Trashy? ...Or AWESOME? by Bytemite

Personally I don't see the appeal. Classic literature is more often than not about characters. You make Darcy and Co into Vampires then you alter their personality - essentially making them different people. So what would be the point?

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Friday, May 13, 2011 3:14 PM

A whole secret side of the story that we aren't even aware of. Character behaviour, that if you think about it, could be consistent with vampire seduction techniques. And then, the final tragic horror of realizing what is going to happen to Elizabeth after the unholy marriage.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 3:38 PM

The duality would be too extreme. Maintaining two such seperate realities would reduce the whole premise into a sit com farce.

It's not that the concept wouldn't work it's just that those characters would clash with the narrative.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 3:39 PM

HKCAVALIER

Moby Dick, only the whales are ORGANIZED. America and Europe develope seperately until the 18th century when Professor B. Franklin out of Liverpool, cribbing from Leonardo Da Vinci, invents the first aeroplane. And Powhatan makes a treaty with the great whale warcheif Mobidi'ish for the conquest of Europe. Hijinks ensue.

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 3:46 PM

YES.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 3:59 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by TheSomnambulist:

It's not that the concept wouldn't work

Woo!

Sorry, everything else to me sounded like "challenge, challenge, challenge."

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Friday, May 13, 2011 4:09 PM

Nope. You know me better than that Byte...

I just happen to think that these ideas have to be considered with the characters very much in mind. Especially with the old classics.

For example you can't have Pickwick from the Pickwick Papers suddenly doing a weight loss montage in order to ready himself with a fight against some Zombies from the new world or something. That's just not Pickwick.

It has to pertain, to some extent, to the character.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 4:12 PM

Wickham is a devilish gambler and debaucher, Darcy is a cold and distant and rich mysterious land owner. Dissociating for a moment whether the proposals offered by either were ever sincere, and in what directions that could effect a vampire narrative, neither character appears to me to preclude reinterpretation as a vampire.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 4:24 PM

Ha,Ha... Well I'd have to brush up on my Pride and Prejudice

I never wish to contradict creativity, so I say; Bytemite... Go for it. Why not write a version? Seriously. Just jot down a page worth of significant scenes and see how it flows?
You never know.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 4:30 PM

Thanks! I think there's an interesting and unexpected twist here. I'm imagining quirky, whimsy, and just a little bit of that prickling feeling at the back of the neck.

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Friday, May 13, 2011 5:58 PM

MYOWNKNIGHT

I havent read PPZ yet, but i bought a copy of sense, sensability, and sea monsters. LOVE IT.

"I don't wanna rain on your crazy parade, buddy. But I don't think we can fix this thing."

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Friday, May 13, 2011 8:32 PM

DREAMTROVE

Pride and Prejudice being done, pick something less well known, but known.

The underlying idea of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was "What would make Beverly Hills 90210 not suck is if the whole school were attacked by vampires." I think that's an exact quote as to where the idea came from.

Follow that logic.

If you take Pride and Prejudice, it already rules, so you're setting the bar higher for yourself, but that's okay. Sense and Sensibility and Vampires probably has possibilities, because it acknowledges blatantly ripping off the idea.

Alternatively, attack a different subject, something smaller.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 1:36 AM

BORIS

I like it when the classics are cleverly messed up...it amuses me immensely...nothing wrong with reworking something intelligently. what I hate is when people take a good story/idea and mess it up or rework it stupidly e.g. the American versions of Life on Mars or Kath and Kim.

Rose S

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 4:36 AM

Yeah, I know, it's a good story without spicing it up, and I actually have some respect for Jane Austen.

But I had this idea and it just grabbed me. You know how it is.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 3:59 PM

HKCAVALIER

The Vampyre Lestrade

Sherlock Holmes must unearth, so to speak, the corruption in Scottland Yard.

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 4:05 PM

Why are you not a professional writer!? That's two in as many days!

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 4:08 PM

DREAMTROVE

The specific problem is that it's already been done on this story, and so you'll be seen as a copycat. You need to twist the idea and make it different enough.

Think Jane Austen and Aaron Spelling, and what they have in common is really audience, and it basically ends there. They're both writing romance grounded in the real world for a younger audience that wants to relate more to characters than to fantasical whimsical elements.

Taking such a story and adding a fantasy element to it, works. When you distill the essence of what you want to do, then you apply it somewhere where it hasn't been done before, or at least, where the target audience may not have seen it done, like a classic western, set on a spaceship.

I just saw Fast Five, a story which was in desperate need of vampires. We thought about seeing Priest instead, but al the sites trashed it, and rotten tomatoes gave it a 19%.

Some things cannot be made not to suck: There's no way you can take "Sideways" or "About Schmidt" and make them not totally suck. It has to be something that has some potential, but just needs that extra kick that a magical element could give it.

Requiem for a Dream, for example (Err. I see Requiem for a Vampire has been taken by maybe multiple porn movies) But this is the sort of think I'm thinking of: What if, instead of being a drug addict, he was a vampire, and that was his addiction, etc.

Taking something like "Remains of the Day" and crossing it with "Bride of Frankenstein" you could have "Remains of the Bride" a look at the love lorn underclass of the distaff undead.

Merchant/Ivory produced a great number of films that could really do well with a vampire or too. "A Room with a Vampire"

Withering Heights
War and Pieces
Crime and Punishment and Vampires
I think Sense and Sensibility and Vampires is actually doable to the same audience, but you probably can't get away with Pride and Prejudice and Vampires. I see someone has already done Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. How about Persuasion and Vampires? Northinger Abbey and the Vampires that should have been there.

I see there's also Emma and Vampires

and Mansfield Park and Mummies

and Vampire Darcy's Desire: A Pride and Prejudice Adaptation

Sales Rank at Amazon (lower is better, 1 is #1, 10 million is selling 3 copies a year)

Mansfield Park and Mummies is the only one here doing well, at 60,000 to P&P&Z's 2,000, so clearly, no one is touching P&P&Z's, everyone else is in the 600,000 (okay for aftermarket, but not where you want your novel to be.)

Someone has also done "Wuthering Bites"

Correction: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is at 72,000.

Android Karenina, 68,000

Emma and the Werewolves is down with the others, nearing a million.

Jane Slayre, The Meowmorphosis, okay...

Dickens, anyone? How about David Copperfiend?

Staying in the same ballpark. I think that Miami Vamps has potential though. Hawaii Five Uh-Oh.

Lost in Space with Vampires. Nah. Happy Days and Vampires. Archie and Betty and Vampyrica.

I see someone has done Little Vampire Women and The Undead World of Oz.

Catcher in the Revenant, a story of a square prep school boy who is woefully unprepared for adventures into the seedy underworld of the undead.

little crypt on the prairie?

Undead Dickens is underdone. The only undone Austen is Northanger Abbey, but a gothic parody of Northanger Abbey would probably be de trop, as it is already a gothic parody.

Little orphan banshee

If you go for some less well known gothic romance writer, you have more of an open field, but less of an audience probably. Hmmm. it's problematic.

Still, as I always say, all new writers should start with short stories.

ETA: Apparently grabbed someone else first.

Riona, good one.

Damn, I see they've already thought of "nancy drew vampire slayer"

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 5:24 PM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

You could do well with just Mark Twain:

Tom Chainsawyer
Huckleberry Fiend
Innocents and Broads
Life and the Undead on the Mississippi

Or the transvestite suite:

African Queen
Been-Her
The Old Man Is A She

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 8:35 PM

HKCAVALIER

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Why are you not a professional writer!? That's two in as many days!

I'm trying! The Moby Dick thing's just been floating around in my mind for years--would require a shit-ton of research to do right.

Right now I'm writing the all-American science fiction novel, a populist dystopia in which people are dying in statistically significant numbers of stress. In the novel's past, whole prisons of inmates and guards alike have dropped dead of a sunny Sunday afternoon. So, prisons are abolished and the entire legal system becomes a "stressor" so it is largely abolished in favor of pharmatherapeutic quarantine. The whole population goes on medication. Wars are rare, utterly devastating to both sides and over very quickly.

Science believes that the human genome is "failing." They've come up with the concept of genetic "nonpareils," people whose genome are so close to the original human blueprint and who, even in the early days of the 22nd century, are sufficiently isolated from the modern world that they are resistant to the degenerative affects of the syndrome. The super-rich begin adopting south-central African children and raising them as their own to succeed them in their global enterprises. Human trafficking, breeding programs, genetic espionage start up with various central African governments seeing enormous profits.

Anyway, it's underway and writing is going well.

Wish me luck!

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Sunday, May 15, 2011 2:47 AM

GWEK

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
I have been thinking about the potential for rewrite of some classic novels, though feel free to post some of your own ideas about things that might skirt the boundaries of good taste, but also be potentially really amazing.

First exhibit.

I know you're all familiar with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Putting aside that Jane Austen found the gothic novels of her time dreadful and would totally hate this:

Pride and Prejudice, where Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham are competing vampires.

DISCUSS.

(You'll never see the original story the same way again after thinking about this, I kid you not)

The idea of rewriting/retelling a classic isn't trashy. That's how we got WEST SIDE STORY and CLUELESS and a dozen other great ideas (generally movies, though) that I can't think of right now because it's too early on Sunday morning for me to be talking literature.

Heck, if I were a movie-maker, one of my vanity projects would be to retell a number of Shakespeare's plays in the Star Wars Universe (KING LEAR with droids, McBETH with Force witches and lightsabers, etc).

Aside from noting that what most of the better re-tellings have in common seems to be that they are movies/TV shows (and therefore able to access the essense of the story and put it in a new shell without feeling like you're cheating the original), the problem with PRIDE AND PEJUDICE AND VAMPIRES isn't that it's trashy or now awesome (although I think it's not) but that it is, as pointed out, derivative.

Not only does it seem too close to the idea of P&P&Z, but it's derivative of the whole current "let's stick vampires in everything" craze. If you're idea is to stick vampires in a bunch of classics, then I implore you in the name of all that is holy to come up with a different (and more original) plan. There are enough vampires in the world. More than enough.

Unless maybe you're talking about VAMPIRE MOBY DICK, which would explain both the pale coloration and the difficulty in killing Moby.

But, no, seriously, there are already more than enough vampires. No more please.

www.stillflying.net: "Here's how it might have been..."

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Sunday, May 15, 2011 4:49 AM