How to Adapt Your Script into a Novel - Part 1

As you already know, the first 14 Substacks I’ve posted dealt primarily in the breakdown of the structure of a story. I peppered in a few motivating chapters that hopefully fed your momentum as you plowed through. Now is when we get into a much more broad set of topics. This is, in the end, the crux of the screenwriting world. There is so much more to the craft of writing than mere structure and logistics. I’ve touched upon quite a few of the additional elements, with a focus on the importance of character development. Now is when we delve into topics that can technically be read out of order. Hopefully they fuel a bit of inspiration for you in the future.

For years, decades, the industry has physically adapted books into screenplays and thus the screenplays into movies or TV shows. That’s pretty standard and, ironically enough, it’s becoming even more prominent in this age of studios begging for a built-in audience.

What do I mean by that? A built-in audience?

When you hear someone use the term, “source material”, they’re referring to the need to have a script based on something: a comic book, a novel, a newspaper article, a true story, anything that has already received interest from outside sources. What that means to a producer is pretty basic – guaranteed ticket sales. Well, at least relatively speaking. No film is necessarily guaranteed in any way whatsoever, but consider the Harry Potter movies. Of course Hollywood would clamor for the rights to that series because of how huge of an existing audience that is already associated with it.

Maybe you’re a purist: you think books are books, they should live in the mind of the reader, they are too difficult to convey on screen, too many flashbacks or character storylines, the list goes on. I get it, and I agree that some books should just remain books. But even a book such as The Lord of The Rings, which arguably falls into all of those categories, turned out to be ... well, we all know how that story ends. 

Nonetheless, Hollywood is always looking for a sure thing, even though a sure thing is never guaranteed. It’s why so many sequels or re-boots are produced. They know that there is already an audience waiting and willing to see it. If they already know 50,000 people are willing to go see the movie, then it’s likely another 100,000 people will be willing to go see it too, simply because those people also hear that there is already a fan base. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, and producers love to at least have confidence in knowing that people will go see the movie. Will they love it? That’s a whole other story, but often producers and studios don’t even care. They’re looking to make money because...? Because this is a business just like any other business, whether you want to hear that or not. It’s true.

If you had a million dollars, and you were going to invest it in something, anything, you would want to know that you would at least make your money back, right?

It’s the same exact thing with the movie business, only on a much bigger scale, both financially and culturally. This is why making a movie or producing a TV show is so damn difficult.

I’ll be negative for a second, but only to prove a point. Consider how many major movie studios there are in Hollywood. Let’s count a few of them (I’m sure forgetting one or two): Dreamworks, Paramount, Fox/Disney, Warner Bros/Discovery/Max, Sony (which is also Columbia), and Universal. That’s seven. Six major movie studios. And of course we have the tech giants and streamers: Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Discovery/Max (which is part of Warners), Hulu (Disney), etc etc. Now consider how many films those studios and streamers release on an annual basis. Maybe they each release eight movies. Ten or eleven at most? And they’re pulling back more and more in recent years (in spite of Amazon recently announcing they’re doubling down and going all out with upwards to 16 films in the coming year).

We’ll just say that this adds up to roughly a maximum amount of 60 movies made by the major studios each year. 60. That’s nothing. Out of the entirety of Hollywood, and considering how much material there is in the industry, 60 movies is a miniscule number.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are smaller subsidiaries of each of those studios, smaller production companies like A24, and many other companies who use those larger studios as distributors, or in other words, the studios are basically just putting their names on the films. There are, of course, many more production companies out there that produce content, and a ton of small independent film companies. You could include Pixar in the general mix, too, but they release maybe one or two movies a year, and they create their own content, so really it’s not even worth mentioning them because they build in-house.

So what’s my point here?

Overall, every year and on average, there are maybe 500 movies made and released through the larger “Hollywood” channels of distribution. I’m not including the small independents just to save our brains from doing math at the moment (and to give you a little positivity within a rather negative outlook, there are hundreds of independent companies producing material on an annual basis). But...500 movies. I will have 500 screenwriters read this Substack in one day. Really think about that. That’s a terrifying number, merely because we all know how many writers there are in the entertainment industry. A lot. I’ve worked with and consulted well over a thousand in my time as a consultant and teacher, and the International Screenwriters’ Association reads around 25,000 scripts every year!

Why am I bringing all of us down and pissing everyone off? Because it’s so absolutely important to note how fucking difficult it is to get a movie or television show made in Hollywood.

It’s so difficult that you could even look at the numbers and consider it nearly impossible. But the good news is that it’s not impossible. It happens at least 500 times per year. And again, I’m referring to the Hollywood system of releasing movies, which then opens the door to the (maybe) thousand small, independent films and Hallmark movies that are made and released every year. There is hope.

To add to the good news, TV is huge right now in spite of the reduced numbers and streamers pulling back. We have so many more opportunities in TV right now simply because of how many channels and networks there are on the air at the moment, and that’s including the tiny screen like YouTube and Tik Tok. So please know that there are so many opportunities for you as a writer.

With that being said, how can you raise your chances of getting a movie made?

Create a fan base. Yeah, I know, that’s so much easier said than done, but it’s actually much more possible to create a fan base for yourself than it is to get a movie made in Hollywood. From Instagram to Facebook, to Tik Tok, YouTube, blogs, video blogs, comic book forums and webcomics, Kickstarter and IndieGogo campaigns, I seriously could keep going. The crux of all of this is what? Content. And not just basic content, but incredibly unique and entertaining content (I technically hate the word “content”, but I’ll go with it for now). But that too is part of the good news. You all have content, and I assume a lot of it. You have the ideas, the scripts, the stories.

Don’t wait on Hollywood to find you.

You have to create your brand yourself, or as I like to remind people and what I coined from my novel, “the best way to grant a wish is to do it yourself.” Don’t wait for other people to grant your wishes. You’ve heard me say that before in previous posts, but in this day and age, we have so many more opportunities to create and inspire than we ever have, so you have to focus on creating your own brand and, therefore, creating your own fan base.

You are a natural storyteller. You’re a natural creator. So why are you only focused on writing screenplays?

So I am finally getting to the specific topic of this post. I know, I took a bit of a round-about way of getting here, but I needed to make all of those points before diving in here. And, actually, I will drive home the point again; it is so damn difficult to get a movie or project made in this town. It just is. And with so many content creators flooding the entertainment space, it will only become more and more difficult, but this is why education and investing time and money in yourself is so incredibly important. You have to force yourself to rise to the top, and the only way to do that is to master this craft of storytelling.

To work our way into the focal point of this two-part series of posts, let’s get into some references to adapting a script into a book. Part two will come out in a couple days.

It’s what I did with my book, The WishKeeper. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I spent many years working on a pretty big fantasy adventure screenplay. It went through over 12 drafts, and nearly every rewrite was a complete rewrite. Re-hashing the story, killing off characters, changing things structurally, changing Main Characters even. It evolved as I evolved personally. That’s how long it took me to write the damn script. But when it finally got to a place where I felt confident enough to give it to some higher-ups in town – four to be exact – each of them came back with basically the same exact note. “It’s too young, and it needs source material.” In other words, I was trying to hit an older, teenage audience, but it was still skewing too close to the five and six year-olds. Plus, since it was a wholly original piece of fantasy, it automatically made it nearly impossible to get it made without some form of a built-in fan base and preferably a very, very big built-in fan base. I had written the script only a couple years after Harry Potter became a phenomenon, so Hollywood was looking for that next hot YA book title, but they still didn’t want to gamble too much money away, especially on a no-name title, writer, and property.

So I said, fine, I’ll write the damn book.

It was weird when I got the fourth set of notes and it said virtually the same exact thing as the other three set of notes did, and these were all completely independent of each other. It was frustrating and maddening, and I felt like I had to start all over again, but I didn’t complain. I didn’t pout. I didn’t try and defend myself or my story. I simply took the notes, looked at my story, and did exactly what they told me to do. I wrote the book and made it much darker than the script version.

So how did I do this? How did I take a screenplay of about 115 pages and turn it into a 400 page novel? How did I make it darker and angle it more toward a slightly older audience? At first, the story was about a traditional fairy named Shea who had a chipped wing. She was rebellious and wanted to do things her way, and most of all, she had been bullied her whole life for being a little different and for being unable to fly. She was at the core of my story, and I wasn’t going to change the Main Character entirely. I knew I had a unique Main Character, and I liked her goal – both her plot goal and her personal goal (which I’ll get to in a second). But I did need to make her strong enough so that teenage girls and boys would find her interesting and entertaining. Not at all an easy feat. So what did I do to my Main Character? And I want to make note that I knew that the entire life-blood of the project revolved around Shea, my Hero. Everything hinged on her. Everything from the drama, the laughs, the obstacles, the 2nd Act Adventure, the climax. All of it. So I had to focus on her when I was adapting her into book form. That was the mentality I took right off the bat.

I had to adapt Shea into book form, and not necessarily the script into a novel.

So I took a look at Shea and considered what teenagers would connect with the most. Her being bullied...that was point number one for sure, but how do I tug on the heart strings even more? How do I make a teenager really connect with her? Make her just a little bit older than my intended and initial demographic of 10 – 14 year olds. So I made her 16 years old. She was a few years younger in the script. That was the first basic step. I then looked at her chipped wing and thought...not enough. Let’s shred the hell out of them to make them ugly, battered, a real handicap beyond just physical. Let’s make those wings a symbol of a dying land. A failing belief system. Doubt.

I remember having that conversation with myself and when the term, “dying land” popped into my head, suddenly I realized that I had just darkened the plot merely by changing Shea’s wings. And her character then naturally flowed from those changes. She grew to be even more pissed off at the world. She became more rebellious, and more of a smart-ass since she’s had a few more years to deal with this issue and problem. And I knew I needed to make her a strong character instead of one that would cower at the insults. She needed to be a character that teenagers who are actually bullied in real life, and who actually do have a very real disability of whatever kind, can look up to and can emulate. So Shea then became who she is today.

Notice that I haven’t talked about formatting in the slightest. I went directly to the Main Character; to the primary source of entertainment. I went there because I knew that I could fumble around with prose and turn certain script pages into longer form writing. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was allowing myself to truly dive into the heads of these characters, especially Shea, and let them shine as much as possible. And I found that through writing prose, the characters were able to jump off the page even more than in a script. Also, I noticed that the darker and more difficult I made Shea’s personal story, the darker the rest of the story became. But I also noticed that the rest of the plot and story, being the same as it was in the script, wasn’t matching how dark Shea’s new character type really was. So I had to add elements to the relationships of the other characters in order to fill in the emotional gaps.

After a ton of brainstorming, I knew that the answer to my problem of the story skewing too young was A) within Shea’s character of course, but just as important B) in the Opponent’s motive. The Opponent needed to have a much deeper connection to Shea and her story. I needed to connect the characters so that their themes were matching the intensity of Shea’s overall theme. So when I developed the Opponent to have a darker storyline, oddly enough I made him even more empathetic. I gave him a backstory that included a very real pain: a very real reason he is who he is and why he is trying to do what he’s trying to do. In other words: his motive. That backstory is not thoroughly explained in the book, at least not in long-winded exposition. It does, of course, come out and is clear as the book progresses, but just my knowing who he was and that what he wanted was painful for him, it suddenly grounded the project even more.

All of this brainstorming led me to realize that I needed a new character. A new character that was both an Opponent and a Hero. I developed this additional character as a way to anchor all of the characters into a much deeper and more emotional story. Her name was Avery and she represented the type of character that had already failed. She represented what Shea and the other Main Characters were so afraid of – failing. Poor Avery. I really put her through the ringer, but she ends up learning even more than Shea does by the end, really, and she eventually became my favorite character in the book.

Let’s pause here for now. In part two, releasing on Monday the 12th, I’ll talk through the very simple and basic steps of how I formatted my first draft of the novel. The primary point to focus on for today’s post is that adapting a script into a novel should focus on how to further develop and further expand on your main character based on the intended audience for the book. It’s so much more than formatting and structure! Know who the book is for, who will read it, and why. And read!! Read other books, for crying out loud. It amazes me how few screenwriters read novels. It’s the ONLY way for you to really and actually learn how to write one.

Like Stephen King said, “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

That will be our quote of the day, folks! Thanks for reading, and until next time…part two is on its way.

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