Novel to screenplay transition

RTH

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Hi, all --

As someone who's been working through novels and short stories as my major "venue" from day one, I'd like to know people's opinions about what are the most interesting differences between novel and screenplay writing (besides the formatting... ;) ).

Cheers,
RTH
 

LittlePinto

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The writer can't get away with sneaking unnecessary material into a screenplay. They have to be tightly written and every line has to do multiple jobs.
 

Usher

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1) With a screenplay you have to think what is possible and can it be reproduced on screen.
2) Cost of production is a factor.
3) A screenplay usually has a simpler story and doesn't take the scenic route to get from A to B.
4) In a screenplay the characters have to be larger than life even with a drama and to react and build relationships just through the dialogue really.
 

creativexec

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While novels can rely on allowing the reader inside the head of its characters, a screenplay must externalize everything. A screenplay tells a story dramatically and cinematically - meaning it uses conflict and moving images to explore the narrative, themes, characters and so on.

Novels rely on words and screenplays rely on structure. Prose is not important in screenplays. I often say that screenwriting isn't writing at all. The success of a screenplay doesn't rely on mellifluous sentences. It relies on craft. Screenplays are about eliciting emotion via the juxtaposition of one scene with another, ebb and flow, set-up and pay-off, and so on.

Many great novelists have failed as screenwriters because it is a completely different craft.
 

screenscope

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One is about creating images in the mind, the other on screen. End result, you would hope, is the same emotional response from readers and viewers.
 

RTH

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Many great novelists have failed as screenwriters because it is a completely different craft.

So there's something to be said for the ones who can do both, like William Goldman. That's a rare case where the novel and the film (at least in my view) are of equal quality and a lot of that has to do with, as folks have said, the juxtaposition and ebb/flow of the scenes and the fantastic dialogue.

Great stuff, all!
 

namejohn

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I am assuming the screenplay is to become a movie.
When writing a screenplay, it needs to be remembered that other people will be doing the same things that were done when the story was written by the writer.

As a sample the showing in the story is done by the people that run the cameras in the movie.
The writer is to leave out the show part, mostly, and have the tell part left in, but not in detail.

Another sample, the way dialog is said is done by the actor, after the actor has the idea of how the character is feeling and so on.
Because of this the actor playing a main character, which is one with dialog through out the movie, will have an idea of how the character speaks, feels, and does things.
So the way the main character does things and speaks is written less then in the story.

However, a actor who plays a character that only talks a little in the movie, needs more information as to how the character is suppose to speak, feel, and do things.

The settings are not described in detail, since to try to make a setting in the movie to be the same as a setting described in a story can get expensive.

Basically the writer does their part in making a movie and stays out of what others are doing.
 

Windcutter

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Cost of production is a factor. (c) Usher
No internal monologue (well, there is a narrator sometimes, but still you have to show everything through external means.)
Hard guidelines considering length. It would be ill-advised to add (or cut) thirty pages just because it seems like the story demands it. Every kind of structure that screenwriting is involved with is more definite, more pronounced, less fluid.
Lean and mean narrative--every word has to matter. I know we say the same about writing but a novel allows its author much more in the way of detours than a screenplay.

But the biggest, most important difference to me is simply the difference between words and visuals. What a fiction writer accomplishes with words a screenwriter does with visuals. I'm actually still struggling with the opposite--I wrote more screenplays than novels, I'm too used to externalizing everything.
 

Yourg

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'Show, don't tell,' is at the heart of it.

Along that note, sure, an author of a novel can explicitly inform his readers by writing something like:

Jane held the knife behind her back and said, "You know I wouldn't hurt you, Mother."

She began to weep. "I...I love you, Mommy!"

But her mother had no idea Jane was really holding a large knife with which she intended to stab her, so she stepped precariously nearer to her deranged daughter.

That might work fine.

But is it quite as potent, as immediate, or as suspenseful as when a film audience sees for themselves, without the need for it to be articulated by an author, that Jane hides a knife, yet claims something different to another character, a character who doesn't have the same special knowledge that the audience has. It seems like a somewhat different sort of interaction between the storyteller(s) and the audience.

Jane's hand squeezes the large hunting knife she hides behind her back.

JANE
You know I'd never hurt you, Mother.

Jane begins to weep.

JANE (continued)
I...I love you, Mommy.

MOTHER
(steps nearer)
There, there, darling, I know...I know that.

Or, is it more potent, more immediate?


Always writing in the present tense is also an interesting difference.
 
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