What Was the Editing Like?

Sometimes books are made into movies. Sometimes movies are made into novelizations. Sometimes novels in movies are made into novels.

Like the novel Jack Torrance is working on in The Shining. Everyone wants to read that.

Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick fan and New York artist Phil Buehler did. He's self-published the book he thinks Torrance put together.

You know, the one that was pages and pages of "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy."

Fortunately, he doesn't just write page after page of that. Cut and paste can do that for me. Buehler actually thought about the process of going crazy in relation to that phrase and its representation on the page, using different formatting--shapes, zigzags, spirals, etc. He even used the same formatting he'd have to if he were working on a typewriter, just like Jack. Just like any other writer, Buehler had his moments of block:

"I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?' I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week."

I'm writing my thesis this semester. Maybe if I get stuck, I can just go this route--play around with one phrase and the formatting.

Even though I'm not going to shell out money for this project, I always like when people have fun with books. Break them apart. Put them back together. Get active. Just don't try to axe your family in the process.