Nikki wants to know
I love your Into the Wilderness series. I have not got to the fourth one yet, for college takes up a lot of my time. I love to write also, only I write children's stories (none to be published yet). I have a question and I hope you don't take offense, it's just something I've been curious about. I have watched, not got the chance to read yet, The Last of the Mohicans. You seem to have gotten your characters from that work of fiction. Yet in the movie Nathaniel is Hawkeye. How did you get the chance to use the characters from this piece and did you have some reasoning for changing this characters name and using it for his son's instead? This is a question that has been bugging me for some time. I hope you can find time to reply.I have the sense that many people have not found the Wildernesss FAQ, so I'm going to point to them again, here. People ask me all the time about borrowing characters from old stories, and my standard reply is this:
Why not? Retelling stories is as old as the hills. West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. A Thousand Acres is a retelling of King Lear. Some people claim there are only twenty possible basic plots, and everything is a retelling of something else. We tell stories to make sense of the human condition, and we keep doing that because we haven't yet figured it out. Stories -- telling them, listening to them -- seem to be an important part of the human psyche. As far as the characters are concerned, some characters are brought to life by a particular author with such stunning success that they outlive their creator. Hawkeye is one such character -- so many people have been compelled to bring him back to life in one way or another. The Man of LaMancha is another -- the underdog, always fighting windmills. He can be found in a hundred stories. I took some characters who mean a great deal to me to see what I could do with them; I invented others of my own, but even those owe a debt to all the stories that came before.Also, these questions and answers:
Q: What is the relationship of these novels to James Fenimore Cooper's work and the movie, Last of the Mohicans? James Fenimore Cooper wrote a series of books called the Leatherstocking Tales. His main character was Natty [Nathaniel] Bumppo (also called Hawkeye, and several other names), and seemed to be based on the legends that grew up around the real life character Daniel Boone. One of his novels was The Last of the Mohicans; another, set in Hawkeye's later life, was The Pioneers. The Last of the Mohicans has been filmed a number of times, the last and most memorable by the director and producer Michael Mann. That is the movie staring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeline Stowe. In Mann's version of the story, Hawkeye's real name was Nathaniel Po. I wasn't so much interested in retelling the story of The Last of the Mohicans -- that has been done often enough -- but I was interested in Hawkeye's later life. So I set out to do a few things: first, write a very loose retelling of The Pioneers (keeping some of the plot, some of the characters, and some of the themes, especially the environmental ones); second, to tell the story from the female perspective (Cooper was a fine storyteller, but he didn't write women very well -- they come across as idealized and two-dimensional); third, to put my own spin on the legend of the frontiersmen who populated the New-York frontier; fourth, to try my best not to contribute to the stereotypes rampant in literature about the Mohawk. I hoped to portray them as a people who survived in spite of great hardship. Because I wanted to put my own version on paper, I changed Hawkeye's name yet again. Not Bumppo or Po or Boone, but Bonner. So I have a Dan'l Bonner and his son, Nathaniel Bonner.And that's that.Q: What are the laws in regard to using another author's characters? This question came up on a discussion board that I visit and your books were mentioned.
A good summary of copyright and domain facts can be found here. Anybody can use the characters, retell the story, etc etc. if a work is in the public domain; any work published before 1928 is in the public domain. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and James Fenimore Cooper fall into this category. So I am completely within the law by retelling Cooper's The Pioneers and using some of his characters. There are hundreds and hundreds of books in the public domain that you can get for free over the web.
Now, as far as works that are still in copyright: no, you can't just borrow the characters. You can't write a novel about John Crichton and Aeryn Sun unless you first get written permission from the owners of that copyright -- the Henson Company. <