Or it happens this way: Someone writes a screenplay, someone makes a movie and then someone else writes a novelization of the film to cash in on its success.

But Wyoming novelist Mark Spragg and his wife, Virginia, have accomplished something no one has ever done before: written a book and a screenplay simultaneously, with both being sold and presented to the public at about the same time.

An Unfinished Life, the book, was just published by Knopf. "An Unfinished Life," the movie starring Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman and directed by Lasse Hallstrm, will come out in December.

The project came about through not only a remarkable confluence of media but also an unusual collaboration between two writers.

For years, "I kept getting this image in my daydreams of this bitter old man on a porch, screwed down tightly, surrounded by barn cats," Mark Spragg said in a telephone interview from his home in Cody. Driving to visit friends, which can take hours in Wyoming, Spragg had plenty of time to discuss the image with Virginia, a screenwriter.

They built a narrative around this central character, describing scenes, coming up with snippets of dialogue and inventing characters as they drove. After about a year, they had the outline of a story, and when he started on the book, she started on the screenplay.

"We never dreamed we would sell both of them," Spragg said, much less that the two would be released within months of each other. The book proposal sold first, and then while Mark Spragg was writing it, the screenplay sold. By the time the novel was finished, the movie was almost done.

"It became sort of this narrative puzzle," Spragg says, with the two of them working out the story in prose and screenplay. "Working on the screenplay at the same time provided this thrust to the whole project."

The two conferred during the writing process, but they consciously kept the film and novel versions separate, even making deliberate major changes between the two. "There's things that happen very, very differently in the book than in the film. . . . They are as underivative of each other as they could possibly be," Spragg said. "I was so conscious of the two different mediums influencing one another that I didn't go on the film set until I had the novel completely finished. I didn't want to see people deliver a line or see a set and have it influence me."

Now, Spragg says he is pleased with the film, especially Hallstrm, who has plenty of experience working with authors after directing "The Shipping News," "Chocolat," "The Cider House Rules" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" - all based on novels. Spragg calls him "bright, cordial and deferential to the script."

The man sitting on the porch turned out to be Einar Gilkyson, a 70ish Wyoming rancher who lost his only son in a car accident 10 years ago and has never forgiven his daughter-in-law, who turns to him for help after escaping an abusive relationship. (If you have trouble thinking of Redford as a grumpy old man, it might help to recall that he turned 67 this year.)

As he got to know the man and came up with his story, Spragg said, "It became clear to me early on that this was going to be a book about forgiveness."

Einar's best friend for 50 years is Mitch, a black man who helped Einar work the ranch until a recent accident left him nearly immobile. Mitch "seems to me the most perfect of the characters. He's conflicted the least," Spragg said. "He cannot afford the mental, emotional or physical energy for bitterness."

Both men, and their close but occasionally prickly relationship, are based on the bunkhouse cowboys who raised Spragg as he grew up on a ranch in Wyoming. "I wanted to show a relationship between two men where they're almost an old married couple," Spragg said. Despite their differences, the two men find, in each other, the most enduring connection of their lives.

Perhaps the most remarkable character in the book is Griff, Einar's 9-year-old granddaughter, a tough but vulnerable kid who has never known a reliable adult. "By that age, children are utterly aware of almost all the subtleties of the world around them," said Spragg, who drew on his 9-year-old niece as well as his own memories of childhood to write from her perspective.

Now, Spragg waits to see how the world receives the couple's work, all the while marveling that it happened at all. He credits his success to his relationship with Virginia, a former counselor. "Luckily, we have one of those marriages where we could fight voraciously for a line or a character, then one of us would look at a watch and say, 'It's time for lunch,' and we'd go eat and talk about other things and play with the dog."

Reading at King's English

Mark Spragg will read from and sign copies of An Unfinished Life on Friday at 7 p.m. at The King's English, 1511 S. 1500 East in Salt Lake City. Call 484-9100 for information.

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A book list

Mark Spragg is the author of three books:

lWhere Rivers Change Direction, a memoir, won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award

lSpragg's novel, The Fruit of Stone, is about two men who are lifelong friends and the woman both of

them love.

lHis newest novel, An Unfinished Life, is a story of family members searching for love and reconciliation after the death of a man they love.

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