Romeo & Julian: Adaptation

If you haven't heard yet, I am writing an LGBT adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, calling it Romeo and Julian, and if you've not yet read the scene I posted on Thursday.




So I'm adapting a play script into a novel, although it's not going to be a word-by-word or scene-by-scene kind of adaptation, that might be pushing it a bit too far for me in terms of creative freedom.




It was fairly easy to plan, considering all I needed to do was flesh it out with my characters, places, events etc. I have kept in quite a few of the scenes but at the same time I'm trying to make this adaptation quite modern so there's not going to be the Romeo killing Tybalt. Also, with characters, there isn't going to be a nurse, instead Julian will have a female confidant who he tells everything to, even the fact that he's gay. There will be no Count Paris, instead there is a girl who is engaged to marry Julian, and because of the girl's family having traditional views on marriage they are not allowed to have sex etc. one of the reasons why she doesn't know that he's gay, and nobody else besides his friend does.




I hope that I'm not straying too far from the whole play. There is still the families and their feud, there is also going to be complications with being gay and coming out and running away, or the want to run away. I've also mixed the whole exile thing up. If you haven't read the excerpt, it's the clickable link in that first paragraph. In the excerpt you learn that Romeo was shipped off to France to an art school and you also learn that it's because he's gay. So Romeo has already been exiled from his family and now there are complications in his relationship with his family because they're homophobic.




If you haven't read or heard of Romeo and Juliet then you've probably been living under a rock...however I presume that EVERYONE has. And because you all know what happens, you know that they marry in hopes of eloping and are both tragically caught in a double suicide. Yeah, well I'm not sure if I want to kill them because gay teen suicide is such a sore area and I don't want to be crying for weeks because I wrote the death of two teens---and at the same time I want to kill them because I know that it will have so much power and force behind the emotion that I know you guys will be sobbing into your copies of the book.




What are your thoughts on writing adaptations?

To kill them, or not to kill them?




-Thomas Jay

(Joseph)




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