The Dangerous Moment When Somebody Says, “We Can Make This Better”

There are few sentences more terrifying to a creative person than: “We love it.”

This sounds a little counterintuitive. You would imagine the frightening sentences would be things like: “We hate it.”, “We're passing.”, “We've decided to go in another direction.”

Or, if you're an author: “We've read the manuscript and would like to discuss page 147.”

Nobody wants to discuss page 147.

Page 147 already knows what it did.

But we love it is different. Because we love it is rarely allowed to travel alone. It usually brings a friend.

“We love it. We just think…”

And there it is. The beginning of improvement.

Improvement is a dangerous business

Before I begin, I have nothing against improving things. Human civilisation would be considerably less comfortable if nobody had ever looked at the first toilet and thought:

I believe there may be room for development here.

Improvement has given us antibiotics, refrigeration, air conditioning and coffee machines that can produce seventeen different varieties of coffee while requiring only a master's degree in engineering to operate.

But creative improvement is different. Because eventually somebody has to decide what better actually means.

Now for this bit, I want you to imagine you've spent twenty years writing a novel. Not twenty weekends. Twenty years.

You've lived with your novel’s characters for longer than some marriages last. You've removed paragraphs you loved because they didn't belong. You've rewritten chapters at two in the morning. You've changed a character's name seventeen times because somehow Bernard wasn't right.

And eventually you think you have something. Not something perfect. But something that’s undeniably yours.

Then someone arrives carrying a clipboard. “We love it.” They proclaim.

Wonderful.

“Absolutely love it.”

Even better.

“There's just one thing…”  <<<  Ah, there it is, WE LOVE ITs best friend.

And this is where Localad gets into trouble

In THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE, Localad has spent twenty years writing his novel Purradise. It is an enormous fantasy novel about a land ruled by cats, fallen knights, singing mountains, courage, grief and a mysterious Wound in the sky.

Nobody has read it and this bothers Localad enormously.

Then Hollywood reads it, which eventually bothers him considerably more.

Because Hollywood loves Purradise. They love the world it has created. They love the characters. They love the emotional depth and the originality. They love absolutely everything about it.

But WE LOVE ITs best friend, would prefer that most of those things were different. The quiet moments could perhaps be less quiet. The complicated characters could perhaps be less complicated. The grief could perhaps become vengeance instead.

The Wound could be bigger. There could be more action. There could be a franchise. There could be merchandise. And could somebody please explain why none of the cats has yet ridden away from an explosion without looking back?

Localad begins discovering something every creative person eventually learns:

Nobody ever destroys your work by openly announcing: “I intend to destroy it!”

They try to improve it.

Nobody means any harm

And this, I think, is the interesting part. It would have been very easy to write the people surrounding Localad as villains. Men in expensive suits sitting around a table saying: “How shall we ruin literature today?” Possibly while stroking a white cat.

Although in this particular story the cat would probably demand points on the backend. But that's not really how these things happen.

The producer wants a successful movie. The studio wants its investment protected. Marketing wants something it can market. The lead actor wants something he can act. The lawyers want everyone to stop talking immediately.

Everyone is just doing their job. And every individual decision made in the process can make perfectly good sense. But somehow, after enough perfectly sensible decisions, nobody can quite remember what the original thing was.

That's what fascinates me.

The death of originality doesn't necessarily require an executioner. Sometimes all it needs is a committee.

The graph has entered the room

At some point in almost every modern creative enterprise, somebody produces data. This is generally considered a serious moment because the data has a graph. And graphs are extremely persuasive.

You can say almost anything while pointing at a graph and people will hesitate before challenging you.

“Our research indicates that audiences respond positively to emotional authenticity.”

Graph.

“Viewers demonstrate stronger engagement with recognisable archetypes.”

Graph.

“Adults aged thirty-five to fifty-four are particularly receptive to emotionally damaged, 64- year-old writers.”

Graph.

Nobody knows exactly how the writer became emotionally damaged. There wasn't time because the meeting ends at four.

And this is where something created because one person desperately wanted to say something, encounters something designed to appeal to the greatest possible number of people.

Those two objectives aren't always enemies. But they aren't always friends either.

Creation is an absurdly personal act

Whether you write books, paint pictures, take photographs, make music, build furniture or construct tiny replicas of railway stations in your garage while insisting to your family that this is perfectly normal behaviour, you eventually put something of yourself into it.

That's unavoidable.

You make choices. This word instead of that one. This colour. This angle. This character lives. That one doesn't.

And sometimes you can't even explain why. You simply know.

Then eventually your product leaves you. A reader reads it. A viewer sees it. Someone listens to it.

And something rather wonderful happens.

They make it partly theirs.

That's the bargain.

The creator doesn't control what the audience feels. Nor should they.

But there's a difference between allowing someone to interpret your work and allowing someone to dismantle it looking for more commercially useful components.

That's the territory Localad stumbles into. He thinks he's selling Hollywood permission to make his story into a film.

Hollywood thinks it has purchased something rather more interesting: potential.

Potential sequels. Potential audiences. Potential merchandise. Potential markets. Potential intellectual property.

Localad, inconveniently, continues thinking of it as a story.

Which brings us now to ownership

Who owns a story?

Legally, that's often fairly straightforward.

Emotionally? Good luck.

A writer might sell film rights. A studio might buy adaptation rights. A publisher might own particular publishing rights.

Contracts can tell everybody precisely who is allowed to do what, in which territories, using which formats, until which dates and probably, under what circumstances someone is permitted to manufacture a commemorative lunchbox.

But none of that answers the more interesting question. Who owns what the story means?

That's harder.

And that's really what THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE became about for me.

Not Hollywood. Not filmmaking. Not even books... Ownership.

The peculiar human need to protect the things we create from becoming something we never intended. And the equally peculiar fact that once we release those things into the world, we cannot entirely control them anyway.

Localad eventually has to learn the difference. So does Hollywood. And neither enjoys the lesson particularly much.

And that's why independent creators do matter

There is something gloriously inefficient about independent creativity.

A person can spend years making something that market research would have killed on a Tuesday morning.

Nobody asked for it. No focus group approved it. There was no strategic gap in the market. Somebody simply thought:

This should exist.

And I love that.

Not: Our analysis indicates significant demand.

But: I've got an idea. And those may be the four most dangerous words in commerce.

They're also responsible for most of the things worth having.

Of course, there is still one tiny problem

Having written an entire novel satirising what happens when creativity collides with commerce, I am now attempting to commercially sell said novel.

Yes, I recognise the contradiction. And I have decided the healthiest response for this is to ignore it completely.

THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE is, after all, a product.

It has a price. It has an ISBN. It is available now from Amazon and here’s the link to prove it.

There are keywords. There are categories. And somewhere in the land of Bezos, an algorithm is currently deciding whether you are the sort of person who might properly enjoy it. So perhaps none of us escapes the machinery entirely.

But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is simply remembering, underneath all the algorithms and markets and platforms and graphs, why the thing existed in the first place.

Someone had something they wanted to say and somebody else wanted to hear it. Easy as that.

Everything between those two people is just infrastructure. Useful infrastructure, certainly. But infrastructure nonetheless.

And if Hollywood ever does get around to telephoning me for my manuscript, of course I'll answer them. I'm an author not an idiot. I'll listen politely. I'll thank them for their interest. I'll remain calm and professional all the way through. And when they eventually say:

“We absolutely love the book. We just have a few changes…”

I'll know exactly what to say.

“That's wonderful, I just have a few clauses.”