The Art of Adaptation

I have to assess books for adaptation for work and bought two books on the subject to give me things to think about. One was this one, the other was 'How To Adapt Anything Into A Screenplay'.This is easily the more useful book, with a much more considered approach to adaptation and food for thought. The other book is anecdotal and quite prescriptive.

Historically, more than 75 percent Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning films have been adaptations of novels, short stories, plays, nonfiction books, and articles.Linda Seger sets the tone of THE ART OF ADAPTATION on the opening page: "In spite of what we may think, there is no such thing as an easy adaptation. We've probably all heard people say, `All you have to do is film the book,' Francis Ford Coppola tried that with the 1974 version of `The Great Gatsby,' and it failed. Others say, `This was immensely popular it's bound to be a blockbuster.' `Bonfire of the Vanities' was a best-seller, but the film was panned."With exceptional lucidity, the author explains the issues and solutions in adaptations from fact and fiction into film. The book includes two detailed examples of successful adaptations: E. M. Foster's novel "A Room with a View" and Andrew Lloyd Webber's play "The Phantom of the Opera." Other examples include "Gone With the Wind," "It's a Wonderful Life," "Deliverance," "Dances With Wolves," " Silence of the Lambs."This was the first Linda Seger screenwriting book I read. Impressed, I went on to study three more: "Creating Unforgettable Characters"; "Making a Good Script Great"; "Advanced Screenwriting." Each of them a five-star book.-- C J Singh

Loved it

I am the author of a novel (The Circumstantial Enemy) that I'd like to turn into a screenplay. I know nothing about writing scripts, so I'm reading how to do it. This is my seventh "how to" book on the art, and the only one so far that concentrates on this aspect. Linda does a wonderful job of keeping the reader's mind on structure and at the same time offering a guidelines on how to tear the novel apart and reconstruct it as a screenplay.

This book was purchased for a screenwriting class. The instructor uses it as one of our textbooks. Our assignments were from that book and others. I would recommend it to writers because sometimes we can take other people stories and rewrite them in other forms with additional information.