Screenplay to Novel: Real Money from Used Pages

Screenplay to Novel:

Real Money from Used Pages

by Skip Press

© 2019 by Skip Press

All Rights Reserved

To all the writers I've helped

and who have helped me,

and to my children,

Haley Alexander Press

and Holly Olivia Press

Introduction

PRIOR TO THE WRITERS Guild of America strike of 2007-2008 which shut down Hollywood, I told hundreds of writers on my Skip's Hollywood Hangout Yahoo discussion group that the strike was happening and that they should turn their used paper into a novel they could sell. I got so many requests for a course on how to do that, I created one and people signed up.

Since I'd done things like have students get three-book deals from what they learned in another course I taught online, and since I'd had several of my own novels published, I knew how screenplays could often be excellent outlines for novels.

It must have been a decent course, because students and clients turned their screenplays into novels that were published.

One of my students finally made that transition in 2018 and had a bestseller in Russia. I’d come across her via the Russian translation of my Complete Idiots Guide to Screenwriting, which has been selling in Russian shops since the mid-1990s.

Not that many people were self-publishing in 2008. I taught people to write novels they would be paid for – whether a publisher was paying them, or if they self-published.

For some, a published novel is a lifelong dream, and it’s easier to accomplish in this day of self-publishing via Amazon and other venues. That doesn’t mean you can’t get a traditional publisher, particularly after your self-published sells well.

As I write this, there’s another WGA fight, this time vs. agents, that’s gone on a year. Once again, I think why let a screenplay sit around when it could be a novel making money?

Here's a brief description of what this book covers, step by step, in case you’re skeptical. Most writers are, particularly if you’ve received as many rejections as I have over the years.

(1) Assaying Your Golden Words - Determine the essence and value of what you wanted to accomplish when you completed your script, and how that can be reconfigured into a saleable novel.

(2) Seeing What Sold - Compare your story to novels that have been acquired by Hollywood and/or adapted for the screen and figure out what you need to do to make your story work for print.

(3) Scenes into Sales - How to recraft your story while outlining your novel so that it works better for the screen, allowing you to rewrite a better screenplay later if you choose to do so.

(4) Your Place in the Store - A breakdown of novel genres and how various types of novels are treated by booksellers, so that you can determine the type of novel to create from your screen story.

(5) People Pay for a Great Voice - How to determine what you need to know about getting your unique voice on the page. Often enough, writers make major breakthroughs when writing something that means a lot to them, all other considerations aside. Those writers are usually people who know their craft well, but knowledge of and passion for a project can work wonders.

(6) Selling with Your Words - Learn how to shape a story so that it taps into the public consciousness in a way that will give editors what they know the public will want.

(7) Good Presentation Sells Tickets and Books - Despite what some instructors tell you, the most successful novels generally have a strong resemblance to successful movies. The key with a novel is in the presentation. And no matter how you feel about franchise movies and sequels, with a novel series you can make big bucks.

(8) Novel Bonuses - How to use the things you usually can't do in a screenplay (like a character's thoughts) to more effectively tell your story in a novel. Plus, there are differences in dialogue and visuality in novels and screenplays.

(9) Finding the Road to the Bank - A breakdown of resources and techniques that will help you get your manuscript in front of people who can get it published, from Web venues and online organizations to real world workshops and conferences.

(10) Do It Yourself for a Larger Percentage - Ways to get published no matter what, and (a) make a profit, (b) get your novel picked up by a publisher, (c) get public recognition as an author, and (d) get respect from Hollywood that you might not have previously received as an aspiring screenwriter.

I taught my screenplay to novel course via email and answered every student’s questions and feedback personally. I would work with the writer to shape the story before writing the novel began. That might include figuring out which script to adapt, if the writer had more than one to choose from.

I discovered that I was often sharing tips about writing, not just about writing a novel, that the writer might not have previously known. I’d helped novelists for over a decade, from people who had gotten their first deal after my help, to hugely successful authors who needed help with Hollywood. I’d been recognized by famous publishing people like Sol Stein, who mentioned me in his excellent book, How To Grow A Novel.

As the writer's strike of 2008 proved, sometimes Hollywood shuts down and scripts are relatively useless. I never believed in letting used paper sit around unsold. Whether Hollywood's doing business or not, if you have a screenplay you love but have been frustrated in being unable to sell it, why not adapt it to a novel? If you sell that, you'll have the possibility of (a) making money on the novel sale, (b) making money selling literary rights to Hollywood, and (c) possibly selling the screenplay once you have more respect as a published novelist.

I hate to see people write things that don't sell when they’re working with a good story. You might make that story greater by making it a novel.

I can’t teach talent, but I can teach craft, and craft will nurture talent. I’m happy to share what I know about the novel craft with you. Maybe by applying that information, you’ll gain more writing satisfaction, and make a lot more money.

So ready, set, read – then write!

SKIP PRESS

Burbank, California

September, 2019

Chapter One: Basic Differences

NO MAN BUT A BLOCKHEAD ever wrote except for money.

Samuel Johnson, April 5, 1776

I’M SURE YOU KNOW THAT a lot more book (non-fiction) and novel (fiction) manuscripts get published than screenplays get made, even in this golden age of TV writing that encompasses all the online venues like Amazon Prime. That’s a big reason it pains me to see people struggle to get a screenplay noticed, much less optioned, sold, or filmed. Compared to making a movie from your own screenplay, self-publishing your novel is a summer breeze.

I’m not assuming you’ll self-publish. My aim is to help you turn out a novel that a good publisher will buy, if you want that.

Literally for decades, I’ve helped people all over the world break into Hollywood. That began when the first edition of my Writer’s Guide to Hollywood books came out. The Hollywood industry remains a field of dreams for aspiring scriptwriters everywhere, all hoping for a million-dollar screenplay sale.

The truth is, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than selling a script, unless you’ve already worked in the business. Most of the hopefuls who contact me, however, won’t get a screenplay optioned, and won’t find an agent (or manager) for a long time.

So, I remind them of Samuel Johnson’s statement. He was an English writer described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history. Most distinguished, and he said write for money.  

To write for money, you have to strip away certain pretensions and prejudices. You have to get to the soul of the matter. And with regard to novels, the ones that last have a fluid spirit. It’s like Mark Twain said: My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

A good novel, like a great movie, is a bit of a soul’s journey in the classic sense. Unfortunately, a lot of people these days think they can write movies because screenwriting software makes formatting seem automatic. This fosters an anyone can do it attitude, which quickly disappears after enough rejections.

Getting stuck in the it’s simple conceit, you can get caught in a bit of a writer’s hell. In the past, I’ve called this not getting past the first act of your own career.

Here’s what I mean. I’ll assume you’ve gone about studying screenwriting wisely, that you’ve read Poetics by Aristotle, are familiar with the structure outlined in Syd Field’s Screenplay, know something about Robert McKee’s methods, and have delved into the serious story analysis in Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. Maybe you’ve at least thumbed through Chris Vogler’s Hollywood movie version of the Campbell matrix in The Writer’s Journey. Or you’ve read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, or you studied one or several of the many online video Master Classes from successful screenwriters like Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman. There’s a lot of instruction out there.  

Have you done that but still can’t get your script sold?

Well, I’ve sold numerous scripts. And I’ve sold novels and gotten them published, too, before I studied any of the people mentioned above. So, what did I learn that you haven’t?

Mainly, I learned how to get out of my own first act. Let’s take the normal structure of a Hollywood movie and examine the protagonist’s actions in a screenplay, and I’ll explain.

Let’s say I’m fairly certain I have an idea good enough for a script or a novel. I have a degree of certainty based on my experience of having people buy what I came up with. Still, once my writing is on the page, I have to leave the somewhat comfortable world of sitting around thinking up ideas and enter the new world of taking my pages to the marketplace.

Therefore, my big opening or inciting incident has to establish what the movie is about and get people hooked on the story. In script terms, there’s the all-important first ten pages. In a novel, that might be the first chapter. If people don’t keep turning the pages to the next chapter, you’re sunk.

Many successful novels these days have chapters that are the equivalent of a movie scene or two. James Patterson, whose novels have been turned into movies, has short chapters as a general rule. His novels made over $80 million in one year alone.

Next on my story checklist is what I call the Shaping Force. It arrives in the middle of the first act in the good movies, with usually a hint or two of it before it openly appears. It is then revisited at various points of the film, helping keep the spine of the story aligned. The Shaping Force is something I discovered on my own. It doesn’t have to be a mentor like Obi–wan Kenobi in Star Wars. It can be a villain, like Kylo Ren in Star Wars. It can be what legendary director Alfred Hitchcock called a Macguffin – that thing everyone wants – like The Maltese Falcon in the classic movie of the same name. Or it can be a concept that the movie is about, like Time in Cast Away.

The Shaping Force establishes the theme. To illustrate, let’s take The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has been made into a movie repeatedly, though probably never done just right.

What’s Huckleberry Finn about?

Freedom from oppression, a concept that speaks to the soul of America. Small wonder that Huckleberry Finn has been described as the greatest American novel of all time.

It takes six chapters for the narrator hero, Huck, to light out for the territory up the Mississippi and escape the oppression of his crazy father. Chapter 7 begins with the title I Fool Pap and Get Away. The adventures that follow are in a new world out from under the domination of a crazy parent.

The novel was written a long time ago, but the story structure I teach works with it. That’s because my Shaping Force is flexible. It doesn’t lock you into a rigid Campbellian structure, requiring a mentor figure in every story. It doesn’t confine you to a three–act Aristotelian matrix. It does, however, firmly establish the soul of the tale. It is the concept that makes the movie worth making, the novel worth reading, and the life worth living.

What is it about you and your writing life? Do you know the soul of what you, as a writer, are all about? Do you even know what it is about your story that needs to be shared with the world, what it will provide for people once published?

It doesn’t have to be a world-changing idea. It could simply be something that fits within an established genre. Hollywood might not currently be in the mood for a detective story, but they’re bought and published all the time in New York and elsewhere.

Still, your story’s Shaping Force had better appeal to as many people as possible. That gets down to basic human wants and needs, like freedom from oppression, which works in many stories, like The Devil Wears Prada, both a hit novel and movie.

I’ve written in the past that a screenplay that sells to Hollywood needs to have a concept that is simple, easily stated, and hopefully reflected so well in the title that any moviegoer easily gets it, as in Black Panther. That movie came from a comic book, but a fascinating story well told translates across media.

If you have these elements in your script and execute the writing well, you have generated the Shaping Force, which will allow you to get noticed in Hollywood. When your screenplay is taken on by someone in Hollywood that people will listen to, you’ve reached the end of the first act in Hollywood for selling that script.

The second act is the selling of the script, and the third act is getting paid for it and hopefully seeing the movie get made.

The same concepts apply in writing a novel. The first acts of good Hollywood movies end with a transforming event that thrusts the protagonist into some kind of new world, even if the remainder of the action takes place within the same geography where the protagonist began. The action with the endangered family in A Quiet Place mostly takes place on their farm. Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour never leaves England, but his world surely does undergo a major transformation.

Here’s how new world transformation might work with regard to you writing novels. A novel can help you discover what you’re all about as a writer, but it might not