Letters to Kel: TRANSFORMATIONS -- Turning a Screenplay into a Novel

I'm pleased to report that my first draft of CHARLI, Quarry Hall Book #6, due out in 2015 from Desert Breeze Publishing, is FINALLY finished.

Well, it was finished two weeks before this blog is due to appear, but I'm writing it now just a few days after I finished the 1st draft, and still basking in the glow, the feeling of "Aaaaaaaahhhhh, DONE!"

The nice thing about transitioning a screenplay into a novel is that a lot of the plotting and dialogue is already written for you. The hard part -- sometimes the painful or uncomfortable part -- is realizing that this screenplay you were so proud of 10 years ago ... isn't really that great. There are some dumb lines, or the action just doesn't fit what you need to have happen, or you have to use the mouse to mark big chunks of screenplay and then hit the "delete" button. And then there are the "technology" issues. When I wrote the screenplay, cell phones weren't all that prevalent. I had to make some changes in the heroine communicating with her mother during times of crisis, and had to change some people's lines around, or have one person kick the tar out of the bad guy when someone else did it in the screenplay. Confused? Think of it as just changing costumes and props around.

The original screenplay was written for a competition 10-15 years ago, and was called WALKING THE WOLF TRAIL. Charli Carson and her mother, Dr. Rachel Carson are still there, and pretty much the same. The children who come to stay with them and hide in the forest from evil men threatening their parents, Jack and Emily, are the same. The wolf cub, Diss, who Charli rescues from nasty poachers who killed the rest of his litter, is still the same. The federal agent who betrays them is still the same. However, to make it a Quarry Hall story, I had to insert at least one of the daughters of Quarry Hall, and give her a really good reason to go to Dr. Carson's hidden research lab in the forest. And then more good reasons to get involved in Charli's problems, and put herself in danger when things start getting tense.

This is called motivation -- and it isn't just for theater students!

Those who know the Quarry Hall series know that Joan, the main character, has great motivation to go to Dr. Carson, who is doing experiments with plants, trying to recreate medicinal plants that have been lost thanks to depredations in the Rainforest. I'll leave it at that.

I'm very pleased with the first draft. It won't take much revising and polishing to make it ready to turn in to my publisher -- thank goodness, because I have a due date of January 1! By the time you're reading this, I'll be doing a third revision, or maybe even polishing. There are some consistency issues to fix, and a few logic holes to plug ... but thank goodness they're small. I was still discovering things about the characters and the story as I was writing -- which is what always makes writing fun.

Check out Desert Breeze Publishing in May of 2015, when CHARLI is due to be released. I promise you'll be pleased with what I ended up with, changing this screenplay into a novel.

Like I've said before, writers never throw out anything.