Adapting a Book Into a Screenplay

It's A Cliche, But I'll Say It Anyway: Show, Don't tell

Adapting a book into a screenplay isn’t just about trimming scenes and formatting dialogue. It’s about transformation. It requires you to shift your thinking from storytelling to story-showing, because what works on the page doesn’t always translate to the screen. A novel can live in a character’s thoughts, offer lengthy backstory, and dive deep into multiple character arcs across hundreds of pages. A screenplay? It has about 110 pages to show theme, emotion, conflict, and character evolution—visually, concisely, and with momentum.

In this article, we’ll explore a few core strategies to make that mental and creative shift. Whether you’re adapting your own novel or working with someone else’s material, the key is learning how to distill the soul of the book into a cinematic engine. We’ll talk about how to identify the central theme, how to reshape the story’s structure without losing its meaning, and how to treat every major character as if they were the lead in their own movie. It’s not about what you cut—it’s about what you focus on.

Let’s Start From The Top

Consider the idea of “the movie version of the story”. This seems pretty basic and obvious, but really think about the nature of that idea. It means that a book is usually much much bigger in scope and scale than a movie, or a TV series…though a TV series can more often than not depict all of the elements of the book if necessary, but…