Want to adapt a novel? Plenty of films are conceived this way – and they’ve been handing out Oscars for good adaptations for over 80 years. Whether it’s choosing which work to adapt, what to leave out, or which format, here are 10 critical tips to get you started.
1. Are You In Love?
This is fundamental, and is ignored at your peril.
You need to find a book, or a story, that you love. Not like, but LOVE. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with this – months, or years – so you had better be happy with this – and you had better think that it is a great enough book to merit this part of your life.
2. Why Bad is Good
When it comes to working out whether it’s a good candidate there are a few other factors. It’s likely that the stronger the narrative, the less work you will have to do. If it’s a ‘plotty’ novel, then your job will probably be more of a cutting exercise rather than creation. You are less likely to have to invent or create scenes as the novelist will have put what is needed in the book.
Avoid books that have a lot of internal story. By which I mean books that are cerebral, where much of the action is internal. Nothing is impossible, as Ronald Harwood showed with his script for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but books that involve people doing things to each other in the real world tend to be easier to adapt than books about people thinking about things. (How do you get thought on screen? Not easy.)
A book’s literary quality is actually no guide to its suitability for dramatisation. It’s even likely that a bad book can make a better movie than a good book. (That’s because bad books are often more concerned with simple, clear narratives than good novels, which can play with form, structure, and point of view in a way that complicates matters for the filmmaker.
3. Is It Available?
Make sure the work you want to adapt is available as a lot of original works will have been optioned and are ‘in development’. There is also a whole industry based on optioning works simply for trading purposes like stocks and shares or URLs.
If you think the work is still in copyright approach the copyright holder to see what the status is. Christopher Hampton wrote to Billy Wilder when wanting to adapt ‘Sunset Boulevard’ into the musical. Billy Wilder wrote back to say that as a typical writer, he didn’t have a say on its availability – it was up to the studios.
Start with whoever published the book. When you get the switchboard ask for ‘the Rights Dept’ and push on through till you know a) who owns the rights and b) whether they are prepared to talk to you about you buying an option on the movie rights.
This could be the writer (or their estate if deceased – not in this case), could be the publisher, could be another production company could be a third party who bought the rights out of interest.
Back in 1996 I remember trying to track down the rights to ‘It’s a Good Life’ – a classic Sci Fi short story by Jerome Bixby – because the BBC were interested in doing a new dramatisation of it.
After following a week long paper trail and endless game of phone tag I eventually ended up talking to a near-legendary Sci Fi fan called Forrest J Ackerman on his home line at the Ackermansion.
Mr Ackerman had picked up the rights at some point out of sheer love for the source material and was in charge of whatever happened to the story worldwide.)
If you’re in luck and whoever owns the script will talk to you about selling you an option, then you can either start negotiating yourself, or hire a media lawyer to do it for you.
You’ll have to work out your own take on genuine the offer is and how much you are prepared to risk.
However I can say I’ve heard of options given away for nothing or chicken feed because the owner liked the writer and they liked the way they were talking about writing the project; then I’ve heard of options selling for £1-2K for a year; and then I’ve heard of the sky being the limit for a hot project in demand.
If the work is out of copyright it’s up to you to get that treatment written and out there, before someone beats you to it. Adaptations of classics may already exist, but don’t let that put you off, as a new version is needed for each new generation of viewers
For example, ‘Pride & Prejudice’ has been adapted a number of times – the 1995 BBC television version with Colin Firth’s Mr D’Arcy may have been a cultural icon, but the 2005 film version took a different approach and was seen to be fresh enough to generate an Oscar nomination for Keira Knightly.
If it’s your own original work – a novel or stage play – which you want to adapt, you must be prepared to cut, cut and cut. You can’t afford to be too precious about every last detail within the book, turning the adaptation into an epic-length, simply because you couldn’t bear to leave anything out.
On the other hand, it can be liberating. If you’ve written a novel, you’ve lived with the characters for years, so you can make them behave in ways that are not quite expected. You can take bolder decisions.
Graphic novels are already very filmic in their approach, being like a storyboard. Check out how the film version of ‘300’ or ‘Sin City’ compares with the book.
4. Know Your Source
You need to become friends with the novel, get to know it intimately, and be able to find your way round it like it’s a habit.
A scene in the book, which will have the luxury of space and time to go on for a few pages, may not translate so well to the screen if every detail is included. But by knowing the book well, you may find that a phrase or paragraph from elsewhere in the book conveys the sentiment of the scene just as well.
And certainly don’t spend two or three minutes of your film just to set a single punch line up even if it’s a devastatingly funny humorous chapter in the book, if it takes away from the forward momentum of the story.
Knowing your way round the book can also be useful if you come across a conflict in the screenplay you are writing. Being able to go back to the original text quickly can be really helpful.
5. Who Are You Going To Lose?
This might be because of the budget, or because they may not contribute significantly to the plot. Ask yourself which characters are memorable and are necessary. If a character in the book is neither, you may be able to leave them out of the adaptation,
Would it be necessary to spend time on a natural disaster if the story were really about the characters dealing with the aftermath? From a cost perspective, it will be expensive to stage an earthquake or volcano or cyclone, but picking up the story afterwards will have no less impact because the film will be about how the characters’ lives are affected.
6. Be Prepared to Play
You don’t have to keep the original running order. Think more of keeping the essential elements of the story, but juggling them round so that they will have more impact onscreen. A book has the luxury of space to develop character traits and plot points, and may have long sections of prose without dialogue.
In a film you have less than two hours to work with, and you may need to establish some key character traits early on so the audience has a better idea about the main protagonists. Or it may be that a long descriptive passage appears quite late in the book, possibly a character reflecting on their life. But for the film version, you may want to try and bring this forward, again to help establish the mood.
Conversely, a plot point may be established early on in the book, but could be something you want to save for nearer the end of the film, for the dénouement.
If you are adapting a murder mystery or crime novel, the order in which you reveal the clues may work better in a different order on screen to that in the book.
7. Use Your Software
Vadim Jean, who has been adapting Terry Pratchett’s ‘DiskWorld’ novels for Sky, says the first the thing he does is import the book’s text using the screenwriting software programme Final Draft. This means he has the whole text so he doesn’t inadvertently leave anything out.
It helps you find a scene quickly, allows you to have characters’ lines of speech, and allows you to go back to the original if you are having difficulties making a scene work.
8. Think About Working With The Original Writer
A book will often be much longer than the film and many scenes, and even characters, in the book will not make it into the film. And as you will know, it can be very painful when someone else hacks their way through, sorry, carefully edits your own work to a more useable length.
So while you may be very familiar with the book, the author will be too. If the original author is happy and willing it may be better for them to do the editing of the original work before you start cracking with the first draft of the adaptation. It can save you a bit of worry or work, and it will keep the author on your side.
Another plus of working with the novelist is that if the screenplay needs a line adding, the author may be able to come up with some dialogue, as they will have been living with the characters for some time so know how they are likely to react.
9. What Format?
The BBC’s adaptation of ‘Bleak House’ was a great success as it was written to reflect the way in which the Victorian readers of Charles Dickens’ novel would have encountered it – in serial form. The BBC also scheduled the 15 half hour episodes in the early evening after the popular soap ‘EastEnders’, attracting an audience who may not typically have considered themselves Dickens fans.
One of the approaches to the upcoming adaptation of ‘Anne Frank’s Diary’ was to consider it as a sort of video diary.
10. Will You Be Unfaithful?
Be prepared for comments from the public (and film critics) who know the novel and have their own pictures of the characters in their minds. They can be very proprietorial when you cut their favourite character or scene.
But even if you write a very faithful adaptation, there may be elements beyond your control, such as casting or locations chosen for filming. You can’t please everyone all of the time.
But you can be true to the spirit of the book – and that’s the greatest goal. You distil a 300 page novel into a two hour movie and you get the spirit right, you deserve a pat on the back. You’ve done the best possible job!
11. Don’t Be Afraid to Impose Screenplay Structure
A bonus point!
Novels and screenplays can be very different creatures. Novels can wander, flow, reverse, drift – it’s a legitimate part of their charm. But if a screenplay did any of these things it would probably get thrown in the recyling box pretty quickly. Don’t be afraid to impose traditional screen storytelling over the top of the raw material of the novel. You have a duty to the original writer and the fans of the book, of course, but that’s secondary to the duty of the audience in the cinema. If they’re bored, you’re dead in the water.
One great way to make sure you are working with a good solid narrative structure is to follow my own step by step guide to screenwriting, the Screenwriting Goldmine. You can download it here.
