Turn Your Novel into a Screenplay, Course Coming Soon
“Your novel would make a great movie!”
Sign up to learn the steps to turn your novel into a screenplay. Course launching soon!
Do you think your novel would make a great movie? After all, it’s visual and active, and it has great characters. It could be just the thing Hollywood is looking for!
This 30-day course will show you just what it takes to turn your book into a great screenplay. We can’t guarantee a completed feature-length screenplay in 30 days, especially if you’ve never written one before. Your instructor isn’t quite that crazy!
But you will learn how to get ready to write one.
By the end of the course, you’ll:
- Understand the differences between regular prose and screenplay style.
- Learn how to turn a novel’s structure into a screenplay structure.
- Make the challenging but fun choices about what to keep, what to lose, and what to change.
- Know what it takes to do your novel justice.
Each week, you’ll watch a short lesson, explore some examples, and use the worksheets to actually start crafting your screenplay.
Time commitment? If you have an hour or two a week – four to ten hours over the month – you’ll be able to do the assignments and exercises with no problem. Of course, you can do as little or as much as you think you need, or want, to do.
But the course is designed to let you dip your toe into the crazy world of filmmaking… at least for a while. And if you find that you enjoy the genre, you may be able to do what Gerald Petrovich did with his novel To Live and Die in LA – write a best-selling novel and a successful screenplay!
The course covers:
Week 1: Make the Shift. Screenplays are a whole other genre, with its own rules and limitations and delights. You’ll shift some cognitive gears to think and write using a lot fewer words and a lot less dialogue to create the same reactions in your readers. You’ll also deconstruct the structure of your own novel to get ready to construct a screenplay from it.
Week 2: Create a New Spine. A screenplay is only around 100 pages these days. So there’s not a lot of room for subplots or secondary characters or flights of fancy. You’ll use the worksheets to identify the through-line, or spine, of your story and use it to re-build the action. You’ll also learn how to let your main character’s wants and needs guide you in that re-building and create a new outline.
Week 3: Make the Tough Choices. Here comes the “kill your darlings” part! You’ll make theStay, Go, Change decisions that are often more fun than you think they’ll be, and that will leave the heart of your story and characters intact.
Week 4: Put It On Paper. Screenwriting is a craft with its own peculiar format and rules. You’llput a scene of your new outline onto the page to get a feel for how it’s done. You’ll also get advice on where to go from here to learn more about screenwriting.
Click here to sign up when this course launches.
Your Instructor
Jackie Blain, Instructor
Jackie has more than 75 hours of produced television as a writer-producer on such series as Diagnosis Murder, VR.5, and Martial Law. She loves to teach, and has taught at The UCLA Writers Program, The Art Institute of Portland , and the Northwest Film Center, runs workshops and the Pitch Practice Room at the annual Willamette Writers Conference, and currently teaches screenwriting, composition, and film studies.
Her students have written and produced numerous award-winning films, and she served as script consultant and associate producer for the independent feature Not Dead Yet which won first place in the Baltimore Women’s Film Festival.
Her very first feature, which has been in and out of development forever, was an adaptation of a biography about Lottie Deno, female gambler and friend of Wyatt Earp.
Contact Jackie about how she can help you with your screenplay adaption.
