I was very recently given permission to do my own screenplay adaptation of the novel
Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog. I've read the digital version and order a paperback copy of the book (its being shipped now). I'm rather new to script writing, and I'm positive I can do an okay job of adapting the novel. I was just wondering if anyone has any tips.
Like, what to leave in and what to leave out? Or what is the best way of changing the dialog for the big screen, but not changing the story?
Stuff like that.
Well, what I've said in some other post (and I'm not sure actually whether it was here or somewhere else) is that every work in a fixed form, whether it's a screenplay or a finished movie or a novel or a play or whatever -- is actually derived from an underlying source -- and that's the *story* itself -- the story in what you might call it's *unfixed* form -- that basic shape from which it might then move on to become a novel or a play or a movie or a work of musical theatre or who knows what -- an icecapes thing.
Whatever.
The point is that it can actually be a kind of long way around to take that story through the novel and through all of the decisions that were appropriate to transforming that story into a novel -- back to a screenplay. That's because so many of the decisions appropriate for transforming a story into a novel are going to be wrong for a movie -- and so many of the decisions that you might want to make in making a movie would likewise be dead wrong for a novel.
While there are a certain number of stories that have worked well with little alteration in both mediums, most stories do not.
And so what may serve you well is not to move forward -- from novel to script -- but rather, first, to step back -- to go back from novel to "story" -- to reduce the novel to it's most basic level -- what are the really critical and fundamental elements of the "story" that is at the heart of the novel.
That is -- strip away the sub-plots, strip away the dialogue. Strip away the "writing" in the sense of the prose itself -- and get yourself down to the story itself.
Lay that out -- either in the form of a treatment, an outline, index cards -- however you want to do it.
Then start with that -- and then say - okay, here's my story. How do I make this into a movie?
The writer of the novel had a different challenge. He had to, in a sense, start with that -- and turn it into a novel. You've got to make it into a movie.
Maybe there's stuff from the novel -- dialogue that you like or whatever. Great. Write that stuff down on some index cards. Put it aside. If, as you're writing you find it useful, use it. If not, don't.
But the critical stuff -- the cental characters, central scenes, central story points -- you'll already have that, because those things should be central to the underlying story.
But the advantage is, because you'll be writing a movie, you won't necessarily be bound by the detail of the novel.
There may be a critical moment in the novel, "Bob realizes the truth."
In the novel, that may happen with Bob sitting alone in a room, remembering something from his past. Fine in a novel. Terrible in a movie. In movies, scenes should be about people doing things, going places, relating to other people -- not sitting and remembering things.
The point is -- since you know what the scene is about -- Bob realizing the truth, you can then create the *movie* version of that scene -- a dramatized version of that moment, in which that realizing occurs through some confrontation with another character, rather than through a character alone having a memory -- which is fine in a novel, but almost always deadly on the screen.
NMS
