Writing movies someone else got paid for

Well, it's happened. Hobbit and I are tackling a project that has a huge audience and could one day become a major BBC mini-series or major motion picture. Except someone else was already paid to write it. Our best hope is that their script, like so many, will end up in development hell and our script will be optioned instead.

I'm talking about The Thirteenth Tale, a riveting, gothic tale of ghosts, romance, mystery, orphans, lots of scandal, and twists that have you guessing at the main character's true identity until the very end. It's written in the style of Wuthering Heights and Jayne Eyre, a comparison that initially put me off, but eventually brought me back. I love those stories. But the language and art of storytelling from that period just bore me. Couple those scandalous tales with an author that has an engaging, poetic command of the English language and I'm sold.

The two criticisms I have heard amidst much praise:

1) The main character, Margaret, has too many thoughts on the beauty of language and her favorite books, disrupting the story.

I can't disagree with this more. Part of this book's hook is that it is a story about the love of stories and the love of language: a good story is a mix of truth and fiction, and if it's done well enough we shouldn't care which is which.

2) The ending, while immensely satisfying, is drawn out too long.

While I do not share this criticism, I must point out that the ending, indeed, is drawn out. However, by this point the book has too much steam for the reader to care, and I for one appreciate the time the author took to tie up some of the more haunting loose ends while still leaving some questions up for pie talk.

As a side-note, I am dumbfounded by the assumed success of this book. The author, Diane Setterfield, previously a Librarian and French tutor, for her first novel was paid an immense advance of 800,000 pounds, almost $2 million dollars. That's not counting what the book DID go on to gross by becoming an instant #1 bestseller, and 2 years after its publication it continues to sell impressive numbers, thanks to continued word of mouth and critical praise.

It doesn't bother me that someone else was paid to write the film adaptation. If ours is never picked up, we need the experience, and it will be interesting to note the differences between our script and theirs, and to voice the inevitable "But ours would have been so much better!"