The Difference Between a Screenplay and a Book

For years I worked on a screenplay about a baseball game between enemy soldiers in the Civil War.  I was never able to get it made, so now I’m turning it into a book.  As I do so, I have to be careful because one cannot simply transfer the actions and dialogue over.  You have to rework it into its new art form.

Movies and books have basic elements that separate them.  I didn’t used to recognize this, as I felt that a story was a story, and should be transferable as is between styles.  However, as I read and watched more, I realized that certain elements simply work better in one style than another.  A movie is experienced viscerally, the viewer gaining a lot of information visually, as well as every other sense.  I used to think this made movies superior to books until I realized that the equivalent in books is in their ability to let the reader create their own experiences in their mind.  In a movie, you have only the filmmaker’s vision, but in a book, you have the vision of each reader.  Thus, in a book, the writer needs to be aware of that and give the reader room to envision it.  Don’t direct too much; give them the space to envision their own interpretations.

Something else I used to think was superior about movies was that they can be more readily experienced by a group, or enjoyed alone.  Books are pretty much all experienced alone.  However, as John Green beautifully put it in his Carnegie Hall appearance, a book is a shared experience between the author and the reader as if both had fallen in a hole together and they live the journey together.  While this may seem simply poetic, I think the point is that it can be more personal than movies.  And so, when writing a book, one needs to dive deeper into the mind and soul than is possible in a movie.

This reveals the strengths of both.  In film, emotion is your greatest asset.  Once can say more with a simple look on the face than in a thousand words.  However, once that image is burned onto the film, no other image can be placed there; which is where the power of a book comes in.  In a book, the reader can see something new every time, and so when the author provides enough detail to be sifted through, yet enough room for the reader to fill in the spaces, the reader can have a different experience ever time.

Speaking of details, another strength that books can have is to go into other aspects of a story that would seem too distracting in a movie.  You can say in a couple sentences that an entire political movement was rising in another part of the world, and explain how it may be impacting the area where the characters are living.  In a movie, it would feel distracting to the audience to suddenly jump to another part of the world and go through a multitude of characters just to show that something big was happening there that had a minor impact on the main storyline.  Also in books, you can put an appendix at the end which goes into detail that some readers will want to read, and those who don’t care don’t have to go through it.  In a movie, everyone would be forced to sit through something that only a small amount of the audience is interested in.  A movie’s strength is in visualizing these places that are sometimes hard for many people to comprehend.

To me, the easiest way to bear in mind the difference between books and movies is to consider books to be full novels and movies to be short stories.  No matter how long the movie seems, it has the basic structure of a short story.  You get in, explain quickly who the main characters are using caricature tools as a shortcut for the audience in understanding their personalities.  You provide the setting through an establishing shot, which is the equivalent of a quick explanation of a setting type, and you jump into the problem and how the lead character deals with it.  In a novel, you’re going to go more into detail about character backgrounds, why they are where they are and who they’ve become.  You’ll put more detail into the settings, sometimes giving its history and what sort of people live there.  As the characters take their journey through the book, you’ll explain the impacts they have on the settings through which they travel.  And the ending won’t always be wrapped up so neatly.  Often the climax is less built up into a single moment, but is rather spread out over a series of events that conclude the story.

I consider the greatest adaptation from book to film to be Lord of the Rings.  I think I’ll make another blog about that sometime as this comparison will be very long, and I’ve filled up enough space as it is.