Happy late Sunday everyone! We have a special post today by Fred Holmes author of The Ugly Teapot. Enjoy! And thank you so much Fred Holmes for taking time to share your incredible story with us.
Let me start off by telling you about my novel: THE UGLY TEAPOT is the story of
a fourteen-year-old girl who loved her father so
much that she worried about him constantly. After all, he was a photographer
who traveled to the most dangerous places in the world.
To allay her fears, each time he came home he brought her
silly gifts, each one with supposed magical powers: the Seal of Solomon, the
Ring of Gyges, even Aladdin’s Lamp. It was that lamp that the girl found most
unbelievable, for it looked like an ugly teapot. Nevertheless, her father
assured her it was real, and made her promise to save her three wishes for
something very special.
Then . . . six months later . . . the unthinkable
happened. Her father was killed while on assignment to Baghdad. And so on the
day of his funeral the girl did something she never thought she would ever do.
She took out that teapot and gave it a rub . . .
Okay, that’s the story blurb, and now I have a confession to
make. I didn’t start out to write novels. I started out to make films. I
directed two feature films starring Lou Diamond Phillips, one for Miramax and
one for Lionsgate; then I directed a Bollywood feature film shot on location in
India that starred two huge Bollywood stars, one of whom had won the Indian
version of an Academy Award.
I also wrote and directed a lot—and I do mean a LOT! —of
television. Some of these were documentaries shot all over the world, but
mostly I worked in series television—and most of these shows were in the area
of children’s television. According to IMDB, I’ve directed north of 250
episodes of TV, and along the way I’ve won quite a few awards, including two
Emmys.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because none of it
matters. Seriously, when I started writing novels I discovered that all of my
work in television and film was irrelevant. It didn’t matter one bit. Okay, maybe
it did matter one bit—writing so much television had taught me what a good
story looked like, sounded like, tasted like (they taste like chicken and go
really well with some fava beans and a nice Chianti), but I still had to learn
how to translate that knowledge into writing prose. And there is a difference
between writing prose and writing screenplays. Oh yeah, trust me on this. There’s
a huge difference.
In order to educate myself on how to write novels, I began
by reading a lot of books on the process, and I spoke with my friends who were
novelists. I also read a lot of children’s fiction. I’ve always loved reading,
and I’ve always loved children’s literature; plus I’ve been fortunate to work on
television shows that starred children. All of this helped. It also helped that
screenplays and novels do share a common rule: “Show not tell”. Unfortunately, they’re
also completely different in that novels are meant to be read and screenplays
are meant to be filmed. Yeah, I know, duh...but what this means is that you
only write down in a screenplay what the audience will see and/or hear. You do
not dig deep into the characters’ psyche—that’s for the actors to portray, and the
director to cover visually—and they both get really upset with you if you mess
with their territory!
So in order to write THE UGLY TEAPOT, I had to learn how to write
fiction. This was a challenge for someone who had never taken a writing course.
What I did have, fortunately, was a lot of experience telling stories. I also
had a good story to tell. THE UGLY TEAPOT began life as a screenplay called
FIREFLIES, and everyone who had read it, loved it. It had been optioned numerous
times by some powerful producers (including Gerald R. Molen who had won the
Academy Award for producing Schindler’s
List). Jerry tried to get FIREFLIES made into a movie for a number of
years, but he was known for producing big-budgeted films (HOOK, JURASSIC PARK,
MINORITY REPORT, etc.), and FIREFLIES was a sweet, small-budgeted film, so he
was never able to get it made. Then a friend of mine at Disney read it, loved
it, and told me, “This is really good. You should adapt it into a novel.”
This struck a chord with me. First, I really appreciated the
praise; and second, I’d always wanted to write novels, I just never thought I
could. Why? Well, the best analogy I can give you comes from some of my actor
friends in Hollywood. A lot of them will tell you, “I’m only acting in
television and films to make money. My goal is to be a star on Broadway where the
real actors are.” And that, in a
convoluted way, was my attitude about writing for television—the “real” writers
were writing novels—and I was only writing screenplays. At the time, however, I
was working in South Africa a lot and those seventeen hour plane rides to Cape
Town gave me ample time to fuss around with the idea of writing a novel, and
what came out of that fussing was THE UGLY TEAPOT.
The story itself had an earlier germination. My brother had died
of cancer at a very young age and his death had a devastating impact on me. At
the time, I decided to funnel my grief into a screenplay (FIREFLIES), but I
didn’t want to write a sad, depressing ode to my brother. He wouldn’t have
liked that. So what did I write instead? I wrote an action/adventure film filled
with magic and humor. When FIREFLIES metamorphosed into THE UGLY TEAPOT, I
stayed true to my original story, but tried to make TEAPOT more “novel-like”.
This required, for one thing, expanding my story. FIREFLIES was 110 pages long (normal
for most screenplays, but too short for a middle-grade novel), so expanding it
allowed me to flesh out my characters and situations. This was fun and intimidating
at the same time, but I was helped along by the fact that I had kept most of my
notes on character and plot from the original screenplay, and I had tons of
material I’d been forced to cut from the screenplay in order to get it down to
length.
Bottom line: I really enjoyed the process. So much so that
I’m doing it again. I’m currently writing the sequel to THE UGLY TEAPOT. What’s
it about? Well, I can’t tell you very much without a spoiler alert, but I can
tell you this: Aladdin’s Lamp has appeared in a tiny village in the foothills of
the Great Smoky Mountains, and the people living there will never be the same.
Fathers will rise from the dead, dogs will start talking, and people will die. And
that’s just on the first day.
If you would like to know more about THE UGLY TEAPOT: HANNAH’S
STORY, here are some links, including one to my YouTube video promo. The sequel
will be out at the end of this year, and I hope you’ll check them both out. Thanks
for listening!
