Out of my head and into the air

So I listened to my story, The Way to Behave, on the radio this afternoon - often a strange experience, since it's so rarely the same as it is in your head, but Lesley Sharp had it almost the way I hear it myself! Of course, it had been cut to fit the slot - the 'frilly' bits had gone (I couldn't help thinking that that was how they must have thought of them): the descriptions of the room and the autumn, with their hints of witchcraft and physical violence; I suppose you could say it was (appropriately) turned into more of a drama. But it definitely got the spirit of it, and Lesley Sharp really was the character as I'd envisaged her: what a pro! Thank you, Lesley, thank you producer Jill Waters, and thank you Jen at Salt.

The story can be heard online for the next 7 days here.

The Way to Behave on Radio 4, 3.30, Friday.

Looked at the radio listings in the Observer this morning and found that it's Friday of this week that my Balancing story 'The Way to Behave' is being broadcast on Radio 4 (3.30 pm). It's a fabulous series to be in, intended to highlight collections of stories in print and easily available, and titled In Bookshops Now. The series kicks off tomorrow with (appropriately) 'Monday Diary' from another Salt collection, the wonderful Some New Ambush by my friend Carys Davies (she's my friend because we met through both being published by Salt and precisely because I so love and admire her writing). It's a real mark of Salt's marketing nous that they should feature so prominently in such a series.

I'm particularly chuffed as my story is being read by actress Lesley Sharp (above) of Clocking Off fame and numerous northern TV dramas - what an honour, and she's just perfect I think for the ironic tone of the narrator. My story slot is critic Stephanie Billen's Radio Choice for Friday and she has this to say:

Radio 4 continues its valuable championing of the short story by highlighting fiction from widely available collections. Concluding the week is 'The Way to Behave', a clever tale by Elizabeth Baines, in which a social worker takes a slow revenge on her husband's far too nice mistress. Reader Lesley Sharp invests her character with just the right amount of venom as she recalls her fateful first discovery of a blonde hair: 'a gold worm, hooked and wriggling...'

I should mention that The Way to Behave was first published in (and commissioned for) the Bitch Lit anthology which is also available, direct from Crocus Books (get them both if you can afford it!)

The dangers of adaptation

Usually you don't tell the world what your mum says about your writing (everyone can guess!), but this is worth repeating, I think.

Last week, after finishing reading Balancing, my mum rang me and cried: 'What on earth have you done to "Power"? (She had read it before because it had previously appeared in an anthology from Honno which I'd given her as a present.)

'Eh, Mum? What do you mean?'

'You've changed the ending!'

What? Is this my mum finally beginning to show signs of old-age forgetfulness?

Me (patronizing): 'No, no I haven't changed it, Mum. It's exactly how it appeared in the Honno anthology.'

'Yes, you have: what on earth has happened to the little girl in the pond?'

Now I'm actually worried. What on earth can she be muddling my story with? Is she going senile?

'No, no, Mum, nothing like that happens in that story. Remember, it's all about a divorce, and how the little girl weaves a magic spell to bring her father back...'

'Yes, yes, that's right... and he does come back, in the nick of time, because she's fallen in the pond and he saves her from drowning.'

I swallow. It comes to me. That was the ending I was forced to invent when I adapted the story as a radio drama, because drama needs action whereas stories can be subtle and internal, and because the BBC commissioning requirements included happier and less ambiguous endings.

But I had completely forgotten the ending of the play. Is it me who's going senile?

Actually, I think it's explained by something Art of Fiction blogger Adrian Slatcher said to me in the wine bar last week: that when stories and novels are adapted for broadcast media, there is always the danger, or indeed the likelihood that the drama replaces the original as the primary text within the culture.

To me my story had remained the primary text behind which the differences in the play were insignificant and so had faded. But to my mother, who heard the broadcast, it was the drama which had become the primary - the real - text, and when she read the story it fell short of it...

Learning to adapt

Giles Foden writes in today's Guardian about the dangers of having one's fiction adapted for the screen. It's a funny business, as I've said on my other blog. As a reader I would say I don't like screen adaptations: I usually try never to see one before reading a book, yet if I watch one afterwards I'm always frustrated by the gap between the director's vision and my own. I haven't read Foden's novel The Last King of Scotland, but on this occasion I was dragged along, reluctantly, to see the film. I was bowled over - rarely has a film made such a lasting impact on me - but I know now that I'll never be able to read the book without its images and those actors in my head.

As a writer, though, it's a different story. Someone comes along and offers you a big bag of money to turn your novel into something which will make it a hell of a lot more famous than it ever was before - or in, my case, famous in a way it never was. I had had bad luck with my second novel, Body Cuts. Halfway through the editing process my editor at the small publishing house left to pursue her own novel career, and the publisher failed to tell me, or to make clear to her replacement where we were in the editing process, and as a result the book went to press without my final editing. The reason for such mix-ups suddenly became evident. Weeks before the book was due out the publisher was bought up by another, and although my book had been announced in the trade press, it failed to appear. When it was eventually published, no new announcements were made in the trade press by the new publisher, and not long after that the original publisher's fiction list was remaindered.

In the meantime, however, during the short time that book was in the bookshops, the TV director John Glenister happened to pick it up, got hooked and immediately decided that he wanted to adapt it for TV. How cool was that? How could I refuse such a chance of resurrection? My usual reservations about screen adaptations went shooting off into the ether.

In fact, in the end that adaptation didn't happen - people at the BBC had moved on, artistic and funding policies had changed - but as I had been working on the adaptation with John, I took it to a Channel 4/arts-board screenwriting scheme, and here my reservations dropped back down from the sky. My God: the changes I was expected to make!! My main male character should be a different sort of person, my female character's mother ought to die!!! Needless to say I soon dropped the whole idea, and contented myself with salvaging from this last experience insights for my satirical (and entirely fictional) story, 'The Shooting Script', which may be included in my forthcoming collection from Salt, Balancing on the Edge of the World.

We haven't yet decided which stories will go in this collection, but one which probably will is 'Power', which looks at the stresses on children of quarrelling parents through their contrasting voices (previously published in Power [Honno]), a story I adapted as a radio drama. It was the second time I had adapted my own fiction for radio: earlier I worked on my first novel, The Birth Machine. Both times I worked with the director Michael Fox and both times I was given free rein to adapt my work in ways which allowed me to stay as true to the original as I wished. I have to say that adaptation for the verbal, non-visual medium of radio is a different thing altogether: I don't feel in any way that the transformations stole the souls of the original fictions in the way screen adaptations so often seem to do.