Hey, screenwriters! I’m new here and wanting to learn more about the screenwriting community.
I am part of the Page Turner Awards team, and we have a really exciting Screenplay Award this year. The judging panel features lots of high-profile film producers who are looking for work to option and includes Paul Michael Glaser of Starsky and Hutch!
We’ve started a screenwriting forum on our website, where screenwriters can connect and collaborate. We want to make this useful for screenwriting community, so perhaps you can help with some of the questions.
What advice would you give to writers who are looking to turn their novel into a screenplay? What courses/webinars can you recommend for an aspiring screenwriter? What award prizes would be most valuable to you and your career development?
Thanks for your help and looking forward to meeting you.
Regards
Charlotte
I'm doing just the OPPOSITE... Turning my screenplays into novels.
I've worked with quite a few novelist turned screenwriters over the years and the biggest CONSISTENT problem I saw was keeping a character's thoughts out of the action/description. Novelists need to figure out HOW to turn those thoughts they are quite fond of into action and description so that a professional reader understands what DRIVES that particular action and description.
After that? There's a lot of PROSE novelists include in their books that simply doesn't drive the story forward. My thinking is that pretty much ALL of that can be cut when writing a screenplay.
The way I've personally approached it because I'm much better at writing screenplays than I am books since that's how I started my writing career is to first just sit down and TRANSCRIBE the book into a SCREENPLAY. I wouldn't even try to cut out anything. Just gut it all out and transcribe everything in that book into screenplay format.
While one does that? I would recommend reading the screenplays of your favorite movies... Making sure to UNDERSTAND that these are probably going to be shooting scripts. So the one caveat would be to eliminate (in one's mind) any camera direction, continueds, transitions, specific angles, etc.
LEAN and MEAN is BEST for a spec script.
Once the book is completely transcribed into (probably) an extremely LONG screenplay? It's time to WHITTLE IT DOWN. Most novelists that I've met do use SOME kind of structure to write their novels by. In fact today? A lot of novelists have actually turned to different kinds of movie or screenplay structure to write their books.
After the book is transcribed to screenplay format? I would recommend going back to the structure the novelist works by and using IT to begin cutting away all the fluff that simply does NOT need to be in that script. Once all the fluff is cut? See what page count you're at. If you're over 110 pages and have absolutely zero connections in Hollywood? You'll probably still need to keep cutting until you're right around 110 pages give or take.
Once you're in the approximate page count? It's time to make a series of passes on that script... Compress dialogue. Compress scenes. Maybe even compress characters if you have too many? Cut some but let others incorporate some of the ones you've cut. A pass for subtext. A pass for character intros. A pass for transitioning from one scene to the next. A pass for every bit of your story structure. A pass for typos. A pass for format. Back and forth until you have a work of art worthy of putting out to the market.
Just my two cents.