The Making of “The Haunting of Bob Cratchit”

by David John Marotta

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I have always loved A Christmas Carol. It was clear to me from a very young age that there was more going on with each of the characters than explicitly stated. Dickens has such an realism to his tale that I’m not sure if he necessarily intended every implication I have seen, but there is joy in theorizing regardless.

Starting in 2003, I wrote several articles on A Christmas Carol for publication in “The Daily Progress,” my local paper, and on “Marotta On Money,” my corporate website. I wrote one article each year for several years.

Many of those articles were exploring the financial personalities according to the book Facing Financial Dysfunction by Bert Whitehead by using different characters from A Christmas Carol as examples. With so many unique characters, there is much that can be learned from analyzing their attitudes toward money.

You can find those articles listed at the end of this page or under “Marotta On A Christmas Carol.” I first wrote about the Cratchit family in 2005 in “Why is Bob Cratchit So Poor?” and revisited them in 2011 in “What was Wrong with Tiny Tim?”

When crafting a story, the reasons can’t just be stated. They have to unfold naturally as the protagonist faces his character and ultimately his flaws. As he changes and grows, he goes on his own journey, and we along with him.

Since my son has been interested in film since he was fourteen years old, I’ve learned a lot about storytelling and crafting a narrative. He gave us a film education while he was in high school long before he went to film school. As a result, I began developing my thoughts on A Christmas Carol into an outline for a film just for fun.

So in 2015 when Brendon’s travels took him to the city where I live, we began turning my rough ideas into a movie screenplay. That script was completed before the novel, and interested parties are more than welcome to contract the move rights!

For a year and a half, Brendon and I met at Citizen Burger for dinner and discussion. My view was that any project that includes having burgers with your son is a great project regardless of the outcome, but what I learned from the process was remarkable.

At first, I was presenting the notes I had for the story while Brendon asked lots of questions and recorded the process. Then, he then wrote a first draft of the story. I gave him notes over the course of weeks of review and revisions. We worked to get the story straight and then to perfect it.

During that process, we took our least favorite scene and rewrote it until it was one of our favorites. We tried deleting scenes to see if anything was missing from the story without them. Then, we rewrote the scenes with those points in mind. We looked at each character in the original and developed them in light of our new story.

For example, what do you know about Emily Cratchit in the original? In Scrooge’s story, she is a side character, but in ours we knew she had to play a much stronger role. The same went for Tiny Tim, Marley, and even the characters we lifted from other Dickens stories like Fagin, the pickpocket in Oliver Twist, and Gabriel Grubb, the gravedigger from “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole the Sexton.”

We talked a great deal about the emotional journey of Bob. In the original story, Bob is more likely to be pitied than liked. If Bob was going to the be main character, we had to like him, not just feel sorry for him. Scrooge would not have hired Bob unless he was an excellent employee. Scrooge isn’t that kind of man. He doesn’t just pay someone to be insulted. Bob had likable qualities in the original; it just wasn’t emphasized enough. Bob has a sense of humor, a loving family, and enough skills to be hired by a boss as demanding as Scrooge. We highlighted that as he went throughout the story.

At the end of 2015, we had finished the script. Although Brendon is an award winning director, we realized we’d written a period piece set in Victorian England with crowd scenes and visual effects. That is not a simple production! However, the story was good and everyone we shared it with loved what they read. We knew turning it into a film might be a challenge. Before A Christmas Carol became a dozen different film adaptations, it was a book. We began exploring the idea of turning our story into a book as well, mirroring the style of Dickens original publication.

We enlisted the help of Aaron Carver to adapt the script to novelization. Aaron is a friend of Brendon’s who is currently working with the University of Kokomo Writing Center. Not enough nice things can be said about Aaron. We are so thankful for his help on this process of conversion and additional editing. Aaron helped us capture the literary style of Dickens work. Many times during the editing process, I’d find a long run-on sentence, only to discover it was lifted directly from Dickens. Other times, I’d discover a really elegant piece of writing, only to discover it came from Brendon or Aaron. The fact that it was hard to tell the difference between Dickens’s work and theirs is a testament to their talent.

The process of creating this work made me realize both the joy and toil that goes into writing. I have always thought that the task of producing a book is a herculean effort. Now, I know each step in that process and have a special thank you to Brendon for embarking on this journey with me.

I hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it!