It's interesting that you present it that way. It makes sense when you think about it, and reminds me of bad stylistic advice I get from referees in papers. When they don't like the writing, they think they can offer concrete fixes, but they either don't improve the paper at all or only do so marginally.
For what it's worth: I pitched a Bad Apples TV show to a friend who writes theater, and the friend said, sympathetically, that it sounds like a good novel. And I explained why, no, it's a story that makes better film than literature (as do all but the worst LARPs): film and television can show dialog from multiple points of view simultaneously, relying on body language and on acting to convey what the characters are thinking. Writing is more constrained to one viewpoint at a time, so trying to portray the same scene from multiple points of view means the story either is about the multiple accounts, like In A Grove (the source for the movie Rashomon), or is impossible to follow, like the early chapters of A Game of Thrones, when all the characters are in the same place. That's why season 1 of Game of Thrones is better than the book (the subsequent seasons then lose that aspect, since the characters are separated, and then lose out big time on harebrained changes introduced by the showrunners).
Film is also a good medium for showing characters plotting without telling us everything about their plots. Again going by ASOIAF vs. GOT, on television we get to watch Littlefinger and Varys interact alone, but in the books they could never be point of view characters since they know so much.
I have not read Mrs. Hawking. I've read Adonis. It can be a decent book, whereas something like Bad Apples couldn't (I thought for a while about how to write coherent chapters with shifting points of view, and gave up). But I don't think making it a book would improve it in any way, and it's a story that visuals can greatly enhance. You want epic visuals for this. You want to show Aidan victorious at the Coliseum, the center of attention and yet clearly so much smaller than the world around him (the empress, the aristocracy in general, the arena). A book would be great if you had more intricate interactions requiring many characters, or a lot of worldbuilding detail, or literary symbolism (of the "cracks in the vase symbolize the protagonist's emotional cracks" kind). You don't have that; you have a small-ish cast, worldbuilding that relies on what everyone knows of Roman Imperial history, and visual symbolism.
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Date: 2015-12-17 04:07 pm (UTC)For what it's worth: I pitched a Bad Apples TV show to a friend who writes theater, and the friend said, sympathetically, that it sounds like a good novel. And I explained why, no, it's a story that makes better film than literature (as do all but the worst LARPs): film and television can show dialog from multiple points of view simultaneously, relying on body language and on acting to convey what the characters are thinking. Writing is more constrained to one viewpoint at a time, so trying to portray the same scene from multiple points of view means the story either is about the multiple accounts, like In A Grove (the source for the movie Rashomon), or is impossible to follow, like the early chapters of A Game of Thrones, when all the characters are in the same place. That's why season 1 of Game of Thrones is better than the book (the subsequent seasons then lose that aspect, since the characters are separated, and then lose out big time on harebrained changes introduced by the showrunners).
Film is also a good medium for showing characters plotting without telling us everything about their plots. Again going by ASOIAF vs. GOT, on television we get to watch Littlefinger and Varys interact alone, but in the books they could never be point of view characters since they know so much.
I have not read Mrs. Hawking. I've read Adonis. It can be a decent book, whereas something like Bad Apples couldn't (I thought for a while about how to write coherent chapters with shifting points of view, and gave up). But I don't think making it a book would improve it in any way, and it's a story that visuals can greatly enhance. You want epic visuals for this. You want to show Aidan victorious at the Coliseum, the center of attention and yet clearly so much smaller than the world around him (the empress, the aristocracy in general, the arena). A book would be great if you had more intricate interactions requiring many characters, or a lot of worldbuilding detail, or literary symbolism (of the "cracks in the vase symbolize the protagonist's emotional cracks" kind). You don't have that; you have a small-ish cast, worldbuilding that relies on what everyone knows of Roman Imperial history, and visual symbolism.