The editor who reads too much |
The editor who reads too much |
Final thoughts I hope you’ve found this series about adapting a book into a screenplay helpful. It’s by no means exhaustive, or by a professional screenwriter. But since I was able to do it, you can too. I’ll wrap up with a few final thoughts! The differences between films/plays and books Hint: a lot The best way I’ve seen this described is from one of my resources listed below. Neil Landau with Matthew Frederick in their book 101 Things I Learned™ in Film School said: A movie is a novel turned inside out. A novel directly describes the invisible inner motives and emotions of characters and leaves it to the reader to formulate a mental picture of the physical world. A movie, conversely, depicts the visible and implies the unseen. Adapting a book to a screenplay thereby calls for a very difficult inversion: The explicit must be made implicit, and the invisible visible. In films, characters’ inner turmoil must be revealed through actions, facial expressions, words and manner of speaking. It’s a bit taking show, don’t tell, to a new extreme. I recently saw the play Hamnet staged at the Garrick Theatre. Many people in my group left wondering how anyone who hadn’t read the book would understand the play. Always keep the audience in mind: many will have never read the book a film is based on. Think about the person who is a blank slate and write for them. Within the layers, there’s always room to add more for the die-hard fans. An important point to make here is that while pace is critical for novels, for scripts it’s vital to keep it speedy! Look at material that’s similar to yours that’s already out there. Go back far and deep. Remember that I saw Player Kings (all the way back from Part I), and everything after the (first!) intermission was slow? I wish the scriptwriters had thought more about what the audience would be able to follow and enjoy. How can that be done? Well, Player Kings is a theater adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part1 and Part 2, which doesn’t have as many adapted versions as Henry V. In 2012 miniseries The Hollow Crown, Tom Hiddleston plays Hal. The King is a 2019 Netflix adaptation of with Timothée Chalamet as Hal. There’s a Kenneth Branagh Henry V film from 1989 and a Laurence Olivier version from 1944. It’s worth watching each version to see how they differently portray similar content and storylines. Each approaches the material with a different creator with a different interpretation. Your reactions to these earlier versions will tell you a lot about how your version can be different! Pay attention to them! Put your stamp on the story! Resources
One note from me: many of my resources were books my mother owned when she was working on her screenwriting career in the mid 1990s. Sadly, her work didn’t ever get picked up, and after she passed away, I grabbed all of her screen writing books in the hopes that one day I’ll find the time to read her script and see if I can’t do some script doctoring. (Never heard of that? See my post on Carrie Fischer’s memoir Wishful Drinking!) Published books
Online
As I find more, I’ll add to this list, but that’s all for now! If you have any thoughts, comments, or questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me! How to adapt a text into a script I’ve adapted two historical novels into scripts. One went on the stage, the other is locked in a drawer, but I learned many valuable lessons from both! Structure Writers rejoice! The structure is just like your novel!
Script 1 When I was teaching English at a high school in Istanbul, as the newbie English teacher, I was given the job of staging a play in English. Lord, how did I get through it? Luckily, the other newbie teacher was into drama and could actually act! So I got the job of script writing. We chose The Three Musketeers because it was in the public domain, was a story I knew, and has lots of characters. Surprisingly, we had a huge group of students who wanted to be in this club. (I wonder if they thought they’d just goof off? I think they found themselves surprised to be acting on stage, in costume, in English! at the end of the year!) How I adapted a book into a manuscript.
So you will finish your script, but you’ll still be tweaking and making changes up to the minute of production! It’s one of those “It’s not over ’til it’s over” scenarios. Script 2
In 2018, I had an idea: what if Jane Austen’s books had been multicultural? I could adapt an old book into a screenplay and with a super cast list as my inspiration. I followed the same process as above: I got a book from Project Gutenberg (not an Austen novel, in the end). It was a story I wasn’t familiar with, which made the process much more difficult. (Spoiler, I was halfway through when Bridgerton was announced. They beat me to it! Let’s just go ahead and give them a round of applause. Bridgerton is freakin’ awesome.)
This is where my advice really ends because I’ve not gone past this stage. But stay tuned! I’m going to the Historical Novel Society Conference 2024, where the theme is From the Author’s Page to Screen and Stage. I hope to come back with all kinds of good advice on what to do once your script is finished! In my final post, I’ll wrap up my suggestions for adaptions and give a list of resources that I find useful. PS Here’s how the rest of The Three Musketeers went!
Before you start, get some tips from the pros In 2017, I went to the Emirates Festival of Literature and had the pleasure of hearing Andrew Davies and Kathy Reichs (hosted by Fiona Lindsey) give a talk titled ‘From book to screen: Getting adaptations right.’ Davies adapted House of Cards, Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice (1995), Bleak House and War & Peace into screenplays. He is THE man to look to for advice when adapting historical fiction for the screen. He shared the tips and tricks he uses to defeat a blank page and get words down. Top tips
Keep the above list handy because you’ll keep referring to it when you need to make a decision but are wavering between A or B. This list will remind you what matters. Fiction considerations
These are self-explanatory, so I’ll let them stand! Know thy audience
When writing a book, knowing your audience is vital. The same is true with writing a script. But you have to acknowledge that the film will never be the book, and it shouldn’t try to be. It’s going to be the amalgamation of several different people’s (script writer, director, set designer, costume designer) imaginations. Davies and Reichs had some nice soundbites! My favorite was: ‘A good adaptation isn’t necessary faithful to the original. It’s not criteria for it.’ It’s important not to get hung up in making every audience member happy. You’ll never accomplish that. The goal should be to tell a good story that happens to have already been published. It’s a new version of that same story. Stay realistic Davies and Reichs said be wary of how things will work once your script is acquired. Scripts get changed! Budgets play a huge role in how a film is created. The actor you want is unavailable! etc. The actor that was hired can’t deliver. (Some actors can deliver, some can’t.) Timing You’re limited on time!
The tech side Things can get more technical than this, but you can still have the basic writing tools and be just fine!
A typical workday Andrew Davies says this is his typical workday. (He was eighty-years-old in 2017!)
Script accepted and ready to roll? Know this! On set, the writer is the only person without a job! You’re there to consult, but that’s about it. Many of the key factors are out of your hands at this point. Don’t be too upset when lines get cut, or rearranged. The director is doing their best to make it work visually. In my next post, I’ll go into detail about my process for adapting a manuscript. Adapting books for the screen and stage (part 1) Start with what you know! This is the first of a four-part series about adapting manuscripts for the screen and stage. The play’s the thing I had the privilege to see Ian McKellen (Falstaff), Toheeb Jimoh (Hal) and Richard Coyle (King Henry IV) in Player Kings at the New Wimbledon Theatre. on 2 March 2024. It’s a mash-up of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. McKellen stole every scene he was in and brought all the comedy. He mumbled and grumbled, but got a laugh every time he did. Jimoh and Coyle brought excellent performances – Hal was sufficiently lacking in direction as a young man with a view to his future; Henry was woefully marching forward while dragging an unhappy child along for the ride. While the first half of the play was phenomenal, the entire second half of the play seems … not to fit the story at all? It leaves theater-goers scratching their heads. How do the characters sitting in the orchard have anything to do with either Falstaff changing his ways or Hal leaving behind his naughty lifestyle to embrace his role as heir to the throne? These questions made me wonder about the process of adapting texts for the screen or stage. I’ve done it myself a few times, without any prior experience or education. It’s time to remedy that! This year the theme of the Historical Novel Society Conference 2024 is From the Author’s Page to Screen and Stage. I’m digging into the best practices for adaptation, so I can help authors looking to adapt their book into a screenplay. Where to start?
First, I’m comparing and contrasting stage and screen adaptations of stories I know well. This helps me think more critically about what works well on stage but also where the potential pitfalls may lie. This brings me to Player Kings. Shakespeare’s history plays (which were historical fiction in his day!) cover a time period and historical events I know fairly well. Since I don’t have to focus on plot, motivation, goals or stakes, I can concentrate on what keeps me, an audience member, riveted and engaged (or – gasp – bored). What Player Kings got right in the first half was the focus on character. The audience enjoyed following Hal and Falstaff around Eastcheap, watching their mischief. They play off each other nicely, the opposition of their characters makes for instant drama, but also comedy. The enjoyment dissolved during the second half, as the characters went their separate ways. This diversion is one pitfall that lost the audience. I’m curious, if instead of adapting Henry IV, Part 2, Player Kings could have adapted the first few scenes of Henry V to finish off the play. The play’s rushed ending, which – after nearly four hours – treated the audience unfairly. They’d given up their evening to see this and wouldn’t have minded lingering longer at the several deaths that influence Hal for the rest of his life. Stay focused Character relationships and goals should always be the focus of a story that’s on the stage or screen. This play lost the focus of the strained relationships between Hal and Falstaff, and between Hal and his father. Be picky when it comes to choosing what scenes to keep and which to toss. If I were critiquing this script, I’d say, ‘Connect the dots! Focus on the characters!’ Don’t focus, as this production did, on a nice piece of setting/scenery. (Think an apple orchard hanging down from above.) Praise is due to this production. Yes, the hanging orchard was nice, but not at the cost of the story. Otherwise, I enjoyed the set design – rooms were created by fun twists and pulls of the curtains. The music was far too loud, and McKellen’s grumbles were sometimes hard to hear: was that on purpose? The reason it’s ‘easy’ for me to focus on the pitfalls is because I wasn’t trying to figure out what was going on, and if you’re an author hoping to start adapting script, start by working with stories you already know well that have adaptations. In my next post, I’ll share the helpful tips I learned from the pros. What happens when I travel into the City to meet Juliet at her office at Mushens Entertainment?
I can’t hear the words ‘the time’ without automatically thinking of ‘The Time Warp’ from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
What happens when you do a mentorship when you're older than everyone else? I'm about to find out!
When we think of knights, our imaginations conjure up armor, chivalry, and jousting, but what if that wasn’t the complete picture?
His Bloody Project is a fantastic example of writing that creates a realistic sense of time and place. If you want to experience a nineteenth-century murder trial in rural Scotland, pick this up.
On March 4, 2020 at the Old Vic, I saw my final plays before lockdown: “Endgame” and “Rough for Theatre II.” Could it have been more prophetic?
In the Oxfam bookshop near the British Museum in Bloomsbury, I found a copy of England's Queens. Wow. There was so much I didn’t know!
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” |
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