figures are hard to obtain because the story was printed originally in 1612. The title character is famously a bit of an accidental hero, known to tilt at windmills and make many mistakes in his bizarre quest.

Other sources say that Dickens actually holds the top slot. His novel A Tale of Two Cities, first printed in 1859, has sold more than 200 million copies. Closely on its heels is Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), a French novel published in 1943. The Lord of the Rings is definitely in the hunt, however, having sold 150 million copies since its 1954 release.

Of course, those are all just stand-alone books.

• Series Books

Some authors can't confine their creativity to just one book; their stories are too big for that. Rather than comparing each individual book in a series, many rank the success of the series overall...but then, it's unfair to compare a whole bunch of books to just one. So when it comes to ranking the best of the bestsellers, series books get their own category. 

Perhaps predictably, Harry Potter takes this title. The series (7 books in total) has sold more than 450 million copies worldwide. British author J.K. Rowling is far ahead of her closest competition, author R.L. Stine. Stine's Goosebumps series has sold around 300 million copies around the world.

• Cookbooks

It doesn't have to be fiction to be a bestselling book. Many authors have found success with cookbooks, because every human being has to eat food to survive. Anyone who can teach others how to make that food tasty is valuable, and it shows in sales figures.

Joy of Cooking, by Irma Rombauer, is arguably the most famous cookbook ever written. It inspired Julia Child, among others, to create her own cookbook and taught millions of women around the world how to perform basic to complicated recipes. Since 1931, it's sold a whopping 18 million copies worldwide.

Two other cookbooks have sold a few more copies. Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book is cited as being the most popular cookbook of all time, with 40 million copies sold. First printed in 1930, the book has been updated many times throughout the years to stay relevant (a recipe for success). But it's actually Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, first printed in 1950, that's the most popular. More than 65 million copies of this one have been sold.

• Non-Fiction

We all love novels, and cookbooks are definitely handy little kitchen tools. But the books that have sold more copies than any other are all labeled as non-fiction.

Religious books are unquestionably the most popular books ever written. Quotations from Chairman Mao, the Qur'an and the Bible, in that order, are the most-printed, most-distributed books around the world. Multiple hundreds of millions of copies of these books have been printed and re-printed over many centuries, and it's impossible to estimate just how many of these books have been published through the years.

Most sources agree that the Bible is the biggest bestseller. Estimates put the total number of books printed at right around 5 billion. The classification for religious books is clearly debatable, but they're labeled as non-fiction (somewhat unfairly to biography writers, as far as I'm concerned). So whether they're fiction or not, this is the category in which they're always shoved -- and in any case, all three of these books have out-sold true fiction novels.

The most popular books ever written all have a lesson to teach, and it's this: people love a great story. If it's truly fantastic and entertaining and funny and poignant and meaningful, a story can stay popular for many hundreds of years and touch many millions (or billions) of people. Think about all your favorite books, what you love about them and why you love them. Think about the way those books make you feel, what they make you think, why they resonate with you. Take those elements, and learn how to bring them to your own books. Maybe in a few years, your book will end up somewhere on the list of the most popular books ever written.

Writing 101: Dating Your Book

Adding dates and date-specific events to your book will make it feel more like reality, but it will also put a pretty clear expiration date on its relevancy. At some point, every contemporary book ever written stops being relevant and starts being history. There are all sorts of little things you might be adding that are dating your book. What should you do about it? 

Please Sell By...

Sometimes, there's just no other way to get certain plot points across, and an exact date is necessary. If there's some question of a character's age or birth place, or if someone goes to look at a grave, exact dates are going to come up. Sometimes, an exact date suits the circumstance. A character appearing in court before a judge, for example, may hear a long litany of charges and a docket number and specific dates. If the police are asking questions about a crime, they're going to use exact dates.

For some writers, it's just unavoidable. But even if you're terribly clever and you find a way to write around it, you're still dating your book. It doesn't take a specific date to clearly place your book in a specific time frame, and you may not even know it's happening. 

Reference music, television or technology, and you're very clearly pinpointing a specific range of years, months or even weeks. Reference any sort of current event (like names of actual Presidents or earthquakes), and you're likewise pinning yourself down to a specific date or date range. Even clothing trends can date your book, or popular expressions. I recently read a book that extensively detailed activities on Facebook. Fifty years from now, that reference may be obscure and obsolete. So no matter how careful you are to avoid dates, you're dating your book anyway.

Even if you avoid pop culture and technology, it's happening. If you're writing with a contemporary, current voice, your book is dated. Once upon a time, Pride and Prejudice was a contemporary book. The author, Jane Austen, wrote about what life was like in the times she was actually living. And when it first came out, that book resonated with all who read it. Today, the language feels stodgy and archaic, and the descriptions of daily life aren't much like the way we live today. Speech and words are ever-changing. Words we use now are going to be outdated 100 years from now.

So now you know the cold, hard truth: your book is going to be dated, no matter what you do. One day, your contemporary setting will become historical. Here's the good news: it doesn't really matter.

Expired

Some authors are absolutely terrified of using dates, pop culture references and other material that might date their work...and it's silly. A word could be invented next year that catches on and becomes the word, and the book you wrote 6 months before will start looking old-fashioned all of a sudden. There's just no help for it: time marches on, and new books become old books. Don't be afraid of it, because it's no big deal.

You can prove it by Pride and Prejudice, and hundreds of other books. Jane Austen's classic was first published in 1813. It's sold more than 20 million copies, and you'll have no trouble buying it anywhere today. The book is constantly being referenced, adapted, re-written and discussed, for all its dated language and prim ideas and highfalutin morality. People still love that book, because it's good. It was good 200 years ago and it's still good today, even if it does describe history that's long gone. 

Your book is going to be dated the moment you publish it -- the date's right there next to it, or underneath it, and it ought to be on your copyright page, too. So don't worry about that. Focus on making the content exceptional, and it won't matter that the book is dated. It may still stay in style for hundreds of years to come. 

Writing 101: Double-Spacing...and Why It's Wrong

Double-spacing after a period.  Like this.  Is wrong.  But so many people have so many different opinions about double-spacing and single-spacing after punctuation, it's difficult to point to just one reason why it's wrong. I'm going to try anyway.

 Single and Fabulous?

The number of spaces that should be placed after a period is actually a hot point of contention among writers, editors and typographers. This is the kind of stuff that gets word nerds all kinds of hot and bothered, and I guess I'm no exception. I passionately believe that only one space should be used following any sentence, and the general school of typography agrees with me. 

Typesetters are the people who actually put the words on the page. They're responsible for making everything fit together and using all the space they've got in an economical fashion. Since the early 20th century, it's been an industry standard in Europe and the Americas to use a single space, not a double, between the period and the new sentence.

Standards were much looser before the 19th century, and in the early days of printing typesetters often used enlarged spaces following their periods. But a 19th-century invention would screw all the spacing up and confuse writers even 200 years later.

 Doubles, Anyone?

Ironically, it was the manual typewriter that changed spacing forevermore. The standard space on the manual typewriter was considered by many to be too small to properly separate sentences. Many writers began hitting the spacebar twice, not just once, after every period in order to provide the necessary separation. It became the norm to do this, and double-spaced typing was even taught in typing classes. No one uses manual typewriters anymore, but the error is still being repeated all the time. 

If it's an error. The debate continues to rage on to this day, with many hotly defending the usefulness of the double space. I hate it, and I advise against using it, and I'm going to tell you why. 

The Way It Is 

Typesetters and printers established the single-space standard for a pretty important reason: money. When words take up less space, fewer pages may be used to print out a whole book. Fewer pages equals less cost to make the books, and that means they can be priced more competitively.

It's something no indie author can ignore. CreateSpace is easy and affordable, but it ain't free. Self-published authors can't afford to be less cost-conscious than those huge publishing houses.

It's also important for indies to conform to all industry standards in matters of grammar, punctuation and spacing -- both to fit in with all the other books and to prove that they can. Indies have a bad reputation as being amateurs and hacks, so don't visually separate your books from the ones the big box publishers are churning out by the million.

And because it is a standard, you could get called on it if you do it incorrectly and use a double space. If you do any guest posts or freelance writing assignments, you could easily draw the ire of a blog owner or editor who has very strong opinions. Conform to the standard; they'll definitely let you know if they want you make changes. If they do, just use your search-and-replace function to fix your spacing.

Judgment: Exclusive First Look

Can't wait until Judgment (Deck of Lies, #4) comes out in November? You don't have to! Death, the third book in the Deck of Lies series, now has an exclusive preview of Judgment. 

Blog readers can get Death free in any electronic format at Smashwords all week long. Use the coupon code PZ96Z to get 100% off, and get a sneak peek of what's coming up in the fourth (and final) installment of the Deck of Lies series.

Writing 101: Bad Writing Habits

You may not even know that you've got bad writing habits. I didn't know that I had one until after I got rejected hundreds of times, and finally took it upon myself to figure out why. You've got to figure out how to spot, and stop, your own bad writing habits. Everybody's got them. 

Got a Bad Habit

I've briefly mentioned the rejection letter that marked a severe turning point in my writing life, and my discovery of my own bad writing habit can be traced right back to this source. It wasn't until I had an actual mystery to solve that I managed to find out one of the things I do wrong when I sit down to write. It helps that I actually write mysteries, but any writer can figure out how to spot their own bad habits. 

The one criticism the letter had for me was ambiguous at best: too repetitive. The word stuck out to me, and bothered me, and made me fret. So I sat down to re-read the book that got rejected, which is a massive epic of more than 240,000 words (it remains unpublished and I don't want to talk about it). That's nearly a quarter of a million words, and that's a lot. But I wanted to figure out the why of the rejection, so I was fueled by vanity. 

It's a strong motivator. I re-read that book and then re-read it again, growing increasingly peeved. I searched for passages that I repeated, descriptions that I was giving over and over, use of too many "said"s at the end of my dialogue (you know, "he said," "she said," "I said," "they said"). 

I couldn't find anything wrong. My descriptions were well-balanced; I didn't give them too often. I didn't repeat too many of the same words (you know I'm good with a Thesaurus). I didn't know what was wrong. 

And I reached a breaking point. Practically howling with frustration, I began to go through the book a third time to find out why I was too repetitive. My brain was screaming all sorts of colorful words about picky agents and their stupid standards, lies in letters and ambiguous hints that mean nothing at all. I started flying through the book, barely pausing as my eyes briefly skimmed each page in search of an error...any error. 

That's when I saw it. As I scanned, a single phrase began to stick out to me. I kept seeing it again and again...and again. Only with all those 240,000 words flying past my eyes could I make out the pattern that was cleverly buried inside the prose. And I realized the letter was right after all, because these two words were repeated over and over.

It seems. When I started looking, this phrase was everywhere in my manuscript.  

But he had forgotten all about me, it seems.

"It seems the weather turned while we were away." 

It seems silly now, but looking back I think I miss the grass the most. 

I used the find function to see just how many times this phrase appeared in that single book, to see how bad my habit really was. 

More than three hundred times. And the person who rejected me was right: it was too darned repetitive. I fixed the problem and I've never touched the book again, and I broke that bad habit. The moment I became aware of it, I started writing just a little bit better. It seems appears in my book Justice exactly twice, and you'll find it in my book Death just once. I don't make that mistake anymore...so hopefully soon I'll start finding all the other bad writing habits I don't yet know that I've got. 

Maybe you'll find yours, too. 

Finding the Habit

All authors are supposed to carefully read every letter of their books several times before declaring that it's done. You read it to proof it for grammatical and punctuation errors. You read it to make sure the plot is hanging together and everything makes sense. You read it to make sure it's perfect, and you read it with a critical eye. But once you're done, check for bad habits.

Scan your book instead. Look through each page quickly and see if anything starts to stick out to you, or if you start to see the same things over and over. You can find all sorts of things when you stop being careful and start being quick; things you might never notice otherwise. Once you find a bad habit, you can figure out how to re-word the passages that contain this less-than-perfect writing. And once you know you've got the habit, you'll always be aware of it and you'll end up being a better writer because of it. 

Writing 101: Proper Use of the Word Y'All

Every writer who wants to unmistakably make a character southern uses it...and at least half of them get it wrong. It's y'all, and it's been offending southern readers since the first author used it the wrong way. Before you attempt to insert it into one of your books, make sure you understand proper use of the word y'all...or you'll end up hearing about it from me. 

We're in the South, Y'all

I touched on the topic of y'all briefly in my apostrophes post, but it's so commonly mis-used it deserves to have its very own spotlight. First, let's all get clear on the meaning of y'all right here and now.

If you read my post, you know how to use apostrophes, and you know that y'all is really you all. The apostrophe takes the place of the o and the u to create this contraction. So every time you see y'all, think you all. The phrase means the same thing as all of you or (as Yankees might say) you guys. 

It's a plural word, and that's the most important thing you've got to remember about y'all. It only addresses more than one, because Robby by himself cannot be an all. Robby and Johnny can be an all because together they're two guys. For example, it's totally appropriate for me to say Robby and Johnny, y'all come in here and get your lunch. But I would never say Robby, y'all come in here and get your lunch.

So many, many authors get that wrong. The word means you all, and actual southerners only use it when they're addressing more than one. Replace y'all with a phrase that means the same thing, and you'll see what I mean:

Robby, all of you come in here and get your lunch. 

Robby, who's out there alone, is going to think the speaker has gone crazy. And readers who see the error are going to roll their eyes...maybe away from your book, and onto the next. Y'all means the same as all of you and it's always plural. 

But I know why people get confused...because y'all's is also considered to be a usable word in the south. 

Y'all's

 It looks like the worst of grammar, but honestly it's not as incorrect as it appears. Y'all's is a double contraction that's commonly spoken south of the Mason Dixon line, and if you're writing true southern dialect it's bound to crop up. Do you know exactly what it means? 

Just extend it to find out. We know that y'all is you all, so what does it mean when you add the new apostrophe and and s to the word? The same thing it always means -- it's possessive.

Y'all's refers to something that belongs to you all. For example, I could have said Robby and Johnny, y'all's lunch is getting cold instead, and it would still be correct. If something belongs to more than one and I'm addressing those owners directly, the thing becomes y'all's. 

Some sources might argue with me on that one; they say the possessive form of the word is more properly spelled y'alls. Some grammarians compare y'all's to its, which is a possessive form that does not have an apostrophe. It's one of those confusing rules of English. However, according to the urban dictionary (the authority on such things), the word is properly spelled out as y'all's. I find this to be the less confusing spelling, at any rate, because you can look at it and figure out exactly what you're doing. Start deleting apostrophes arbitrarily, and you're bound to get yourself screwed up.