Posts Tagged ‘how to write screenplays.’
Turning Your Novel into a Screenplay, by David Farland
David Farland
(From David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants)
Recently I’ve been hired to turn my first Runelords novel into a screenplay. I’m nearly finished with the last book in the series, and I want to complete that first, but it’s not too soon to begin thinking about the challenge—and it is a challenge. Always remember that the book is not the movie. They’re different mediums. A book is long enough so that you normally can’t just remove the excess description and still have a workable movie. You need to simplify the plot—not all of it, just the right parts.
So as I prepare to write the Runelords screenplay, I think I should go over the history of the project, first, so that you can understand why I want to take on the challenge.
Many of you know that I began writing the book in 1996, or at least began plotting it then. I plotted the novel knowing that it had excellent potential as a film and videogame franchise, so I made sure that as I plotted it, I kept the special effects budgets fairly inexpensive (it’s easy to write a novel that would cost a billion dollars to make into a movie), and I paid attention to creating a story that I would want to see as a movie.
As the books began hitting the New York Times bestseller list, interest in them heated up. In 2001 I was invited to take a trip to China with some movie producers to see about filming the movies there, and I took another trip in 2002. I decided against working in China at the time, but began a development company in 2002 and helped raise millions of dollars to create the movie. more »
