Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Author: M. Night Shyamalan



Well, I had a real chuckle this morning as I opened Amazon to see what was new and saw them touting M. Night Shyamalan's "first" (does that meant there will be more?) children's book. Lady in the Water happens to coincide with his movie of the same title.

Shyamalan earnestly talks about the story and how the details grew with each retelling and how closely he worked with the illustrator, Crash McCreery, to compose the scenes...er...illustrations. He mentions that he is inspired by other children's books like The Giving Tree and Where the Wild Things Are and (oh yes) Van Allsburg. Just looking at the cover and the pictures in the exclusive, I would say he owes a WHOLE LOT to Chris Van Allsburg.
(Just as he owes a whole lot to the book Running out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix.)

I actually enjoyed the mysterious music that played in the background but then had to howl when he commented, with great seriousness and some astonishment, that "it took a long time" and "many drafts" to get the story right.

Bless his heart. Writing for kids should not be so hard should it?
I'm going to go drink some more coffee so I will not be so snarky.

2 comments:

Mental multivitamin said...

(Just as he owes a whole lot to the book Running out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix.)

*chuckle*

I wrote about that when The Village first came out:

From the 8.24.2004 "On the nightstand entry":

We saw The Village this weekend. For the record, about a month ago, I shared with Aunt M-mv that Master M-mv and I were betting that the Shyamalan twist would be akin to that in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s book, Running Out of Time. Heh, heh, heh. Have you read that Haddix and her publisher may take legal action against Shyamalan?

Whatever happened with that? I should go Google about, see what I can find.

Best regards.

MFS

Little Willow said...

YES! Haddix! :)