When books morph into movies, sometimes it’s really funny.

Have you ever watched a movie in which the characters TALK the book? Usually, it happens in a sci-fi or fantasy film where the world apparently must be explained. Say, the love interest of our hero speaks: “If we shall not find the golden sabre encrusting in the Mountain of Doom then the spider god of the ant-hillians will reclaim earth for the weborians whom they now serve since the noble Brainunder lost his power in war with the Gadzookees.”

I wish she would kiss our hero. Or, jump up and down. Or do something.

Writers in any medium do the same thing, sometimes. Sometimes we are so sure readers won’t get what we mean to convey in the manner in which we want to convey it that we overdo the explaining and skip the best parts.

Mystery series that move to the screen can be funny, too.

Have you ever read reviews of a movie based on a popular thriller or detective novel? Tom Clancy, Sherlock Holmes come to mind. Brutal. Brutal. Brutal. NO visual, however powerful can EVER compete with a reader’s imagination, where our hero or heroine is ours to devise and anybody who’s gonna present them differently is just wrong as can be.

Writers in any medium do the same thing sometimes. Sometimes we ignore the imagination of the reader. We should never do that silly thing. It’s the reader’s imagination that has the power, not our words.