From Screenplay to Novel: Why It Works for Me
I began writing fiction in college. I also studied playwriting, which I continued in graduate school, along with screenwriting. Of the three, screenwriting came more naturally. It was as if I were a musician and had found my niche. If writing fiction was classical, and playwriting was jazz, then screenwriting was rock ‘n roll. I was hooked from the start. But the showbiz industry isn’t always kind to writers. Especially if you’re a woman and live in a relatively small town on the East Coast.
(10 Screenwriting Techniques Any Writer Can Employ.)
Regardless, I refused to give up. I did everything I could: trips to take meetings in LA; working for free (almost always a step in the process); attending conferences and pitch festivals; entering endless screenwriting competitions; and, of course, writing new scripts so I could sharpen my skills. This is a never-ending process.
When I won one of the bigger and better competitions with a $25,000 award (thank you, PAGE International Screenwriting Awards!), I got a good agent. I also got a good director and producer. By this time, I knew enough to know that you never get too excited. Not until the actual shooting starts—because nine times out of 10, it won’t. And it didn’t. However, I had won $25,000, which I figured nearly balanced the thousands of dollars I had spent chasing this dream.
Shortly thereafter, I was hired to write two screenplays by a production company that actually paid me. Despite these “wins,” I chose to walk away while I could still tell myself I was in the black. This, however, was magical thinking; I could not put a price on the countless hours I’d spent writing on nights, weekends, and holidays. In short, whatever time my full-time job and family allowed.
Never able to give up writing, I went back to what my creative writing college professors had encouraged me to do in the beginning of this journey—focus on fiction. Of course, the other reason I decided to write fiction was that everyone in Hollywood loves a good IP. And with all of the screenplays I’d written, filled with characters I loved, why start from scratch? Why not turn a screenplay into a novel? After all, my screenplays had been vetted by agents, managers, competitions, and producers. At the very least, I had the basics down.
In writing a screenplay, you need to choose who and what to focus on. You give your leading actor—man or woman—the best scenes, while trying to give all of your supporting actors enough to keep them interesting and interested in playing the part. You also need to make sure your theme is apparent throughout, while balancing the emotional beats, because character is drama. All this while making sure that you’ve placed enough hurdles in your protagonist’s way before resolving his or her conflict. At least to some extent so the audience doesn’t leave the theater feeling cheated.
It was fairly easy to pick which screenplay to use first. Hickam had garnered interest from The Black List, who’d wanted to give it a podcast reading before COVID hit. They’d even pulled together the reading cast, which was exciting. Moreover, Hickam is the story of the first woman to earn a Purple Heart—Lieutenant Annie Fox, Chief Nurse of Hickam Hospital at Hickam Air Base. Adjacent to Pearl Harbor, Hickam Air Base had housed hundreds of B-17 bombers and had also been a target of the attack on December 7, 1941.
While subjective, having a screenplay vetted, especially on The Black List, can tell a screenwriter what’s working and what’s not working. In other words, how much did you get right and how much still needs work? You rewrite until you think it’s as good as it can be, realizing that the producers, director, and actors will have notes. And more notes. And more notes. A screenplay changes, hopefully for the better, up until the cameras roll.
Over three decades, all of this left me with stacks of unproduced scripts. (Depressing to look at. My advice—keep the good ones and have a bonfire for the rest.) However, it also left me with an amazingly detailed outline for a novel. Hence, Hickam was ready to become The Woman With a Purple Heart.
Check out Diane Hanks’ The Woman With a Purple Heart here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
A screenplay is approximately 100-120 pages long, if it’s a drama; comedies can be shorter. Typically, a debut novel is around 300 pages. Tripling your page count might seem daunting. However, when you write a screenplay you leave a lot out. You don’t write about what your characters are thinking. You can’t provide motive in that way; you need to show it. Another thing you can’t do is provide detailed descriptions because that’s the job of the set designer and costume designer. When writing a screenplay, you need to make room for all of the other creatives on a set. Especially the director.
When you write a novel, you take on these roles. You’re the writer, director, set designer, and costume designer. As a novelist, you’re completely in charge of creating your new world. This can be overwhelming and exhilarating all at once. But this is when working from a screenplay gives you a major head start since you’ve already envisioned this world, even if you haven’t fully described it on the page.
When I write a screenplay, I leave plenty of room for other creatives while still seeing details of the world my characters live in. Consciously or unconsciously, screenwriters step into that fully realized world whenever they write. When you sit down to write your novel, that world returns. It is as if it’s been there waiting for you in the real or mental drawer where you left that screenplay.
The greatest thing about writing the novel is that you get to expand your story. Little gems you left out for the sake of a page count can come back. You can develop your lead characters’ backstories. And you can develop your supporting characters. One of the best things I did, which I credit to a suggestion from my editor at Sourcebooks, Erin McClary, was to expand the story of Kay Kimura—Annie Fox’s friend and a Japanese American nurse who came to the aid of the wounded at Hickam Air Field at great personal cost.
All of this is not to say that working from a screenplay is the best way to write a novel. In fact, I just finished the first draft of a new novel that was not based on one of my screenplays. Next, I will write the screenplay based on this new novel and see how that works, because a little rock ‘n roll is never a bad thing.