'Petticoat Sailor' to 'She Crossing' : adaptation in process : a writer's reflection on adapting a feature length screenplay into a novel

• Main Author: Lock, G.
• Published: Nottingham Trent University 2015
• Subjects: 823
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.686914

This PhD thesis consists of a novel entitled 'She Crossing', and a Commentary. The Commentary reflects on my practice of constructing the novel by adapting it from my previously existing screenplay, 'Petticoat Sailor'. They both derive from 'The Seafaring Maiden', a Nova Scotian newspaper article dating from 1957. All of these narratives are concerned with a nineteenth-century woman who had to captain a commercial sailing ship across the Atlantic. My screenplay, 'Petticoat Sailor', is set entirely in the nineteenth century. Both the newspaper article and my novel frame the protagonist’s voyage as a twentieth-century reminiscence. My novel also introduces a fictional subplot, which was not present in the screenplay. This subplot derives from my research into accounts of cross-dressed women who went to sea when only men were legally employed as sailors. The direction of my adaptation from a screenplay into a novel is unusual. Most adaptations move from novel to script and this is reflected in the secondary literature about adaptation. Novels resulting from adapting scripts have attracted little academic analysis as artefacts, and even less theorization of their creative processes. There is also an absence of sustained reflection by other writers who have turned their screenplays into novels. Aiming to increase understanding of the novelizing process, my thesis addresses these absences. The Commentary discusses the differences and similarities in writing screenplay and writing prose fiction by reflecting on my processes in writing this novel. I particularly explore the effects of contingency in adjusting theoretical principles during the creative process of novelization. I also examine to what extent the ways in which I write are themselves adapted from my own experience of directing and acting for stage and film.