Creating a screenplay from a novel

In late 2012 I was approached by a client to create a screenplay from his novel. The challenges of such an enterprise are many, and I will begin to go through the process in the following posts.

The first obstacle seemed an obvious one to overcome- “what is a screenplay?” as opposed to “a novel”. We all appreciate a novel has the advantage in the story: a novel can use a level of descriptive prose and narrative the humble screenplay can never aspire to, yet the screenplay, if able to capture the heart of the novel, comes into its own right as a gateway to a representational medium.

The question should really be “what is a story?”

For centuries before television and radio and long before the invention of the printing press, we told stories. Wherever communities gathered, a man or woman would talk by firelight of myths and legends interwoven with Gods, heroes and monsters. Some tales would be allegorical, others moralistic, and some were simply entertaining.

A gathering of storytellers would delight, amuse, frighten and teach the crowds that gathered to hear the tales told in a way that took their imaginations and set them aloft. Words conjured from their mouths put the listener into the heart of the story as if they were there. We do the same now, if we think about it: when we read a novel, we let the power of the author’s words transform us, and place us within the story.

But here’s the thing: take ten story tellers, give them all the same assignment or tale to tell, and each will tell the tale differently. Human nature will create diversity and a depth of imagination that make each story different, even though the audience might have heard it once before. It wouldn’t matter how many times a villager heard the same fairy tale because the parts changed, the events altered and the descriptions varied from story teller to story teller. The act of story telling became much more of an interactive audience participation art than a recital of simple fact. Audiences were challenged to use their imaginations, to take part, and imagine they were there with Arthur, Merlin, or Charlemagne. They saw Dragons in the sky, midnight pools where unicorns drank, ivory covered towers and the crumbling battlements of a bandit lord’s holdout on a wind swept desolate frontier.

Shame we can’t do that with the visual medium, really. Radio leaves the imagination to the listener, books leave their interpretation to the reader, but a television series or film says “here’s how we imagined it, like it or not”.

So it was when I accepted the position to create a version of my client’s novel, I would be attempting to become another storyteller to a tale already told. I had to retain the heart, the soul, and the magic of his tale, impress an audience and dare them to like his protagonists, despise his antagonists, laugh at the comic, feel anger at the injustice and palpitate at the drama and ever growing threat.

So as a writer, where do you begin?

For a writer, the first stage was to read the original novel, twice, and make copious notes. Who were the characters, where had they come from, how had their lives shaped them to that point and where, assuming they had an answer, were they going?

Each story for me begins with a character rather than an event. If I have a great story but not so great characters, I change things until the character leaps off the page; all too often have we seen weak characters in a strong plot.

Once I had the characters, I created an “event tree” for each one. This is a tool of my devising, though I’m sure I haven’t invented the procedure. An Event tree, or event line, is a series of the actual events a character undertakes within a story.

Let me give you an example: We’ll take the Medieval fairy tale / panto heroine of Cinderella.

Cinderella is born / watches dad marry step-mum / dad dies / step mum makes her work long hours in rags / step sisters bully her / she makes friends with every animal on the estate / goes into woods / meets prince charming / hears about the ball / has a dress made / evil step sisters and step mother hear about it and destroy her dress / is banished to bedroom whilst everyone else goes to the ball / Fairy God Mother appears and does magic / she attends ball / dances with the prince / loses slipper at stroke of 12 / gets home (just) / when prince comes knocking, is locked in her room / escapes / presents self and spare shoe to prove she was the mystery guest / lives happily ever after.

Without the drama and dialogue, that’s her story. From that emotionally bereft sequence of events we can identify who she is, where she is coming from, and most importantly, at what part of the story she is going to grow as a person.

When you deal with a single protagonist, an author only has one person to worry about. With a cast, everyone has to tie in. So, the event tree helps when you compare the characters and how they react because it guides the writer towards the break points in the story at which character revelations are made, personalities change, and people grow from experience, sometimes in the face of their primary beliefs.

Now I had growth trees for several characters, both protagonist and antagonist. From that point I also had the story, and in that fashion the story became driven by the characters, rather than the characters driven, or lead, by the story.

Again, how often have we seen / read / experienced weak story telling where things “happen” because a writer thought it was fitting, cool, or appropriate. The Deux ex Machina of the story to drop in a “…and suddenly, THIS happens, and everything’s ok!” is a tired, random excuse for the story, although it does have a place if the tale is constructed to allow such things.

So I had my characters, the sequence of events for each one, and I had begun to identify where they developed (and in some cases, where work on their development was required).

So how do you develop a character? How do you make them grow? More on that next time.

Jacob