Stranger than Fiction

Literature and film have an interesting and sometimes difficult relationship. Questions of fidelity to plot and characterization are often at the forefront of many avid readers' minds as they watch movies "based on" their favorite novels. However, what if a movie were to play with the ways we view the relationship between the author and his or her story from the very beginning? Would that change anything about the way we see and judge the resulting film? I think director Marc Forster's film, Stranger than Fiction, can give some interesting insights on such a topic.

In this film, Harold Crick is our boring, IRS auditor of a main character, who goes about his life with the same old mundane patterns everyday, that is, until he begins to hear author Karen Eiffel narrating his every move. Karen believes she is just writing her next big, best-selling novel as she contemplates how to kill Harold. Harold panics when he hears someone say he is going to die because to him, he is more than just a character. Confusing, right?

Their relationship is so fascinating because we often don't get to see the author-character relationship while a novel is "in progress." An author may tell us what he or she felt as they were writing, but we will never truly know what it is like in their head. In the case of Karen and Harold, Karen is detached from her work; she is simply trying to write something masterful, meaningful, and marketable. She doesn't come to see Harold as a "person" until she meets him face-to-face. What makes this so complicated is that the movie never really addresses whether or not Harold is actually there, or if he and his whole world are just in Karen's mind. Either way, Harold changes Karen in ways she could never have imagined, which is really important to not only the film, but to the novel within the film, which is what makes the film...and the cycle continues.

This change is exciting because it causes Karen to reevaluate the direction of her novel. She writes novels that kill people, yet Harold causes her to pause and think about this. Harold is just a character, but he becomes real to her. This is a great illustration of how characters affect the writing process for an author. Through the writing process, they can show an author who they really are, contrary to what he/she may have originally intended. They can change the direction of an entire story, leading the author down the path they intend to take as the plot develops. The author has much less control than we assume because sometimes, they don't even know what their intentions were as they were writing. Karen changes the ending of her novel, and consequently the whole thing, from something that was a work of art, to something that is just ok. Why? Because she met a character who demanded life simply by the way he faced his death, and she had to give him a different ending. The movie does a great job of portraying Karen as a writer faced with a difficult decision. We are lucky to get a glimpse of that journey, even if it is fictionalized.

I wonder how many novels I've read where the author originally intended something entirely different than what the outcome was, after characters took shape, introduced themselves, and demanded something new?