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 pro