Page to Screen and Back Again: The Adaptation Process

Looking at the major movies and properties of the last decade or so, you can see what makes it big: adaptations. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Game of Thrones… All of them started off as books or comics first. These days, everyone seems to be adapting something into something else. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that! Sometimes a good idea makes for a good book and a good movie.

I myself am working on an adaptation for my June novel. I’m adapting a story I ran as a role-play several years ago into a proper novel. Working on outlining has gotten me thinking a lot about what goes into the adaptation process.

So how do you adapt something?

It’s important to look at what works for the different kinds of storytelling you might be undertaking. What works in one medium isn’t necessarily going to work so well in another. Films are great for visuals, but not so great for internal monologues. A novel written entirely in the first-person (like The Hunger Games) might have a harder time working as a film, unless of course you manage to find a brilliant actress who can pull off conveying that inner life. Films can use lighting and music to establish tone, but a book relies on description and diction—very different tools!

Sometimes people get unhappy when changes are made during the adaptation process. “Oh, they messed with it, now it sucks,” is a common refrain among fans. It’s important to keep in mind that changes may be necessary, though. The Lord of the Rings movies cut Tom Bombadil in order to streamline the plot, and keep the narrative coherent. He worked as a random chapter-long interlude in book form, but in a film he’d be a very confusing distraction. Some authors, like Neil Gaiman, like changing things when they adapt work, so they don’t wind up telling the same story twice. (One only needs to look at the film and book versions of Stardust to see how true that is for Gaiman.)

I’ve been working hard at streamlining my plot and characters this last week. The original version of the story had more than a dozen viewpoint characters. While that might work for George R.R. Martin, this story is supposed to be a little smaller than that. I’ve been trimming left and right, trying to get everything to fit into a single coherent arc… It’s not easy!

What about you guys? What do you think is important when adapting a story? Should you focus more on faithfulness to the original, or on making the new version the best-suited story for its purpose?

— Ben

Photo by Flickr user The Trousered Ape.