I was off to a good start in adapting my novel to a screenplay when I noticed something: The number of pages of the book I'd adapted so far equalled the number of pages written in my screenplay to that point! So basically everything I'd written turned out to be useless, unless I wanted a six-hour movie with glacial pacing. All I'd done was change the novel's formatting to look like a script, without keeping in mind the different needs of the two media. So, after wasting a week, I'm back to square one, starting over with a better idea of how things should be done.

Has anyone else had a problem with trying to save every last turn of phrase and scene with their adaptations? Have you been so enamored of scenes and details that you've been unable to alter or excise them, or have you gotten so wrapped up in what you were doing that you forgot the script needs to be of producible length and flow?

I'm adapting my own novel also. I think it's easy to forget that you need a lot less description to carry a screenplay. Plus, you can cut anything that is intensively about character introspection.

Yes, me too! I'm at about sixty pages now, and I'm about one third of the way through the book...it's annoying.

Since this is a draft I'm trying not to worry about it too much, but it bothers me. I was proud of myself, however, that I found a couple scenes that weren't necessary, and could be cut.

But trust me, for me, there will be a lot more cutting and switching things around to make it a lot shorter.

And I need to trim down my dialogue quite a bit.

Otherwise I too will have a six hour movie on my hands. :|

I think you've stumbled on the problem every screenwriter has. Remember all the complaints when the first Lord of the Rings movie came out, because of all the stuff that was missing? and that movie STILL wound up excessively long.

It's hard to cut out things to fit it into a 1 1/2-2 hour format. Something has to go. It's a good exercise to see what the real meat of your novel is!

I'm sort of grateful for my situation. I'm adapting a novel that I've started writing, but haven't finished yet. So the fun question for later: which came first- the manga or the novel?

I started out with the same problem! I typed my first scene from the novel and realized it was 15 minutes long if the 1 page = 1 minute screen time holds true!

And it's so hard to cut because the novel I'm adapting is so well written that a lot of her dialogue is justified! I'm having to come up with ways to show the information I need to get across visually rather than through the dialogue and because I've never thought this way before, it's proving to be quite a challenge. But still fun!

I think you can definitely be *too* faithful when trying to adapt - the recent Watchmen film is a pretty good example of that. A lot of the dialogue is lifted so directly from the graphic novel that on film it just doesn't feel right. There are a whole load of other problems with that particular adaptation as well, but I don't have the three spare weeks it would take me to write about them!

For my Script Frenzy I'm adapting from a videogame into a film, and given that it's a role-playing game with a core plot of 20+ hours, I've had to be pretty brutal about what goes and what stays. I'm about halfway through the adaptation now, and I'm already 10 pages over my original page/scene plan - so rather than having a 100 page script, I think I'm going to end up around the 120 page mark.

I think adaptation could almost be a completely separate writing discipline from doing an original script. Learning how to cut down a story to its bare bones so it'll fit in the screen time you have, without losing the true spirit of the original story, is really challenging.

I think the key is to decide what's absolutely essential, and just write that, even if it means throwing a lot of good stuff away.

I suspect the screenplay adaptation of my '07 NaNo novel will be a little bit too long in its first draft, as Bad Company's a pretty long novel even in its incomplete drafts. Fortunately, I have my pack of index cards ready, so I can cull scenes before I put them in the script. I'll restore them to the graphic novel script, however.

I write screenplays better than I do novels. Screenplay descriptions are short, and you can get away with a lot of vagueness (leave the exact location choices to the director), e.g. EXT. MOTEL - DAY. In my novels, I must put in exact descriptions, map out my locations and my characters' places in them, etc. In my comics, I have to actually draw the locations as they are, but at least drawing them is easier for me than having to write about them.

I'll end up adapting the scripts back into the novel, of course.

Ugh, I'm totally going through that.
A way I found that was useful in combating the "EVERY WORD MUST BE PRESERRRVEEDDDD" feeling I was having was to not go in order. I went through the book and underline the super important stuff, and then just opened the book and started typing.
I'll have a hell of a time putting it all in order, but it's been great for cutting unnecessary bits out.

I'm having this problem right now.

My ratio is about 2 pages of novel to 1 page of script, but that's still not tight enough. I'm also trying to think about subplots--what to include and what to drop. But everything seems to be intertwined so much that I'm in a muddle.

It's a good learning experience, though. I keep saying that...especially when I'm frustrated...yeah, that's it. Good learning experience.

:-)

See... mine went the other direction. Rather than feeling the need to preserve it exactly as written, I looked at my story and said, "I can't adapt this directly." I had a lot of internal dialogue and character thoughts in the original short story. Since that doesn't translate well or easily to script form, I ended up giving it to the characters as dialogue instead.

I started with a short story of about 34 pages. It took 59 pages to reach the end of the sequence. It worked out well, pacing-wise. Now, I just have to hope I can finish the second part of the story in 20-odd pages I have left.

Death toll: 7 named, about 181 unnamed

I've been working on trimming my script already, and I have cut SO MUCH now. I'm down to about 130 pages, but I still have more to write, so I plan on getting down to 100 and trying to write the last bit of the novel in twenty pages, to give me 120 - about a two hour movie, right?

I cut an entire B-Plot! And by the time I'm done, I'm hoping it all still makes sense but...you never know.

I'm probably going to try my hand at an adaptation next screnzy, or perhaps before. I really want to adapt Lord of the Flies, but the audiobook of that is 6 hours long, so I'd essentially have to cut out two thirds of the book. And that sounds really hard. :P
I might start with adapting Into the Woods. Since plays/musicals aren't too much longer than movies, that should be an easier project.