Number ONE:

I’m going to use Twilight as my example, since it’s one of the most controversial. In my opinion. Twilight, the book, is 115,362 words long. To non-writers, this might not sound like much, but the accepted average novel length is 50,000 words. This is how you know that you’ve written a novel, not a novella or a short. 50k words is a novel.

The average movie script is anywhere from 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours. This is just my opinion once again. 90 minutes (an hour and a half) is a feature length movie, the kind that make it to the theaters.

Twilight is a 122 minute movie. That is 2 hours and 2 minutes approx.

A movie’s length can be judged, approx, but how many pages the script is. If I have a ninety page script, I have a ninety minute movie. See how that works? Now, for the fun part.

In the 122 pages it takes to write the script, you have approx. 20,000 words. Give or take. So, we’ve knocked 115,362 down to 20,000 to have a movie length that won’t have people walking out of the movie. Beast Within, my novel, is only 75k. I’m still loosing over half of my novel by turning it into a movie.

Number TWO:

Screenplays are nothing but dialogue and action. There’s no inner dialogue, there’s no emotion, there’s only what they say and what they do condensed to simple stage/set motion. If you can’t see it on the set or in the actor, don’t put it in the script.

I don’t care how awesome you are, or what your capable of, showing inner turmoil in a screenplay is next to impossible. I’m not saying the actors can’t show it, I’m saying your black words on the white paper cannot show that Luna is torn between wanting to love Gabriel and wanting to be true to her father’s memory. I can say it, but I can’t show it.

As I adapt my own novel, I’m finding scenes and secondary plots that don’t make sense in a screenplay and have to come out. It’s frustrating and a little discouraging and I have to think to myself, do I want this screenplay written this badly? The answer, of course, is yes. I do want this. I’ve always wanted this. I am going to make it happen.

For the last two weeks, I have been working on adapting my novel Beast Within to a screenplay. It has been so long since I wrote one, but at least the basic setup has stayed the same. Once I got the story reformatted for a script, I sent it off to a friend of mine who subsequently tore it apart. In the most loving way, of course. Characters that work in a book format don’t always translate well into a script. I’m learning that first hand with Gabe, my beasty. In the novel, Gabriel is mean, cold, and borders on kidnapping at one point. But it’s easily explained through inner dialogue and exposition. In the screenplay, some inner dialogue becomes spoken dialogue and some spoken dialogue gets cut completely. If not, it gets rewritten to suit the style better. I don’t have the mediums I had before to explain why Gabe is the way he is or to show you that he doesn’t really mean it. He’s just trying to protect Luna. This is where my struggle is now: finding a way to make Gabe look like less of a creeper. Thanks to my notes, I’ve come to realize that he does, indeed, come across as the last man on the planet you want to get caught alone with.

Readers can’t understand why movie versions of books get so twisted around and messed up. Well, this is a good reason why. It’s not easy to convert from novel to screenplay. In all honesty, it would be 100 times easier to convert from screenplay to novel, in my opinion. Authors don’t get a say in the movie making process. I, at least, get to decide which changes need to be made, which characters get deleted or added, and which dialogue gets changed. For now. Until another writer more versed in these things gets their hands on it and starts making changes. Because that’s what happens in the film industry.

As I work through this process, and it is a process, I’m garnering a new respect for the writers who have had to do this.

This year I’d planned to turn Beast Within into a screenplay. It wasn’t something I advertised because I didn’t know when or if it would get done. Well, I just finished. Thank GOD! It was fun, but tedious. Of course, now comes the multiple rounds of edits and revisions before I can feel confident enough to submit it to the contests. Fingers crossed that something comes of it. If not, well… I tried. lol And since Beast Within and Beast Anew are a package deal, I’ll be adapting the second one as well. Just in case they like the first.

Here’s a sneak peek at the script.

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