Speaker 1: Hi, Becca C. Smith here, and today I'm going to show you how I adapt books into screenplays. Now normally my channel is about writing books, but considering the first years of my writing career was writing screenplays and teleplays, I thought I would show you how I take books and adapt them into screenplays, especially since I'm in screenplay mode right now. I've adapted a few of my books and I've also adapted a couple of other books that were not my own. I have four easy steps that I do. Well, they're not necessarily easy, but these are the four steps that I do to adapt a book. Step number one, I am a simple, simple girl, especially with screenplays in terms of outlining. So I like to follow Sid Field's advice. He has a diagram in his book Screenplay, The Foundation of Screenwriting. It's a great book if you're going to write screenplays. I highly check it out. There are a ton of other books, but they're just, I've gone through some of them and they're just a little bit too, too, too complicated, too much. I just like simple. And he does act one, act two, act three, plot point one, climax, plot point two. Done. So I take the book and I put it within that diagram. So set up first 30 pages, plot point one, which is the first turning point of the story, somewhere around page 25 to 28. Act two, which is basically going to go from page 30 to around page 90, 80 to 90. Second plot point is somewhere around page 75 to 80. So anyway, you get the idea and then you get the resolution, which is the last 20 to 30 pages. So I do that and I put it aside. So now I know roughly where each part of the book is supposed to be in terms of page count for the screenplay. I can't do anything with it right now. I just know those are my markers. That's roughly where everything should fall in terms of page count. Put it aside because it's not going to mean anything right now because step two is what I call pages. Now I'll show you an example. I adapted Alexis Tappendorf, a book that I wrote into a screenplay. So what you're going to be doing now is you're going to be looking at the pages and you have to remember that screenplays are essentially blueprints because no one's ever going to read the screenplay. I mean, of course, everybody that's going to make the movie is going to read the screenplay, but I'm talking in terms of the public. Screenplays are for filmmakers only. This is their blueprint to make a film. Your job as a writer is to make it interesting, but it is not a literary piece of fiction. So you do not want to go for paragraphs upon paragraphs of description like you would in a book. You have all these inner thoughts in a book. You can't show those in a screenplay. So you have to find clever ways to show and not tell in a screenplay, especially because this is a visual medium. You want every scene to move the plot along, to move the character arcs along, and you want it to be interesting. You want it to be an interesting read, but you also need it to be structured and to be a good movie. If you look at the first couple of pages of Alexis, it's a lot of description and of driving down Virginia and things like that, and Alexis is annoyed and upset that her parents are going to dump her at Great Aunt May's. She's all thinking that. She's not saying it. So description-wise, you'll see in the screenplay, I break it down to very simple, brief, sort of staccato sentences like green hills, green forests, occasional cow or horse, small barb fences, lots of nature, not a lot of houses or cars on this road. Boom. Done. Established. That's the road they're on. Then you go into the interior of what's happening inside the car, and that's where, you know, you have her staring out the window, you know, with disdain. So now I just go through the pages. I usually try and keep as much dialogue as possible because that's easy, and then I try and break down. Sometimes it's very, very satisfying when you can take three pages of description and just put it down into, like, three sentences, and I just do that through the whole book. And if there are scenes where there's a lot of inner thoughts, but I feel like these thoughts need, the people need to hear or see or do, I'll either try to make a dialogue or I'll find a way of showing it in an action as opposed to just her thinking about it. And I do that through the whole entire book. Now, this can take quite a while, but when I did this one, I was doing an, I have a video, but I was being insane. I was three days away from the Nickel Fellowship deadline, and I really wanted to submit this as a script, and so I adapted this entire book in three days. It was, I do not recommend this, but it, I did it, and what's crazy is I made the top 15%. To get in the quarterfinals, you have to get three out of three judges to love your script, and I got two out of the three, which I'd say for a three-day script is pretty darn good. That is step two. So step three, now that you've done that, this is kind of key to how I whittle it down, because there was one time when I adapted a book that was about 600 pages. When I was done with just the rough, after going through every page and writing down the dialogue and doing everything that I think I needed in the screenplay, it was 210 pages. Screenplays should be anywhere between 120 and 130, and even 130 is pushing it. They really want you to be under two hours. Of course, if you're Tarantino and like, you know, Scorsese and, you know, Malick, they go on for hours, and of course there's long movies, but if you are trying to make it as a screenwriter, you really need to get your scripts under 120 pages just at first, because as a reader, I was a reader for years, you know, when you're reading a spec script, you don't want to read 150 page spec scripts. You just don't. I know that's horrible, but it's true. You really want to keep it under there, especially if you're just starting out. What I do to get the page count down, instead of going through it and just trying to edit stuff out and take it out, sometimes what that does is that pushes your plot points around, and it kind of makes the structure go all over the place. So now we're going back to our Sid Field structure. Take that document. Now you know where everything should be, and so you're going to go, okay, where did I say act one left off? Okay, that's this point, and then you're going to go into your screenplay version, and you're going, holy crap, that's on page 60. I need to get this down to page 30. So now I'm going to make three files, one for act one, one for act two, and one for act three. Now you have an act one that is 60 pages long, and basically you're going to take those 60 pages and edit it down to roughly 30 pages, close as you can get it to 30 pages. Basically how I do that is I look at each scene, and the thing about movies is that every single scene needs to push either the plot or the character arcs along, and sometimes you'll have great scenes, but they really don't do anything for the story or the character arcs. So those are the scenes that go first, and so I go through that until I can finally whittle it down to 30 pages, and I do the same with act two, and I do the same with act three. This is time consuming. It's hard. It's difficult because especially when you're really close to something, it's hard to see what's important and what isn't. I suggest giving yourself some distance if you can, just so you can come back with fresh eyes, but if you're determined to keep going, just keep in mind plot, story arcs. Those are the two most important things. Those are the scenes that need to stay in the screenplay. Step four is basically putting the three acts together. Make it all one file now, and you're going to read through it, and that's when you do sort of your line editing, and if there's any other things that seem awkward, make sure it flows together. Make sure everything's smooth. Sometimes you need to write another scene just to make things flow, especially when you've done a cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, then you're suddenly like, wait, now act one and act two don't quite go into each other the way they should. Sometimes you need to add a little scene, or sometimes you even need to take out another scene to make it flow, and that's it. That is how I adapt books into screenplays, so I hope any of these tips and methods help. Let me know if you guys are even into screenwriting. Most of the authortubers on here are book writers, so I'm always a little bit leery about putting screenwriting content on my channel, so let me know if you like it and if you want more of it. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I will see you in the next video. Bye.