User blog:RRabbit42/Embrace, don't chase: Adaptation abounds, part 2

The philosophy of these blogs is "Everything is adaptation". It's impossible to list every type of adaptation because of it. But here are some examples that you may not realize are adaptations.

Literature and storytelling
Stage name, pen name, pseudonym, married name, professional name, nickname, pet name: Changes to how you identify yourself.

Sequel, prequel, mid-quel, spin-off, remake, reboot, reimagined, inspired by a true story, based on actual events: Taking an existing story and changing it to re-tell the same story or add onto that story.

Parody, homage, allusion, mashup: adapting your idea to reference another story, person, place or something else:
 * "The Dude" and "The Stranger" from The Big Lebowski appearing in a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episode.
 * Candace Flynn imitates one of the body snatchers in one of the episodes of Phineas and Ferb.
 * Combining the theme songs from Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia and Zootopia and Trolls into one song apiece.
 * You'll lose count of the number of references in the MythAdventures books.

A fifteenth-century version of the Aesop Fable, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", ends with this remark: "men bileve not lyghtly hym whiche is knowen for a lyer". It looks almost unreadable to us because the spellings of words have changed in the past six hundred years. Using today's spelling, it would be "men believe not lightly him which is known for a liar" and using a more contemporary translation, we could say, "People do not believe those who have a reputation as a liar".

Sherlock Holmes. Played by 254 actors, adapted into TV shows like Elementary on CBS and Sherlock on BBC and into books like the Basil of Baker Street series about a mouse community in the cellar of 221B Baker Street.

The Day the Crayons Quit: A story about what if your crayons were alive and weren't happy with what they were used to color.

Coloring books
Coloring books have been around for over a century. They are line drawings that you can fill in with a variety of colors, using crayons, color pencils, watercolor paints and markers. Coloring books for children sometimes include stickers and stories for the pictures.

In the past decade, coloring books for adults have become popular, with more complex and finer designs. One example is a Firefly coloring book, which was used to lead off this series of articles. Another is the Disney Dreams Collection Thomas Kinkade Studios Coloring Book that has a paintings from Thomas Kinkade's "Disney Dreams Collection" with a line drawing next to each one so you can try reproducing them yourself.

Coloring books are used for education and therapy for children and adults. They provide a way to de-stress, replace negative thoughts and images with pleasant ones, and provide a break from technology, though electronic versions of coloring books are available that provide some features from graphic programs, like flood fill to quickly fill in a defined area.

Fables, fairy tales and folklore
Throughout history, we've had Aesop's Fables like the one above, stories by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and those written by slightly more modern authors like Joel Chandler Harris (the Brer Rabbit stories) and Richard Dorson (who wrote about Davy Crocket and contributed to the use of the term "urban legend").

Each culture has their own versions of these classic stories:
 * Cinderella: Cendrillon (Caribbean), Domítíla and Adelita (Mexico), The Irish Cinderlad (Ireland), Cindy Ellen (set in the Wild West of the United States), The Egyptian Cinderella (Egypt), The Rough-Face Girl (Algonquin Indian folklore), The Golden Sandal (the Middle East), The Korean Cinderella (Korea), The Persian Cinderella (Persia, now known as Iran) and Yeh-Shen (China).
 * Several of Disney's films were adapted from Andersen's stories, such as The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid and Frozen. Another movie, Tangled is based on the story of Rapunzel from the Brothers Grimm. The Princess and the Frog is a double adaptation: adapted from the book The Frog Princess by E. D. Baker, which was based on "The Frog Prince" by the Brothers Grimm.

Adapting stories professionally
For those who are interested in writing, be it fan fiction or any other kind, I thought it would be helpful to provide links to a series of blogs by a professional scriptwriter and showrunner about why adapting stories is something every writer is likely to do if they want to get into movies.

John Rogers created the TV series Leverage, adapted the three The Librarian movies into a TV series and wrote a few screenplays for movies, including co-writing the first Transformers live-action film. He is the only showrunner I'm aware of that creates each season of the TV shows he works on so that it will be a complete story. That way, if the show is cancelled after the end of a season, fans aren't left with a cliffhanger that won't be resolved.


 * Parts 1 and 2: What you can expect to earn for your work and a glimpse at how many scripts a year the movie studios need.
 * Part 3: Learning to find what you love about a story so you can tackle the adaptation.
 * Part 4: You'll have to change things. That's why it's called "an adaptation".
 * Part 5: You're not going to please all of the fans.

Rewriting your work
No matter what type of writing you do, there will always be a point where you have to rewrite at least a part of it. Actor and writer Wil Wheaton recently posted his work on re-writing the first draft of his latest novel. It's good information about how just doing the work counts as much as being able to point to a number and say, "I did that much."