From Betty:
Adaptations of novels are not for the novice. It’s hard to turn something that takes a whole week to read into something that takes only 90 minutes to watch, but it can be done.
I’ve adapted someone else’s fictional novel into a screenplay and it was very difficult. The most difficult part was explaining to the author that we simply had to kill some of her babies from her story. Not everyone in the book could be in the movie. We had to consolidate to make the plot revolve around the three main characters and cut a lot of the riff-raff out.
Often we get students who have written a series and are horrified to hear that some of their beloved characters have to be cut from their spec script. It’s hard to know what happens through seven different novels and try to put it all into an hour and a half, so we urge them to start with their beginning group of characters and the original goal. Remember, having your screenplay turned into a movie will inspire people to read the entire series and solidify the necessity for sequels. Take Harry Potter, for example, or Diary of a Wimpy Kid, or even Lord of the Rings. Each movie takes a scenario/theme from one book and writes a tight script around that.
We have had a lot of fun helping our students who’ve written a romance novel turn their screenplays into Hallmark movies, including Christmas movies. The great news is that YOU ALREADY KNOW YOUR STORY. You already know what makes your characters tick. You already know why they would or wouldn’t do X, Y, or Z. You just need to learn on which page of the screenplay the beats of your story belong. If you can learn the FORMULA of a screenplay, the rest is just filling in the blanks…like a job application (but significantly harder).
If you take our class, we will help you turn your masterpiece into a movie!