Post #4, Adaptation of "The Maze Runner"

For "The Maze Runner" an aspect that will certainly be difficult to capture is the sheer scale of The Maze itself, The Maze isn't simple it's a massive and long series of always changing twists and turns that has carte blanche in the book as it doesn't need to consume material space, but in a movie adaptation The Maze would need to be condensed. Not so much as to change the scale and impact it has on the book, but The Maze couldn't be a prop or a series of stages it'd need to be fairly CG to work properly.

Another scene/aspect of "The Maze Runner" that may be difficult to adapt is the feeling of terror the characters go through when The Maze stops shutting down at night. The whole premise of the book being a mass lab-rat testing site works because as each character enters the safe haven of The Glade they integrate into a new society and attempt to solve The Maze, which just so happens to be filled with mechanical monsters who exist to both hinder and aid the 'Gladers' called Grievers. The Glade remains a safe place because at night when the Grievers become most active The Glade shuts out entrances into The Maze, this has been going on since the beginning and none of the characters could never imagine The Glade not being safe. But when the final subject enters The Glade the doors stop shutting and the Grievers are free to attack non-stop. Capturing unspoken emotion is already something movies have a hard time doing, trying to reenact that scene without placing it in exact proper context could prove difficult.

The ending of the book which I won't go into great detail about would be the hardest thing to really capture, as "The Maze Runner" is part of a series the book ends fairly nonsensically and without a great deal of explanation as that is expected to be taken care of in the next novel. In movies unless there is a lapse in time where cutting off like that is logical like in the "Lord of the Rings" series then leaving the audience of a movie with something that isn't really a cliff hanger but a massive list of questions gone completely unanswered can really ruin a film. As the entirety of the story takes place in The Maze and The Glade itself when the book ends and you learn that it was some sort of very elaborate test to ensure a fairly vague event it becomes a very stiff and difficult contrast to deal with wrapping up a movie. It's as if a movie like "Titanic" underwent all of its events but at the very end instead of a prologue, you see Jack waking up on a beach and the trailer for "Inception" plays, very hard to grasp.

How True, is True?

To give a physical number as to the amount of a book that should be completely true to consider it Non-Fiction, I would have to say at least 98% of the material as a whole must be truthful for it to be considered under the Non-Fiction umbrella. This is because relatively that is what history texts tend to be and they should out of all under the genre umbrella be the most truthful, some very very small inaccuracies and minute events that effect no other events being omitted for the sake of length are fine. It is when the inaccuracies are glaring and obvious and when events that directly effect others are modified then the genre divide begins to form.

Considering books that poster themselves as Non-Fiction but are in reality half-truth, or in actuality half-lies, the matter is simple. These books like Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" are Fictional stories that follow a Non-Fiction format. Frey says that only 18 pages are changes overall and that makes up around 5% of his book, if the events of those 18 pages are crucial to any other part of the story then it isn't 5% Fiction, every event those pages create or embellish have a direct effect on the rest of the story. For instance if you in reality went to jail for a day and were mildly uncomfortable, but in the book that you claim is legitimate you state you spent several months in a prison then the rest of the book the reader now has that time-frame and experience issue, being involved in a crash that kills students and being completely indirectly effected by a crash that kills students that you happened to kinda know are two completely different things on both a physical, meta-physical, and psychological level and all of that will drastically change how your characters are viewed by readers.

On the matter of if Mr. Shields is correct in saying that we don't need genre boundaries and that they limit writers. I feel that he has lost understanding of what genres do. Genres are at their most basic element a guideline for what a story should include and get rid of, they mix often and their boundaries are actually in many cases already very blurry, but what they do on a practical level for non-writers is what they are most useful for. Genre gives a reader the ability to a glance tell within a general idea what a book is about, Fantasy books will very clearly have completely different elements than a Murder-Mystery, if we preclude the use of genres overall the reader is who suffers, if libraries were to suddenly stop sorting books by genre the reader would have a more difficult time finding what they truly want to read. Seeing as how reading is already on such a scarcely balanced needle-head the advent of genres allows easy and quick access to books for everyone, Shields is merely taking the concepts of genre too seriously and has missed massive ulterior concepts in what genre really is.