Flickr photo c haley327.

I have a book about the opposite methodology – turning a novel into a script. But I’m not sure a roadmap exists for this what – this expansion, I guess, is what it would be.

I’m in the process now, with a script I wrote a few years ago called “Kept.” The movie I envisioned is a steamy potboiler encompassing the wide diversity of the folks who live out in the Coachella Valley (the Palm Springs, CA area).

I want to elevate the tenor of all this a bit for the novel, so I have to make some small changes which I hope will have a profound effect on the feeling the finished product gives the reader.

Here are some of the things I know I must do, in no particular order. If you’re embarking on a script-to-novel conversion, as many screenwriters seem to be doing these days, hopefully this is helpful:

• Go back to your character bios and make them real. I always have written biographies for my main (and often secondary, as well) characters, using Lajos Egri’s “The Art of Dramatic Writing” as a guide (he furnishes an outline to follow). For a novel, it’s imperative that you can live and breathe your characters. In a screenplay, I know I’ve often cheated, using archetypes and gulp, cliches.
• Go Back to Your Themes. Before writing a script (or any fictional thing, really) I list out my themes, the overarching ideas I want to have come through the work. The source I use to prod myself is an old copy of Eric Heath’s “Story Plotting Simplified,” which lists and explains the 36 Basic Plots. For “Kept,” Greed, Lust and Nihilism are essential themes. Your themes for a novel will be more internal than those you chose for your screenplay.

• Outline. Detail or Not, it’s your choice. I know novel writers who just sit down at the typewriter or computer or legal pad and just start writing, letting their muse take them where it will. I am not one of those writers! Even at a minimal level, I’ve divided ideas and plot points and snippets into chapters, loosely trying to figure out where they’d go in a narrative. With the “Kept” script, I’ve also broken it down from scenes into likely chapters with an idea of how many words the novel will have and how many chapters it will be. I think of it as a rough guide that’s likely changeable, but it really helps me if I have some sense of where I’m “writing to.” I do better with maps.

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• Research. It just makes sense that when writing something that’s going to be in much greater depth than in its previous iteration, you have to have much more knowledge, or should I say, the appropriate amount of knowledge. For me, for “Kept,” this includes more facility in writing truthfully about the Native American community and culture, among a few other things.
• Expand Sublots. There’s a lot more room in the novel, of course, than in those 120 screenplay pages with all that white space! This is one of the things I’m looking forward to, as I had a number of minor characters I found interesting that I couldn’t devote much time to in the script. I expect that doing this will add to theme and elevate the project up a few notches.
• Make it Richer: More depth, more detail. Here’s a perfect line of description from Robert Towne’s “Chinatown” script:

Walking toward the main house. A classic Monterey. A horse led on a halter by another ranch hand slows down and defecates in the center of the path they are taking. Gittes doesn’t notice.

To me, this gives one everything they need to know to do their job on a movie: director, location scout, animal wrangler, props, etc. It gives me a sense that there’s some kind of menace (by the very fact of the out-of-bounds horse) and that there’s something on Gittes’ mind.

In a novel, we’d probably get more of a description of the house itself, more of a sense of place. How does the path smell? Earthy, dusty, did it just rain or has it been months (it’s California). Does it smell like shit? What’s the ranch hand like, does he give Gittes a look, what’s his name, what color is the damn horse and how big is it, etc. You get my drift. Things are much more spelled out.

• Make what happens actually plausible. Mostly referring to action sequences here. Your script may or may not have anything like this. But mine did, from car chases to mountain tram accidents to methods of detaining someone or knocking someone unconscious (to get them conveniently offstage for a bit). Some things work in movies and some things (like, the same things) just don’t work in books. You have that nice suspension of disbelief in the cinema, probably because of the pacing, which just doesn’t work in a book, which can be re-read, stopped and picked up again, fact- checked, etc. If you have stunts in the script that you plan to keep in the book version, better make them something that can actually happen on planet Earth.
• Keep the best dialogue. Here’s one thing you can use almost verbatim, that is, if your story doesn’t change too much. Having the dialogue already done once helps tremendously, though I suspect there will ultimately be more of it and it will go in different directions. Having written dialogue for a character previously also brings them right back to me, as soon as I read it.
• You’ll need to decide the POV of the novel – told from first person, third person omniscient, third person limited, from several characters’ POVs, etc. Screenplays are always in the third person with an all-knowing author (although I guess some of them do have first person voiceovers – but that’s rare). There are also the movies with the same scene told from a different point of view (a recent example from the worlds of both literature and film, the inciting incident in “Atonement”). My first novel “Benediction” was told in first person; “The Forest Dark” is from three different characters’ POVs. I believe “Kept” will be what is called third person limited. With an opening and a closing chapter told in second person! For fun.
• Revise – or not – the three-act structure. I do think most people want a beginning, a middle and an end to their stories. It’s what they’re used to. At the same time, I think you have a lot more latitude with the reading community as opposed to the film-going community. You can really experiment here and take a lot of liberties with the novel structure, or, you can keep it somewhat conventional and follow the general three act structure of a script. If so, people might tell you they thought your book was cinematic, or would make a good movie. Then of course, you always knew that!

How does this sound to you? What other tips can you add to this process?