What to Do When Your Novel is Adapted into a Pile of Dogshit

A cautionary tale

The non-lunch lunch

I cross the lobby of the Grosvenor Hotel, London, wearing a tailored jacket, court shoes, and an air of excitement. I’ve been invited for lunch with a producer, who has just bought an option on my first novel, The Marlowe Papers. Not the film option all writers dream about. An opera option. But hell, it is a start, right? Who knows where it might go from there? It will spread knowledge of my book and put a little money in my pocket (£1000 minus two sets of agent fees, so about £750). A bit more, if they renew the option, and 5% of net receipts if it comes to pass. Also at the lunch will be the opera composer, who will write the score. It was he who initially contacted me via Facebook with the proposal. This is an exciting new phase of my life, and I am looking forward to shaking their hands.

We will call the producer Dick Swinger. We will call the composer Will Ingstooge. We will call the prestigious European cultural institution they worked with, Krakozhia National Opera (I have just re-watched The Terminal). The option contract is already signed. They insisted I sign it before meeting them, and that they received the original, not a scan. They were very particular about that. A Red Flag, my friend, though I don’t at this point know it. I am naïve, fresh and hot out of the publishing oven, puffed up with perceived admiration like a souffle. I’m just excited someone wants to adapt my work of art to a new genre.

And it’s something of a miracle I’m there at all. The day before, I was ill. A bladder infection I’d been nursing for a week had flared up in my kidneys, and I’d spent all day in bed in considerable pain. In the morning, I’d rung the doctor and got an emergency appointment for the afternoon (2016! those halcyon days when the NHS wasn’t broken). I messaged the composer to explain, saying there was a chance I might not make the meeting. In the afternoon, I got a lift to the surgery, still in great pain and feverish, and was prescribed antibiotics. Fortunately, these had an almost immediate effect, and by the time I’d taken the second dose that evening, my symptoms were largely relieved. In the morning, I felt okay. I sent a text to confirm we were on. The lunch meeting was at noon, so rather than spoil my appetite with a late breakfast, I caught my train to London on an empty stomach.

The producer must have known me from my Facebook photo. He crosses the lobby to introduce himself. The first thing he says:

“You don’t look like someone who was in agony yesterday with a kidney infection.”

There was no smile on his face. That’s right. The man who owns the opera option on The Marlowe Papers begins our first meeting by implying that I am a liar. Don’t worry; it gets worse.

Over the next hour and a half, over a single pot of tea served in the Grosvenor’s lounge, he tells me they will be choosing “a non-narrative line” through the book, stripping fragments out of context to deliberately distort the storyline. Their plan is not just to misrepresent the story I’d written, but entirely contradict it. I have inadvertently sold the rights to a passionate Stratfordian, who despises the underlying premise of my work of fiction so much that he intends to use fragments of the threat itself to destroy it, the way vaccines are created from viruses.

In Dick Swinger’s version of The Marlowe Papers, Marlowe didn’t use his secret service friends to escape being hanged for treason in 1593, faking his death and escaping to Northern Italy where he penned, for the next 20 years, the works of Shakespeare. In Dick Swinger’s version, Marlowe has gone mad and is locked in an asylum. The whole storyline is happening in his head. With considerable glee (confident there is nothing I can now do to stop this), Swinger shows me — with passages in my book which he has underlined — how this can be achieved.

“See if we take this… and then skip to this… and then to this… cutting out this person here… it will look like he is simply deluded?”

I agree miserably that I can see exactly how he can do what he intends. I have no idea how to respond. Some kind of paralysis is setting in, brought on by being blindsided, the shame of having been bamboozled, and an upbringing of enforced politeness. This is the Grosvenor, and you don’t make a scene. Anyway, what do I say? “I am an idiot, and I should have met you and got the measure of you before I signed this bloody contract”? This guy has kidnapped someone I love (I am, no question, in love with my invented Marlowe) and is describing in detail how he is going to slice him up while I just listen, nodding, numb with horror.

Dick Swinger seems to get a kick out of wound-infliction. It’s some kind of victory for him; some kind of revenge for the success of the book. He calls Marlowe a “narcissist” and refers to his words as “this guy’s bullshit”. The composer, Will Ingstooge, is quiet throughout. He seems embarrassed but unable to do anything more than witness this cultural ambush; watch me writhing in the net he, himself, laid out over the spike-laden pit of the other guy’s ego. At 1.40 pm, looking at me, he weakly suggests to Dick Swinger,

“Shall we get lunch now?”

Swinger: “Sandwiches are £15.”

Ingstooge: “We could go to a café down the road.”

Swinger: “I don’t want to lose this table. We have another meeting at 2.”

Praying for expiration

Friend, as you might imagine, I leave that meeting both miserable and ravenous. No amount of train station BLT baguette is going to fix the problem of having sold the rights to my beloved novel to an arsehole whose sole intention is to creatively destroy it. My only comfort is that the guy was too cheap to buy me a sandwich. He’s got no money of his own. Hopefully, he can’t raise it. My option was cheap (and maybe a grand was a bargain price to make this author who annoyed you feel crap for a couple of hours), but opera is expensive. Most options come to nothing. This was my fervent (non-religious) prayer.

Eighteen months later, the option is renewed—an automatic renewal I have no say in. But I set myself a little alarm for the day in 2019 that it is due to expire. After this first renewal, the contract says the option “may be renewed” subject to my agreement. If that happy day arises, I have no intention of renewing. I will bring my baby back home and tuck it up safely where I can keep an eye on it.

Friend, the expiry day in 2019 comes and goes. I am in a car in the countryside when I see the alert, and I punch the air. But too soon. Because the next day I get an email from my agent. I have the date fractionally wrong. Three days ahead of expiry, they have asked for a small extension. Just six months, at a pittance.

I say no.

She chops the meat again

The response to this is panic, though it takes them 11 days after the option has expired to respond. They reveal they are close to signing contracts with two opera houses for its production. They have six-figure funding pledges in the bag. They have even made a fully-realised, slick, 14-minute promotional video. They send my agent a link to the video.

Oh boy. The video.

A still from the video. I just discovered this week IT IS STILL ON YOUTUBE!! I’m going to send paid subscribers the link :-)

I watch it. I have what I describe in an email to my agent as some issues.

Extract from my email:

The actors sing their own speech tags and describe their actions: "I flinch" or "She gasps, knocked senseless by the sight" or "the mother says". Having them say them seems ludicrous to me - they were only present in the novel because it's a novel, not a visual artform. You don't need to describe the actions when they're being performed.  Perhaps the worst example is when the librettist has added an action description for the landlady so that she says of herself: "She hacks and smacks the board... she chops the meat again... she cleaves the poor ex-animal" (none of those words mine). But okay. I could just say, alright, that's the stupid thing they want to do with it, that is up to them.

However, I deeply object to the following added words:

"Where are you? while I rot here in some foreign land? Probably fucking every last boycunt back in England."

Not only are they incredibly offensive, but they are absolutely *not* respecting the spirit or intention of my work.  The language is completely wrong for the 16th/17th century, for Marlowe to speak (it is not how he speaks) and for Marlowe to speak of Walsingham (whom he is in love with, and respects). Nor is Walsingham someone who would be doing what this version of Marlowe accuses him of: it's utterly out of character.

It's added for pure sensationalism and completely vile. The producer seems to think these are largely my words, *edited* by the librettist, but they are only about 75 % my words, significantly added to by the librettist. Some of the clunkiest most awful lines are not mine. And I can't have *anyone* thinking I would use the word "boycunt", which is a foul word at the best of times.

If they're this far down the line with using my storyline and some of my lines (the Venetia scene is all my invention), and they can make a high-quality filmic trailer like this, then you think they could do more than offer me an insulting amount of money for a 6-month extension.

But how far they have come! Despite what they’ve done to it, I feel sorry for all the other creative people involved in the project; the people who weren’t Dick Swinger (who was the Librettist) or Will Ingstooge. I say it can go ahead under two circumstances. Either they remove my name, the tile The Marlowe Papers, and all the text that is mine. Or, they rewrite it to be true to the original storyline and intention and give me full creative control of the libretto.

Their response? We get a letter from their lawyers, saying they will sue me for breach of contract, and demanding I meet costs they have so far incurred, totalling over 38,000 Euros.

Cheaper than a £15 sandwich: a serving of integrity

Unlike the instance of “someone threatening to sue me” that I am currently living through, in this case, there was an interesting and cost-free get-out clause. And if you are an author, or friends with an author, it is something worth knowing about. I wish I’d known about it in 2016, because then none of this need have happened. I need not have sat dumbly through that torturous non-lunch at the Grosvenor Hotel in 2016, listening to Dick Swinger swing his dick. I could simply have said the phrase that you sometimes see printed on the copyright page of a book: “I assert my moral rights.”

There are four of them, and the key one in this case is the moral right of integrity:

“the right of an author to object to ‘derogatory’ treatment of a work. Treatment is ‘derogatory’ if it amounts to ‘distortion or mutilation ... or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author ...”

My agent sent a letter explaining moral rights, and that was that. We didn’t hear another thing. I had it hanging over me through the summer, seeing if they would still press ahead with trying to bankrupt me (obviously, being a non-famous writer, the only 38,000 Euros I had was 38,000 Euros of debt), but after a few months, it became clear they had gone away.

Finale

Some troubles dissolve easily. Some do not. The fact is, I am human, and I make mistakes. Naturally I regret those mistakes, and I aim to learn from them. I hope, in fact, to grow from them. But I don’t beat myself up about them. I hope you don’t either.

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Roundup of great things I read this week on Substack:

A.J. Jacobs

has reinvigorated the old Elizabethan idea of a Commonplace books and this looks like total nourishment for the swipe-and-scroll-exhausted soul: check out his “Just One Thing”. ‘The sea cannot in any sense be mistaken for a footbath’ says the inimitable

Tom Cox

in a metaphor you have to fully experience, dead walrus and all, especially if you’re being shredded by social media.

Katie Jgln

’s smartly written and well-researched piece on why gender discrimination does not end even after woman die got me thinking. And

Georgina Bruce

made me laugh while reminding me how much I loved Chicken Licken.

Since last week I have:

1. Had a Zoom call with my agent to discuss the very final tweaks of my novel before submission.

2. Spent a chunk of hours answering interview questions and gathering photos to be the featured poet in a forthcoming Of Poets and Poetry issue.

3. Received my pizza oven and a huge box of free goodies from the lovely grown woman whose troubled 15-year-old self got something significant from some poetry workshops I ran at the turn of the century.

4. In the absence of any magic words I can use this time around, I have set up a "defamation defence fund” to try and offset the considerable costs of defending myself against the most recent person threatening to sue me.

Over to you

1. Has anyone ever tried to sue you? If so, how did it go?

2. Did you know about Moral Rights?

3. Has anyone ever promised you a meal and then welched on the deal?

4. What do you think of inappropriate vocab in historical novels and adaptations?

5. Are you a beat-yourself-upper or a self-forgiver?