Do you ever feel stuck in your medium? You shouldn’t! Artists like Miranda July have proven over and over again that followers of your work are capable of supporting you through a variety of undertakings because you have proven yourself as an arbiter of good taste. In fact, you may more quickly gain an audience by branching out or at least doubling your odds of being discovered.
It may not feel ideal to repurpose your story into a novel after putting in so much work, but there is good news: the hard part is done. You’ve already built a story with structure and characters. A screenplay is basically the most detailed novel outline of all time. Still, there’s work to be done, and we’re here to help you make the leap:
Choose a Compelling Point of View
One of the primary ways a screenplay is different from a novel is that a screenplay is typically filmed in an unbiased, third-party perspective. This is largely due to the visually captivating nature of the format and the difficulty of expressing a first person point of view. With books, readers need a look into your world, which is most infrequently an unbiased position because of how it makes connecting with readers more difficult. If you’re still considering what the POV of your novel might be, check out our point of view blog series, which goes over the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Build on Your Skeleton
Having a screenplay gives you a compelling plot structure, cast of characters, themes, and more. But a screenplay is lean and mean. It’s time to bulk up. Here are some tips to increase your manuscript length in a way that can bring life to your story:
Step 1: Rewrite Your Skeleton – You’ve already got a roadmap in your screenplay. Now rewrite scene by scene. Don’t just reformat your existing document. With a novel in mind, you can quickly find places to add color particularly in the action and exposition.
Step 2: Get into Your Characters’ Heads – Depending upon your point of view, we might literally read their thoughts in ways we never could in a movie, but most frequently (particularly in first person or third person limited) the whole world takes on an atmosphere that reflects your primary character’s mindset as do their interactions with others and what they notice about them.
Step 3: Fill in the Holes – A long movie can reach up to four hours long, but the audiobook of a short novel is at least six. Naturally, you’re going to have some room to make up. This is a great opportunity to dive into your character’s motivations more deeply, give more of their backstory, or incorporate a subplot. You may even find it prudent to bring in new characters that challenge your story to make it more rich.
Color Your Prose
When you’re writing a screenplay, your collaborators want to fill in the words with their own imaginings of the set, lighting, casting, locations and so forth. So, it makes sense to keep description tight. But the key to engaging a reader is giving them something immersive to experience. Two prudent opportunities for this are in delicate sensory details and realistic world building. Unless your novel takes place in a mundane or everyday world, readers want details that point to the mood you’re trying to capture.
We’re not going to fool you. Adapting a screenplay into a novel is never going to be easy particularly if you’re writing your first novel. But hopefully we’ve given you some building blocks to get started. If you’re still having difficulty reimagining a scene or your act structure gets off kilter with your word count, that’s what book coaching and developmental editing are for. First thing’s first: get your ideas down on paper.
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