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.