The Book or the Movie?

I love a good story. I love the plot twist you never saw coming, the character who feels like someone you’ve met. And I love finding those stories across every platform there is, though I’ve come to believe the platform matters far less than the tale itself. Even though it predates me, I’ve sometimes imagined a family gathered around the radio in the living room, listening to old westerns like The Lone Ranger or Hopalong Cassidy. Even now I’ll occasionally listen to one of my favorites in that medium: Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds.

Film and television paint a broader picture, taking the description on a page and bringing it to life for all to see. Special effects can now render just about anything the mind can conjure, in astonishing detail, and actors put faces and personalities to what was once just a name on a page. My sister recently commented on how different Peter Benchley’s Jaws was from book to film. Benchley had a hand in writing the screen adaptation, yet she still thought the book was better. And though I loved it myself, plenty of people felt the film version of The Lord of the Rings never matched Tolkien’s original tomes. That’s the rub: reading builds your own picture, and the screen hands you someone else’s — when the two collide, the book usually wins. There are many well-made films and shows that tell amazing stories. But in the end, my favorite platform is still a book.

I don’t mean e-books, but I don’t want to knock them either. Technology has put the world’s entire library in the palm of your hand, and that’s no small feat. But for this consumer of stories, my favorite way to drown in a tale is flipping the pages of an old book. I want to smell that pulp. I want to feel the heft, the roughness of the pages. I want to hear the spine crackle when I open and close it.

Some might say that’s archaic. Some might say I’m a Luddite. That’s okay. I’ll answer to both. There’s something about cracking a cover and stepping into a world that comes alive in your imagination. You can get the same from an e-book, I know. I just like a plain old book.

Because in the end, it was never really about the medium — it was about the story. I remember reading Michael Crichton’s Congo, a used paperback I picked up at a yard sale. Its condition told me it had been well-worn and probably mistreated in storage, but never judge a book by its cover. I read it start to finish in about fifteen hours. I could not put it down. I had the same experience with Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, then again with Bernard Cornwell’s Grail Quest trilogy and Saxon Tales. Just recently I did it with Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars: Thrawn series and Trevor H. Cooley’s Noosejumpers. I read them all in record time, and every one was superb. What was it that pulled me in so hard? It’s simple, really. They told a good story.

That’s why I’ve started my own foray into writing. I want to tell a good story. It’s my sincere hope that if you ever pick up a book I’ve written, no matter the platform, when you close the back cover or power down your Kindle after the last page, you’ll sit back and think, “Wow — that was definitely a good story.”

All my best, and my thanks to you,
Lyle