The Process of Adaptation, or: The Writer's Dilemma

When I began adapting Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken into its as yet untitled screenplay sibling, I thought that it would be a somewhat easy project because its source is a short story with a small cast of main and supporting characters and only a few settings – the narrator’s college campus office, his apartment, a cemetery in Miami-Dade County, and the high school he had attended back in the early 1980s.

Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken (or, as it was originally titled, Reunion) also has a very simple structure – it’s an extended flashback to the narrator’s final day as a high school senior in June of 1983, with a “present day” (1998) frame which serves to set up the main story and give it what I hoped at the time would be a poignant epilogue.

However, because I have learned – from both watching movie adaptations of novels such as The Hunt for Red October and reading how-to books along the lines of Sy Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting - that adapting a prose story to a movie script is essentially like writing a new screenplay from scratch, I have gotten seriously stuck in the decision-making process about how the movie version will differ from its point of inspiration and how “true” some of characters and situations will be to the original vision I had when I wrote the short story back in 1998.

Part of the difficulty in going farther along on my script – I have only two thirds of a sequence written in my Movie Magic Screenwriter 6.0 file – is that now that I am aware that I do not have to be a “slave” to the source in my adaptation, I’m not sure what kind of story I want to tell once I do finish the “chorus room” sequence which serves as the climax of Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken.

In my original concept for the screenplay, I was going to stick to the plot of the short story as much as possible. I would, of course, have to shift my storytelling focus from internal reflection on the part of the narrator to a more dynamic and visual experience that would capture the essence of the characters’ experiences in high school, especially those that lead up to the ending I originally conceived.

However, adaptation doesn’t merely involve paring down a piece of literature – with all its adjectives, internal monologues and thoughts, settings, characters and situations – into the “simple” elements of the screenplay format. It requires a totally different mental approach.

As Field writes in Chapter 14 of Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting:

Adapting a book into a screenplay means to change one (a book) into the other (a screenplay), not superimpose one onto the other. Not a filmed novel or a filmed stage play. They are two different forms. An apple and an orange.

When you adapt a novel, play, article, or even a song into a screenplay, you are changing one form into another. You are writing a screenplay based on other material.

In essence, however, you are still writing an original screenplay. And you must approach it the same way.

Field spends a few paragraphs explaining the differences between, for instance, a novel and a screenplay, especially focusing on how a novel can take you into what he labels the characters’ internal’ mindscape by describing thoughts, observations, feelings and emotional needs, whereas a “screenplay deals with externals, with details – the ticking of a clock, a child playing on a street, a car turning the corner. A screenplay is a story told with pictures, placed within the context of dramatic structure.”

Of course, I knew before I even started adapting the sequence set in the music department of South Miami High that I would make changes in the script. Some of the dialogue I wrote in 1998 sounds all right in the prose version but doesn’t quite ring true when I think of how high school students talked in the 1980s, so I have tweaked some of the dialogue in the screenplay so that it sounds more true-to-life.

What has proven to be more of a challenge, however, is that when I make some time to think about the screenplay and visualize the finished movie version, I am suddenly faced with a plethora of choices.

For instance, do I want to keep the story’s frame-and-flashback structure intact, or do I change the narrative so it’s more linear by starting the screenplay in the fall of 1980 (the narrator’s sophomore year) and telling the story arc in episodic form? Do I delve more into why Jim and Martina (or Marty) cross paths in school but never get together, or do I focus more on Jim’s friendship with Mark (his best pal since elementary)?

(One recurring idea that I do have is for the main title: As the credits roll, we hear the “Call to Colors” bugle call that is played every morning at the start of a school day, then, over a montage of black and white photos which trace the Class of 1983’s progress from kindergarten in the early 1970s till 10th grade in 1980, the voices of kids reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, with the voices changing subtly as the kids age.)

So many choices can be liberating and challenging, yes. But I have always had trouble when faced with daunting challenges, especially when it comes to writing.