Stories that have made the journey from book to screen have always been popular. But it feels more than ever they make for a increasingly popular sub genre. They even have their own category on Netflix.
Whilst it’s a tempting route to pursue for a screenwriter, the journey from book to screen can be a bumpy one.
These are just some of the questions that might plague a book to screen adaptation.
And we, as audiences, can all recognise when the book to screen journey hasn’t gone smoothly.
You can’t legislate for taste. Especially when dealing with an adaptation of an already beloved story, whose followers will have passionate feelings either way.
What you can do, though, is try and make the journey from book to screen as smooth as possible.
We’re going to look at 9 steps you can take to do this, before looking at some case studies.
Outlining the story of any screenplay is crucial. But in condensing a story that might be explored over hundreds of pages, outlining is key.
This might seem like a daunting task. But try outlining the story as you read along. You might get a lot down on the page. But you can edit out arcs and subplots that feel less important when you’ve finished.
You could outline in a number of different ways in order to extract the most impactful parts of the story.
Once you have your outline, you might want to go over it multiple times. This will help filter out how you respond to the story.
Having an almost second nature understanding of the story will help you understand what the parts worth having at the forefront of your book to screen adaptation are.
When you have your outline, you can start to work out what the shape of your adaptation will be.
Some stories are capsuled. These are perfect for a movie adaptation as they can take an audience in and out in 90-120 pages.
However, some books have a story and world so comprehensive that it would be almost impossible to condense into just two hours.
Some books have such a richly realised world that they provide possibilities for multiple story arcs. This is perfect for a TV series, where there is the potential to continually return to the same setting and characters.
In trying to identify the shape of your story, look for the following aspects:
Your adaptation could take any shape you like. However, make sure it is the right one for the story.
Audiences will be able to tell when a story isn’t suited to the format it’s being explored in. It will stick out and feel opportunistic.
Conflict is a key part of any drama. Therefore, in your book to screen adaptation it’s essential to find out what the conflict running through the story is.
Reducing a story down to a simple hook and conflict can be hard. It’s even harder when considering summing up a book that may be many hundreds of pages long.
Remember the keys of creating a logline: The Protagonist, the goal and the antagonist force.
Then apply this to the book you are seeking to adapt. It will again help give you a clear vision of what the essential story is.
Novels can be a great form for having characters express their inner thoughts and lives. This is an inherent quality that literary works have.
There is a connection with the audience established by a conversation with them. However, this is hard to emulate directly on screen.
This isn’t to say that character’s inner thoughts can’t be expressed on screen. But in your book to screen adaptation you need to find a way of making the internal feel external.
‘Show don’t tell’ is a key principle in screenwriting. But it is especially key when adapting a story that wasn’t meant for screen in the first place. Applying this principle throughout is a surefire way of turning novelistic trappings into cinematic ones.
You don’t have to erase the internal. Indeed, internal conflict is an important part of building characterization. But making the internal FEEL external is how you make the story one that fits comfortably on screen.
It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to include everything from the book. You will need to make cuts.
However, cutting isn’t just important in condensing the story down. It’s also important in making the story your own. Find what you want the main arcs to be and cut the ones you think aren’t important.
Be wary of second guessing what an audience will want left in or left out. Make strong, consistent decisions about what is important for your story and make strong decisions therefore about what to leave in and what to leave out.
What is the context of this story? How could you expand on it? Do you have your own insight into the setting and/or time period (either by research or personal experience)?
The context can be a defining feature of a story. Within a book it might be the background or at the forefront. Either way, you can put context at the forefront of your book to screen adaptation.
The strength of literary works can be in their potential for depth. Where possible, find a way of making that depth tangible within your adaptation. A rich context can make for endless potential storylines as well as deep thematic resonance.
These are questions to ask of your story’s context. Can you see how well these questions are answered in the below clip from Brooklyn?
It may seem obvious, but making a story visual is a key part of a book to screen journey. However, this doesn’t just mean literally turning the story into one we see rather than read.
You need to exploit the medium of screen and put visuals at the heart of the storytelling.
Thinking about visuals is about more than just beautiful landscapes. It’s about how visual techniques do the storytelling in place of literary devices.
How can you condense a page of prose description into one image? How can you turn something a character says into something they see? These questions speak to the heart of adaptation.
To the previous point, if you are going to pluck a literary device from a book, such as voicover, then make sure it has purpose. This should ideally be a purpose other than one purely expositional.
Voiceover can be jarring when it feels like it is doing work that could otherwise be done visually.
As an example, in Submarine, the voicover explicitly works against what we are seeing.
What are the themes that power this book that you have chosen to adapt? Some might be louder than others. However, bear in mind the life of your screenplay when you’ve finished it.
A relevant theme will help your screenplay stand out. Audiences want to see the world reflected back at them. So what does your story have to say about the world NOW?
This might not seem immediately obvious. The book you’re adapting might be set hundreds of years ago or in a fantasy world. However, always remember to be malleable.
For example, in Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s original setting of Ancient Rome is changed to Eastern Europe. Although it doesn’t do this explicitly, merely labelling the setting ‘A Place Calling Itself Rome’.
However, the intentions are clear.
Below we’ll take a look at some of examples of book to screen adaptations.
This isn’t a list of ‘the best’ adaptations. Instead, we’ll take a look at examples that show both the pitfalls and rewards of adaptation.
This ambitious novel was always going to be hard to adapt. It spans six interconnected stories, that range from the distant past to the distant future in their setting.
The film has both admirers and detractors. It serves as a good example of a book to movie adaptation that could never match its source material.
However, for some it proves to be a taste of that source material, making them want more and giving a brief glimpse into its complex, wide-reaching themes.
A hugely popular book, this film somewhat missed the mark. It’s a great example of how changing a story’s tone can fundamentally alter its appeal.
What made the book so popular and distinctive was lost. And what replaced it felt too generic to stand out.
The disappointing last two series of Game of Thrones prove just how important source material can be. When the series started to outpace its source material, it lost its grounding and its reputation.
The potential spinoff series and fan appreciation of the Game of Thrones world proves how rich the source material is.
The series fully appreciated the strength and depth of that world and the characters within it. It was also imaginative enough to make adjustments, whilst remaining true to the core elements.
Famously an adaptation that its original creator doesn’t care for. What this shows, however, is how much Stanley Kubrick made The Shining his own.
The movie version and book version are completely different from each other. However, both take the same set of basic ingredients and do their own thing with them. And people are fans of both.
The Shining is a great example of an uncompromising vision of a story. One that does its own thing so much it even alienated the original author.
An adaptation that matched the tone of its source perfectly. In its surreal, dark comedy American Psycho borrowed from the same tone that defines the novel on which it is based.
The movie is a faithful adaptation of the book.
Apocalypse Now is a great example of a book to screen journey that is quite hard to notice at first.
In changing the setting but keeping the key characters and themes, Coppola sought to make a point about the madness of war and the effect of it on human psychology.
Apocalypse Now demonstrates the power in making an adaptation relevant. It was released only four years after the Vietnam War ended and struck a nerve in this respect.
The fact that the themes were taken from an eighty year old novel make them all the more powerful, showing their depressingly unending relevance.
A hugely successful novel was turned into an unsuccessful movie. It’s a great example of a much hyped book being seen as a no-brainer for an adaptation but that adaptation being ill thought through.
There was much talk of how the novel was inherently un-filmable. However, the temptation of a movie adaptation of this well received book was too much.
Perhaps it was too rushed. Perhaps the ingenuity needed to adapt a complex literary story such as this wasn’t given.
Either way, the movie felt a waste of a compelling story.
The endlessly popular TV series, Sex and the City, took its inspiration from a book of the same name.
It’s a great example of how the inherent setup of the story and its setting, can be utilised over and over again.
The set up, of four women’s friendship and love lives in New York, is so well characterised in the book that multiple series of storylines feel possible.
The ease and charm of the basic premise, which is in even the very title, is what provides rich material for multiple series.
Perhaps the book to movie adaptation that rules them all. Peter Jackson orchestrated an adaptation that got almost everything right.
Furthermore, the movie didn’t come in to existence until the technology was there to make it. Thus the effects were at the forefront of the movie’s appeal, bringing the book’s vivid world to life.
Whilst there were previous adaptations and there will be subsequent, Peter Jackson’s version proves the value of good timing and of love and care shown to the source material.
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