How to Adapt Stories from the Page to the Screen

This article was originally published on Stage 32 (stage32.com ).

Welcome back to another Stage 32 Blog, filmmakers! Your host today is a master screenwriter and a master worldbuilder, an award-winning director, and a leader in the independent film community. My name is Tennyson E. Stead, and today’s the day we talk about adapting other people’s stories for the screen.

When I agreed to write this article a month ago, I had no idea what September had in store for me… but as fate would have it, I wound up getting hired to run my pitch on a film adaptation by the novelist who wrote the book. His response was one of the best compliments I’ve ever received. He said “I think… I think you made my characters better.”

Wow. Let me tell you something. Being on the receiving end of that kind of appreciation and trust, when you’re adapting someone else’s work, is a powerful (and certainly ego-boosting) experience. Let me be very clear that I did not, in fact, make this man’s characters better. What I did was make those characters more available to actors, and more useful to cinema as a performing art.

NOVELISTS ARE TRYING TO THINK LIKE SCREENWRITERS.

In the publishing world today, whether or not a novel is viable as a film property has a lot to do with whether it gets picked up for publication… but who’s deciding what makes a novel useful to Hollywood? Without a strong background in dramatic structure, publishers are relying on the same, “common sense” ideas about filmmaking shared by the audience at large.

Novelists look for unique visual elements to include in their stories, and they put a lot of attention into anchoring important plot points with particularly heavy visual iconography. According to the logic that’s driving the publishing business, adapting these stories should be a simple process of trimming the story down to a running time that suits the producer’s needs, writing some extra dialogue, and getting it in front of cameras.

Fundamentally, film is not a visual medium. Painting and photography are visual media. A painting is something you look at. Film is something you WATCH, in the same sense that we feel compelled to watch a space launch or a child crossing a busy street. Cinema is a language of action because when we see someone doing something that looks challenging or dangerous, we keep watching. We invest in their story.

Active writing is about the efforts of our characters to achieve something urgent, personal, and overwhelmingly challenging. Passive writing is about the events that drive a story, and about the reactions our characters are having to what’s happening to them. Basic stuff, right?

In literature and journalism, great storytelling is really just a collection of observations the writer is making about life, people, what-have-you… connected subtly and artfully by theme. When we create conflict with the written word, we create it by juxtaposing those themes against one another. Great literature and great journalism, inevitably, are dramatically passive.

If you’d like to find out more about writing from an active structure, I recommend checking out my blogs on “WHY I PASSED ON THAT SCREENPLAY ” and “HOW TO CURE WRITER’S BLOCK WITH ACTIVE STRUCTURE .”

What we need to know, essentially, is that an actor’s performance is defined by their actions in pursuit of some larger goal. Actors play actions, which is why we call them actors. Playing an emotion or tone to “sell” a story or an idea isn’t acting, it’s modeling. Passive writing often feels like advertising because in the structural sense, it literally is advertising.

FIND THE LINE OF ACTION.

On some level, any novel, piece of journalism, or biograpahy you might be adapting is going to be about “what happened,” and about what makes those events so important. Literally, your job as a screenwriter is to move that focus, and change what the story is about, without changing what it means to the audience. Your first job is going to be figuring out what the protagonist’s mission really is. All the things that happen to this character, and all the things that change and define them as the story moves forward, need to become something that the protagonist is doing to themselves in their efforts to achieve something greater.

What if all these things that happen to your protagonist were actually choices your character was opting into, rather than circumstances that befell them through means beyond their control? What kind of goal would drive a person to get themselves into those situations? Alternatively, what is the arc of the character… and what if your character was becoming that person deliberately, rather than by accident? Why would someone do that to themselves? What’s to be gained?

Basically, the story itself needs to be the protagonist’s fault. If the story is about how they stumble into something magical which changes their whole perspective on the world, then they need to be actively looking for that magical thing. Your story becomes about how they find it, and about what they were planning to do with it once they got their hands on it.

If the story is about how your protagonist gets arrested by some fascist or military government and become a rebel, then it needs to be their low-key efforts to change the status quo that get them arrested in the first place. Now, it’s a story about how their efforts to build a better society evolve over time to meet the challenges they face. Of course, it always was... but now, that action is the focus.

EVERY CHARACTER NEEDS AN ACTION.

Surprisingly, the supporting characters of a novel or journalistic piece are usually easier to adapt than the protagonist. Most of the time, it’s the actions of the supporting characters that are driving the story. Most novels and journalistic exposes have a character who’s trying to do something that’s morally or ethically wrong. Just make sure that you don’t lean on the archetype to “sell” that character. Lean into the action.

Make sure that you’re being honest about why a person would do that thing, and write that character as “the hero in their own story.” Find the motivations and the rationalizations they’re using to excuse their behavior, figure out how self-aware such a person would really be if this is what they were doing, and focus that character’s time on screen on their honest efforts to achieve that goal. All the details of who they are and how they relate to the other characters will float to the surface, as they use the resources at their disposal - including their relationships with the other characters - to achieve their mission.

If there’s a character who’s in the story to support the protagonist, then you’re probably going to need to get a lot more creative with how that character is handled. Not only does that character not have a mission of their own, but their very presence is diluting the stakes and taking action away from your hero. All they’re doing, structurally, is making sure the protagonist doesn’t need to do the work of achieving their goal - and that’s a problem.

Find something that they need to accomplish for themselves that explains how and why they’re helping the protagonist, and let the subtle differences between the mission of your protagonist and the mission of this supporting character create conflict in the scenework. If this character is a lover, and if they’re building a relationship with the protagonist because they need emotional support with a goal of their own… then what happens when the protagonist gets too busy to provide it? Let the supporting character deal with that problem at the expense of the protagonist.

REMEMBER, YOU’RE THE EXPERT.

When you start deconstructing the story and how the characters drive that story forward, most authors start to panic. If the themes of this story aren’t laid out through metaphor, are they really in the story at all? Will the audience get the point?

You know, through your own experience as a screenwriter, that when you focus on the action of your story without distraction or compromise, that the themes and the tone of a story emerge as layered subtext rather than as overt exposition. Visual metaphor is just another form of exposition, and this is where the author’s efforts to write a “visual story” that’s ripe for film adaptation start to backfire on them. Don’t “sell” the ideas. Don’t hire amazing actors, and then give them modeling work.

You can’t tell a story about a rebel overthrowing a government, without dealing with themes like the abuse of power. You can’t tell a story about lovers trying to kill one another, without addressing themes of betrayal. Action begets theme, and you don’t need to structure an actor’s performance around communicating that theme to get there.

Learning to trust that process as a writer, no doubt, has taken you a lot of practice. Most writers take years to get there. Assuming that the novelist or journalist you’re working with has done none of that work, or at least very little, is probably in your best interest. After all, you’re the screenwriter. You’re working on this project because someone needed an expert on the job.

Finding an action for each character that satisfies the writer’s needs is part of your responsibility, so don’t get too hung up on your idea of which actions suit the story best. At the same time, remember that you need to eliminate the coincidences driving this story and find ways of making the characters completely accountable for how things unfold. When the writer has a problem with where an action is taking a given character, listen. Work with them to find an action, or an approach to the action that does the right job.

If there’s a way for your character to pursue the goal you’ve assigned for them, which better suits the author’s vision for the character, then the author’s giving you a more specific approach to writing that character. Embrace that. If your action isn’t working on a deeper, more fundamental level, then take a step back and try to reinvent the story with a different set of goals and conflicts.

What you mustn’t do is back off your lines of action. Take the time to teach your author the same lessons that you’ve been learning, about how dramatic structure works and why it’s necessary. Be a leader to your development team, and remember that you’re on the team because they needed an expert in the field of screenwriting to help make their movie work. Never send an actor out on screen or on stage without an action to perform. Don’t ask actors to sell the story. Use the story as a tool to empower the performances. On the most basic level, that’s our job as screenwriters.

CONSIDER THE BIOPICS.

When was the last time you went to the movie theater to watch a biography? How often do you get excited about seeing biographies, at all? With rare exception, we all pretty much accept that biographical movies are going to be boring. Watching them just isn’t worth the hassle, most of the time.

How can this be, when so many of the people we make biopics about have lived important, exciting, even world-changing lives? Well, there’s two kinds of biographical motion pictures. Some of them, although far too few, focus on what these people actually did. Lincoln, for example, is about what President Lincoln did to pass the 13th Amendment. The Imitation Game is about Alan Turing breaking the Enigma Code with a box of watch parts, while the Nazis kept sinking Allied ships and the military tried to shut Turing down.

Most biopics, on the other hand, are about the events of a given historical figure’s life. Most biopics are about the moments and the themes that make a given person important to the rest of us. Most biopics are structurally passive, and that’s why they’re boring. More than anything, they feel like advertisements for the people and events they seek to chronicle.

Don’t write that. Write the other thing.

TRUST THE PROCESS.

Find actions that you can rely on to carry you through the story you need to tell, and then lean on those lines of actions right down to the smallest details of the script. Let your characters and their relationships express themselves through how these characters seek to achieve their goals. If a line of dialogue is important, then it’s important because that’s something the character needs to say in order to complete their mission.

If you compromise on that fundamental principle, then your movie is not as good as the book. Before you shoot one frame of that film, I can promise you that your film will never live up to the source material. Why? That novel is great because it played to the strengths of literature. Like any excellent novelist, your author understood the mechanics of their relationship with the reader… and they wrote in service to that relationship. Understand the relationship between your audience and your cast, and write in service to that relationship.

Your job isn’t to preserve the novel’s literary value. You’re not here to remake the novel, using the technology of cinema as a sideshow gimmick to sell the story to people who don’t like reading. You’re here to make cinema. Your responsibility to that writer is, in fact, the biggest reason for you to keep your focus directly fixed on the fundamentals of your structure.

If they knew how to write this movie, they would have. You’re here to help them. Don’t make the same mistakes they were inevitably going to make themselves, just to prove you care. You’re a showperson. Do right by the show, because that’s what makes the author’s story come to life. Do that job. Do it well, and do it in service. If you can hold that focus, if you can be patient with your development team, if you can provide leadership and if you can trust the process, there’s a damn good chance the author you’re adapting will be the very first person to stand up…

...and applaud.