Is anyone else adapting nonfiction? I'm working on a history set in the Age of Discovery, and I'm finding that there are challenges peculiar to nonfiction.

Right now, the problem I'm running into is that there is too much story - it's hard to carve out a clean structure, because there are so many juicy scenes and characters in the book.

There's also the tension between wanting to be respectful of the history (I hate leaving movies and realizing that what I think I "learned" is really just made up to create a good story) and needing the story to work.

Anyway, I'm posting this hoping to start an open discussion on adapting nonfiction, so please feel free to weigh in with your own challenges and thoughts.

Mine's non-fiction. It's kind of an adaption of the book I'm writing except that a lot of the stories covered are different than in the book but some stories over lap so that they will appear both in the script and in the book while others appear only in the book or only in the script. Got all that?

My screenplay is an adaptation of a magazine article. I think this works a lot better than trying to adapt an entire non-fiction book. I'll probably supplement it with information gleaned from other sources, but as it is, I've got more than enough plot.

Non-fiction is interesting because it's easy to get lost in your research. It seems like for every hour I spend actually writing, I spend about an hour and a half researching (thank goodness for Google). The fact that most of the characters in my screenplay are real people presents interesting issues. I'd like to be true to the story (and it's a great one), but I don't want to stick to slavishly or it might hold me back.

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"These are the muddy waters I'm swimming in to make a living. That I might drown in them should come as no surprise." - The Shins

"It's funny that hamburgers come from cows. And milk comes from cows. And goats too. And yaks." - Will