Turning Your Novel Into A Screenplay

I recently got this question from Abba A. Onyeani who’s the owner of www.theblackurbantimes.com: “Currently we have a title [novel] out called , The Broederbond Conspiracy. It’s about a Black James Bond character. We’d like to get the book made into a screenplay, but I don’t know the initial steps to take to do that. Any advice?”

Since you’ve already published the book you have a step up on most other people peddling ideas to Hollywood.  So that’s good.  What you do next really depends on what you want to do and what you have the resources to do.

You can either shop the book around to producers (or agents, directors, and actors), you can hire a screenwriter to turn it into a screenplay, or you can try and write the screenplay yourself.

Unless you really want to pursue screenwriting as a fulltime occupation, I recommend NOT trying to write the screenplay yourself.  I assume since you wrote the novel first novel writing is your true passion and probably what you’re best at, not screenwriting.

Further, hiring a screenwriter at this time is also probably not such a good idea. Unless you can pay WGA wages and hire a reputable writer there’s a good chance you’re going to end up with a poorly written screenplay.  Some of the same things that I talked about in my post ‘How to hire a screenwriter to write your life story or great movie idea’
apply here so you might want to read that post.

A good book with a poorly written screenplay isn’t going to do you a lot of good when trying to shop your story around.  Nobody will read the novel if there’s a screenplay already written, so if you have it turned into a screenplay make sure it’s good.

If you’ve had even a little bit of success with the book I think you’ve got to try and use that heat as your spring board to getting a producer to read your material.  I’ve worked for agents and production companies and they quite often will read a book with an eye towards turning it into a movie.  Producers love to adapt material from other sources.  There’s an assumption that since it’s from another medium it is already a proven commodity and probably better than a lot of scripts that are floating around.  There’s some truth to this as getting your book published (as I’m sure you know) takes quite a bit of effort so a vetting process has already occurred.

So you’ve got to dig in and try and contact producers with a query letter or by cold calling them.

I wrote this post about how to find and contact producers:

http://www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/how-to-sell-your-screenplay/getting-your-screenplay-to-producers-and-production-companies/

I wrote this post about writing a query letter.

http://www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/how-to-sell-your-screenplay/how-to-write-a-professional-query-letter-for-your-screenplay/

Since you have a novel already written I would recommend writing a concise 1 page synopsis/teaser for your story and also a 4-5 page treatment of the story.  Include the synopsis in your query letter but be sure to mention the 5 page treatment.  I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks to pitching a novel is that the producer (or their reader) will have to spend extra time reading a novel so if you can write a real concise 5 page treatment they might be more willing to read that then committing to reading an entire novel.  And then if they like the treatment they will request the full novel – but by that time they should be pretty serious about it because they’ve already gotten an idea of the story and your writing style.

Also, if you can get any sort of attachments to your project that will most definitely help.  If you have any friends who know any famous actors or directors try and approach them with the material and get them committed to the project.

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