Literary Density

This blog update is written in regards to this reply, but readers are encouraged to read this regardless of how little they read of the previous blog update. Just click the title to get started. :)

Jay, I would like to ask you to read this block quote from one of my favorite books:

Now Sun Ce had become ruler of the Southland. His army was well trained, his granaries well stocked. By the fourth year of Jian An (A.D. 199) he had taken Lujiang district from Governor Liu Xun and had sent his adviser Yu Fan to Yuzhang to accept the surrender of Governor Hua Xin.¹ Having made his name and power felt, Sun Ce dispatched Zhang Hong to the capital with a memorial to the throne detailing his victories. Cao Cao sighed and said, "We cannot take the lion head on," and arranged for Cao Ren's daughter to marry Sun Ce's youngest brother, Sun Kuang, thus binding the two houses. The emissary Zhang Hong he detained in the capital.

Sun Ce next sought the post of grand marshal, but Cao Cao refused him. The resentful Sun Ce plotted to surprise the capital.² But Xu Gong, governor of the Southland district Wujun, secretly wrote to Cao Cao. His letter said in part, "Sun Ce is bold and ambitious, another Xiang Yu in the making.³ It might be appropriate for the court to show its ostensible appreciation by recalling him to the capital, rather than let him remain in a remote military area where he may become a serious problem."

A messenger was carrying this letter across the river when a border guard seized him and turned him over to Sun Ce. After reading the letter, Sun Ce beheaded the messenger. He then found a pretext for summoning the author of the document and showed it to him. "You would have me sent to my death," he said harshly and had Xu Gong strangled.[4] The governor's family took flight.

This text (printed on the bottom of one page and the top of the next) is almost exactly equal to (literally give or take one line only) one single page. Now:

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as I have said numerous times before, is the second-most condensed book I have ever read, the first being the Bible. This one single page provides the equivalent of over 30 minutes of high-quality Hollywood movie footage.

• "By the fourth year of Jian An (A.D. 199) he had taken Lujiang district from Governor Liu Xun" - the reader is left to fill in the details of what was likely a castle siege. The siege itself could occupy 30 minutes of a film (The Two Towers). The journey to Lujiang undertaken by Sun Ce's troops could be stretched out to however long the director wanted, but let's say a brief 2-minute package of microscenes in which the men walk through grassy fields, ford rivers, talk with locals asking for directions, and camp under the stars at night.
  
• "[Sun Ce] had sent his adviser Yu Fan to Yuzhang to accept the surrender of Governor Hua Xin." - "had sent"? In what manner? With a written petition? With a force of a thousand men? Again, this could easily be a 5-to-10 minute scene of political banter or it could well be a 20, 30, 60-minute story about the last stand of Governor Hua Xin.
  
• "Having made his name [...] detailing his victories." - this would require a 1-3 minute conversation scene between Sun Ce and Zhang Hong but could potentially be extended to explore Zhang Hong's adventures on the way to Cao Cao's capital in Luoyang which was (literally) hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Sun Ce's capital. Back in those days, the journey would have taken weeks. Granted, the director is free to just cut from one capital to the next, but I'm merely pointing out that there's a lot of potential story invested in this one easy-to-overlook sentence.
  
• "Cao Cao sighed and said, "We cannot take the lion head on," - wait? So Zhang Hong's already delivered the letter? ;p Suffice to say that before Cao could even have spoken these words we needed a minute or two of filmtime, but then ... do you honestly expect me to believe that this is all the writers would have Cao say before dismissing Hong? No way. This is easily the time for a 1-2 minute scene in which Cao talks before his court about what he plans to do with Sun Ce.
  
• "and arranged for Cao Ren's daughter to marry Sun Ce's youngest brother, Sun Kuang, thus binding the two houses" - would be nice to show the girl, would be nice to show the guy, would be nice to show Sun Ce receiving word of this and angrily crumpling the messenger's letter in his fist (or some such), etc.
  
• "The emissary Zhang Hong he detained in the capital." - again, in film the audience cannot know this knowledge without either (a) a narrator stating it or (b) seeing the scene play out. The latter is preferable and more likely, and the latter would MINIMALLY be a scene cut to Zhang Hong trying to leave Luoyang but being denied exit from the palace grounds by the gate's guards, and then (if he tried to force his leave) being restrained and placed under house arrest. A 1-3 minute scene.

I'll stop listing the sentences off here. I think you get the idea. ONE PAGE of the book could easily translate into many hours of entertaining television that most people would be happy to tune in to and watch. It's not "boob tube" boring TV. It's not "oh my god we're watching grass grow and paint dry"-depictions of every single thing they did. I wasn't so preposterous, was I? I didn't suggest that they show Sun Ce's meals each day? or show him playing with his daughters? or show him having sex? or show him practicing his swordsmanship? I allowed the producers to omit all of those *cough* "unnecessary" details out, right? Right. All I said was, "Let's translate realistically onto the television screen the very sentences which are written here." And because these sentences are so condensed, are so THICK with potential details and stories of their own, one easily gets hours and hours of footage from just one page.

Guess what?

The entire story is over 2000 pages in length. :)

Believe me when I say, Jay, that transforming The Romance of the Three Kingdoms into a 50-episode series would be an impossible feat -- not because there'd be too much footage with too little happening but because there wouldn't be enough footage to share all of the amazing things that went down from 220 to 280.

Which reminds me, the 500-page Heike Monogatari covers (in detail) roughly 1180 to 1189, so (roughly) 50 pages per year, or one page per week. When you consider that there are literally dozens of major characters -- generals, their families, their vassals -- and hundreds of supporting characters, it's a miracle that you tell any story at all with only 500 pages to cover 10 years, huh Jay? :) ;p :D

This is why I am telling you that the 50-episodes-in-1-year television series works. It works, it works, it works. :)