Martian Child

My daughter and I went to see Martian Child over the weekend. I don't go to movies very often, but I've been reading No Plot, No Problem (a guide to novel writing for NaNoWriMo), and one of the suggestions was to take a break and watch a television show or go to a movie and think about plot development. My daughter picked the movie, but it turned out to be a great one for my purposes. The protagonist is an author (a very successful one, kind of a science fiction version of J. K. Rowling) who decides to adopt a seven-year-boy who thinks he is from Mars. He's single, a widower, so the movie is all about the connection between the father and his unusual son, without the bother of interaction with a mom or even a nanny. It all works out fine, of course, because this is a movie, and the father writes a novel based on the experience, guaranteed to be a feel-good best-seller.

The real-life book that the real-life movie is based on is "semi-fiction" by [apparently famous] science fiction author David Gerrold who adopted a six-year-old son as a single parent. In real life the Gerrold and his son played a game about pretending to be Martians; the child didn't really believe he was a Martian, as he did in the movie. In real life Gerrold is gay, and the father in his real-life book is gay. I guess introducing the whole issue of gay parenthood would have changed the focus of this movie. Perhaps they could have made his sexual preferences ambiguous, though, instead of making him a widower still grieving over his dead wife. The book was originally a short story, then revised as a novelette.

My NaNoWriMo novel (also more truthfully a novelette, estimated to run only the minimum 150 pages) is "semi-fiction" too. It's based on an experience that happened to me about ten years ago. I am making lots of changes to "novelize" my story, but sometimes truth is so much stranger and more satisfying than fiction, and sometimes I just want to tell the story the way it happened. I have introduced several other characters, and I made myself a proficient cellist in the novel, though I did not take up the cello until a couple of years after the events in the novel took place, and I am not yet as proficient as the narrator of my book. I threw in a harp player for good measure. Adoption was a factor in my real-life experience so one of my characters is an adoptive parent. In my novel, the two main characters, who would not have done this in real life, collaborate to write a musical instead of a novel. I needed to depart from reality a bit and wanted a feel-good ending. :-)

So, it was the perfect movie for me to see, legitimizing the "semi-fiction" novel and allowing me continue merrily on my novelization path. I just hit the halfway mark of 25,000 words and added a word-count widget to the sidebar of this blog so that those who are interested can see how I am doing.

Next, my daughter and I plan to see August Rush, another adoption tale, this time with cello. Hmm, I wonder who will play the cellist when my book is made into a movie....