How do I adapt a novel into a screenplay?
- A 110-page screenplay holds roughly 25,000 to 30,000 words of a novel's story.
- Interior monologue has to become action, dialogue, or image.
- Most adaptations cut at least one full subplot and merge characters.
- Adapting your own novel requires rights you still hold, which is usually the case for indie authors.
- Option agreements, not sales, are how most adaptations begin.
Adapting a novel means deciding what the story is when two thirds of it is gone. Cut subplots, merge secondary characters, and turn interior monologue into visible behavior. Start from the spine, the single throughline that survives compression, and rebuild scenes around it rather than trimming the novel chapter by chapter.
Chapter i·Why it matters
Writers adapting their own work usually fail by loyalty. They preserve favorite scenes and lose the spine, ending in a script that plays as a highlights reel to anyone who has not read the book. The novel is source material, not a contract. The screenplay owes the audience a complete story in 110 pages.
Chapter ii·What to include
- The spine: one sentence naming whose story it is and what they want.
- A list of what must survive, capped at what the page count allows.
- Subplots cut entirely rather than compressed into fragments.
- Characters merged where two serve one function.
- Interiority converted into behavior, dialogue, or visual metaphor.
- Rights status confirmed, including any prior option or publisher clause.
Chapter iii·Example
A 94,000 word literary novel with three timelines became a 108-page script with one. The second timeline became a six-scene flashback thread and the third disappeared, taking its protagonist with it. The spine, a daughter identifying her mother's forgery, survived intact.
Chapter iv·Related questions
In WriteLoom
Everything this article talks about, in one project
WriteLoom keeps the novel and the adaptation notes in one project, so you can see exactly what the script kept and what it left behind.
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