You Ruined It! :: Movie Adaptations of Favorite Books, Redux

The other day, a friend of mine pointed me to a news story about Tom Cruise being considered to play Lee Child's itinerant vigilante, Jack Reacher.

The outcry from fans was immediate and vigorous. Reacher is an unstoppable 6' 5", 250 pound, package of whupass. Cruise, generally speaking, is not. Child is on on record with the Guardian, saying "Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way," Nevertheless, the cry went up from the halls of fandom: "You're ruining it!"

Every so often, this discussion rears its head and I've discussed it before in relation to Harry Potter as well as Where the Wild Things Are and Inkheart. And I'm on record as saying that there's no manner in which a movie adaptation can "ruin" a book.  They can screw up a story, they can make a bad movie, but nothing they do can have any effect on the book they were (allegedly) based upon... or can it?

The cherished myths of writing :: "One Size Fits All"

How do I put this delicately? I have an outsized cranium. Seriously. My hats are built in a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia by skilled craftsmen imported from a murky parallel universe where humanity has evolved into a horde of massive levitating craniums.

Would I lie to you?

This is the root of my contempt for the words "One size fits all." Those words have mocked me my entire life, whispered from the hatband of almost every hat I've ever encountered "...except you."

The truth of the matter is that there's no such thing as a one size fits all hat. At best, a third of the people who try it on will be satisfied, while the rest either look like they're trying to wear a church bell with a brim or suffer an instant compression head ache followed by cerebral edema and death.  You can no more make a hat that will fit everyone than you can make a pair of pants that will.

The same might be said of writing advice.