Flash Fiction Forum

Writer Kevin Sharp of Palo Alto is a regular attendee and performer at the Flash Fiction Forum, a bi-monthly reading series held in San Jose, CA. FFF is the brainchild of local authors Tania Martin and Lita Kurth. According the site:

"The idea for the forum emerged out of a local writers workshop in San Jose, CA where members routinely read their work aloud. We noticed that although the South Bay has a wealth of poetry reading events, there was not a regular spoken word venue for fiction.  If up to now, you’ve only written and published, but never read in public, we encourage you to join us. This platform allows the writers to get an immediate response to their work. Join us and expose your fiction!"

Each forum presents a diverse lineup of writers, reading 500 word (or shorter) fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In 2016, FFF partnered with the Los Gatos, CA Listowel Writers Festival for a "Lit Crawl" held at a series of coffee shops and bars.

The site of the forum is the WORKS Gallery in San Jose. Founded in 1977, the space is a non-profit art and performance venue with a regularly rotating series of exhibits. WORKS' mission statement reads as follows:

"Works/San José believes that thriving communities support artistic experimentation. Therefore, we serve as the South Bay community’s creative laboratory where people can experiment, exhibit and engage with art and with each other. We achieve our mission by providing an accessible, supportive and welcoming art center."

Readers interested in learning more about FFF can visit their website at flashfictionforum [dot] com.

The Don & Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting

Palo Alto writer Kevin Sharp was a previous runner-up in the Don & Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. The Nicholls -- as they are called in the industry -- are considered the most prestigious screenwriting competition of the numerous ones that exist across the U.S. and the world. Aspiring writers are advised to consider both the prestige of a contest and past winners’ track records, before committing money for an entry fee. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) has administered the fellowships since 1986; the program was born in 1985 as a collaboration between Gee Nicholl (widow of film producer Don Nicholl) and Julian Blaustein.

The Nicholls recognize up to five amateur screenwriters each year with a $35,000 prize for each. Over $4 million in total has been awarded since the program’s inception. All fellowship winners are expected to complete one new feature film screenplay during the following year; quarterly prize payments are made to assist writers with living expenses, giving them time and freedom to focus on their creative work.

Writers who have earned less than $25,000 profressionally are eligible to enter. Screenplays must be original works, written in English, between 70-160 pages. Scripts are read via multiple rounds of voting; each is read at least twice, while the further a script advances the more times it is read. The quarterfinal round is made up of approximately 5 percent of entries; the semifinal round is approximately 2 percent. Typically, 10-15 scripts reach the finals each year. As of 2017, over 7,000 total entries were received.

Past winners who have gone on to professional writing careers include Alison Anders, Jeffrey Eugenides, Susannah Grant, Karen Moncrieff, Michael A. Rich, Doug Atchison, and Deston Daniel Cretton.

Chuck Palahniuk's ADJUSTMENT DAY

Before this year, author Chuck Palahniuk's most recent book was 2014’s Beautiful You, which featured a number of names thanked in the acknowledgments, including Kevin Sharp of Palo Alto, CA. The author's much anticipated new novel, Adjustment Day, released on May 1, 2018.

Adjustment Day's blurb reads as follows: People pass the word only to those they trust most: Adjustment Day is coming. They’ve been reading a mysterious book and memorizing its directives. They are ready for the reckoning. 

Palahniuk’s best known work, 1996’s Fight Club, won both the 1997 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for best novel. Director David Fincher helmed a film adaptation in 1999, starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter, and released by 20^th Century Fox.

Palahniuk followed Fight Club with the books Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Haunted, Choke (film adaptation released in 2008), and Lullaby (also a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award winner and currently in pre-production as an independent film). Beautiful You is about Penny Harrigan, an employee of a Manhattan law firm, who becomes the object of affection for mysterious tech billionaire C. Linus Maxwell. The novel received mixed reviews.

Kevin Sharp’s name appeared in the Beautiful You acknowledgments due to his contribution to the 2014 horror thriller Starry Eyes, directed by Dennis Widmeyer, founder of the website chuckpalahniuk [dot] net.

I Liked The Book Better

A new podcast called I Liked the Book Better is co-hosted by writer Kevin Sharp of Palo Alto, CA. Each episode of the show compares a novel or short story with its cinematic adaptation; the hosts review the similarities and major changes, then decide which version of the two they prefer.

Episodes include The Shining, written by Stephen King and adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson; A Scanner Darkly, written by Philip K. Dick and adapted by Richard Linklater; American Gods, written by Neil Gaiman and adapted for television by Bryan Fuller and Michael Green; Minority Report, written by Philip K. Dick and adapted by Jon Cohen and Scott Frank; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Ken Kesey and adapted by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.

The show can be found on iTunes or directly through the site Ilikedthebook [dot] com.

There are a number of challenges in executing a successful adaptation from one written medium to another. Two major ones are:

1) Making the internal into external.  Novels and short stories can take readers inside the head of a character (or characters) through first person narration. Hearing the thoughts can be entertaining and captivating; however, watching a character simply think onscreen isn’t visually dramatic. One way around this is to include voiceover in the filmed version, but overreliance on this technique gets away from what film does best and give the impression of the screenwriter leaning too heavily on the original prose.

2) Dealing with the length problem. A typical screenplay runs between 100-120 pages. A novel might run 200, 300, or even 1000. Numerous subplots might have to be pared down or jettisoned altogether in shaping the story for the screen. If the adaptors have the option of presenting, say, a TV series or miniseries, then much more of the book can be ported over. A short story, on the other hand, could present the opposite challenge: how to expand a shorter work into something that fills a movie’s expected runtime.