by Byron Turner
A day ago
Adapting Source Material for Film and TV: A Working Writer's Decision Guide
Most adaptation guides on the open web read like checklists. Secure the rights. Read screenwriting books. Outline your three acts. Pitch. The work of adapting source material for film and TV happens long before any of that, in the diagnostic decisions a writer makes before they ever open a beat sheet.
Working television writers develop a sixth sense for these decisions because they have to. A pile of source material lands on the desk, and the first job is to figure it out. Will the engine hold? Is this a feature or a series? Where is the heart? What is my take? What can I cut without breaking it? Who is going to buy it?
What's below is that sequence, in the order working writers run it. Each section names a question, gives you the working logic, and shows it at work in a contemporary adaptation that solved the decision well. Six questions in, you'll have something most writers approaching adaptation never develop on their own: a framework for evaluating any piece of source material before you commit a single page.
Should This Story Be Adapted at All?
The first question never feels like a question because most writers come to adaptation already in love with the source material. They've finished a novel they couldn't put down, or rediscovered a public-domain title, or bought the rights to a memoir they think will move people. Love is the reason they're at the desk. Adaptability is the first question every writer adapting source material for film and TV has to answer, and love often makes it harder.
Adaptability has nothing to do with prose quality, sentence-level beauty, or whether the source material moves you. Plenty of beautifully written novels make terrible films. Adaptability is about whether the underlying story engine, the thing that drives the source forward, can survive the transposition to a visual medium where the audience watches characters do things to and for each other.
Diana Gabaldon's Outlander novels have an engine designed for the screen. The drive comes from scene-level conflict: a 20th-century woman caught between two timelines, two husbands, and a regular crank of capture-and-escape stakes. The Starz adaptation didn't have to invent action. It had to organize it. Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch runs on the opposite engine. Theo Decker's drift through guilt and grief is a consciousness, not a sequence of events. The 2019 film tried to externalize that consciousness and ended up with a literal, plot-shaped object that lost the very thing the novel was about.
When a working writer assesses source material, the question is where the story lives. In voice, sentence rhythm, and interior weather? Or in scene, action, relationship, and visible decision? The answer doesn't kill any project, but it tells you what the adaptation is going to cost. If the story lives in interiority, you're going to invent a visual analogue for that interior, and that invention is the work.
Is This a Feature, a Limited Series, or an Ongoing Show?
Once you've established the source can be adapted, the next question is what shape the adaptation wants. Most failed adaptations fail because they've been forced into the wrong container. A novel that should have been a limited series gets compressed into a 110-minute feature. A short story that should have been a feature gets stretched into eight episodes of a streaming show.
Format is a structural decision, dictated by the scope and shape of the source. Studios and producers will weigh in on commercial viability, but the writer's job is to recognize the natural shape of the material first.
Bounded narratives with a fixed cast and a contained crisis tend to want limited series. Big Little Lies is the textbook case: Liane Moriarty's novel has a finite mystery, a finite ensemble, and a finite arc, and HBO's adaptation kept it that way for one season because that was what the book was. (The second season, which the novel never anticipated, struggled because the format had been expanded past where the source could go.)
Expandable worlds with regimes, institutions, or systems that can be examined from multiple angles want ongoing shows. The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu was always going to outrun Margaret Atwood's novel because Gilead is an entire society and a novel can only show you so much of it. The adaptation found new angles by following different characters, regions, and resistance lines that the original book gestured toward but didn't enter.
Single emotional arcs, condensed in time, want features. Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter (2021) adapted Elena Ferrante's novella as a feature because that's what the source's psychology supports: a woman alone on a beach, her present unraveling under the weight of her past, with one short stretch of narrative time. A series would have diluted the pressure.
Get the format right and the rest of the work has structural integrity to climb. Get it wrong and every later decision compounds the original mistake.
Where Is the Heart of Your Adaptation?
The third decision is where the writing begins: identifying the heart of your adaptation. The heart is the portable narrative core, the part of the source that has to survive the move regardless of what you cut. Find it and you have a compass for every cut, every consolidation, every invention. Miss it and you'll write something that's faithful to the plot of the original and unfaithful to the thing that made it matter.
Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation (2002) is the most radical example because Kaufman violated nearly every plot point in Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and somehow produced an adaptation that's more faithful to the book than a literal version could have been. The heart of The Orchid Thief lives in Susan Orlean's longing for an obsession of her own, set against an orchid heist that gives her something to chase. Kaufman recognized the longing as the engine and built the film's structure around it, mirroring it with a screenwriter's longing for an obsession of his own. The two book-ends rhymed.
Eric Roth's adaptation of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon worked the same diagnostic muscle. Grann's book is a journalistic procedural anchored in Tom White's FBI investigation. Roth and Scorsese moved the heart of the film to Ernest Burkhart and his marriage to Mollie Kyle, because the moral weight of the story sat there, in a love that participated in genocide. The book's investigative frame became a coda. The heart became the engine.
The exercise Dan teaches in his weekend intensive is simple and ruthless: write a single paragraph stating what the source material is at heart, before you open a beat sheet. Not the plot summary. Not the elevator pitch. The thing under those things. Until you can write that paragraph, you're guessing at structure.
Want a working writer's read on the source material you're considering adapting? Dan Robert's weekend intensive on May 16-17, 2026 walks the same diagnostic moves on real student material.
Explore the Weekend IntensiveWhat's Your "Take" on This Material?
A take is the working writer's vocabulary for the interpretive lens you bring to source material that nobody else would. It's the single most asked-about and least discussed asset in the development process, because it's also the hardest to define. Producers want to know your take in the first ten minutes of a meeting. They will pass on a writer who knows the source backward and forward but has no take of their own.
Greta Gerwig's Little Women (2019) is a master class in the move. Louisa May Alcott's novel has been adapted for the screen many times, and the standard version walks chronologically from Jo's girlhood toward her marriage and the death of Beth. Gerwig's take cracked the timeline. She started with adult Jo selling her stories to Mr. Dashwood and used that frame to interrogate every choice the younger Jo had made about love, money, and authorship. The novel's themes had always been there. Gerwig's take pulled them up to the surface and gave them a structural home.
Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog (2021) did something similar to Thomas Savage's 1967 novel. Savage wrote a Western told largely from Phil Burbank's masculine, brutalizing perspective. Campion's take re-centered the watching: how Rose sees, how Peter sees, how the camera sees the men who think nobody sees them. Same source. Different weight on the prism. A Western became a study of who is looking at whom, and how that looking shifts power.
A take is what you bring that the source can't bring on its own. It's the reason a producer hires you and not the next writer. Until you have one, you're an editor of the source material. Once you have one, you're an author of the adaptation.
How Do You Break the Story for the Screen?
By this point, you've established that the source is adaptable, identified its proper format, located its heart, and developed your take. Only now does the practical work of breaking the story begin. Beats. Scenes. Acts. The structural skeleton of what the script is going to be.
Breaking the story means dismantling the source down to its narrative units, then reassembling those units in the order and shape your chosen format demands. A novel that runs 400 pages might break down to eighty story beats; a feature script can hold maybe fifty. So twenty or thirty of those beats have to be combined, demoted, dropped, or absorbed into a different scene's subtext. A limited series can hold more, but the breaking has to account for episodic shape and ending each hour on a question that pulls a viewer to the next.
"When I teach writing action lines, I tell people to jot them down as if they're explaining what's happening to their best friend who's in a hurry. We're trying to tap into this totally freed up, urgent, almost audacious way of showing up on the page."
– Dan Robert
The hardest mechanical question in adaptation is interiority. Novels can sit inside a character's consciousness for pages at a time. Films and television, with rare exceptions, cannot. Voice-over works in Goodfellas because the voice itself is dramatic. Voice-over fails in most adaptations because writers reach for it as a shortcut to render thought. The actual move is to find a visual analogue. Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers (2023) adapted Taichi Yamada's novel about a man visiting his dead parents by simply letting the dead parents appear in the present, on screen, in the kitchen. The book's metaphysical haunting became the film's literal premise. The interiority got a body.
Inventions are part of this work and shouldn't be apologized for. Cutting a beloved subplot is part of this work and shouldn't be apologized for either. The discipline you're developing is the discipline of choosing in service of your take, with your take as the unifying logic for every cut and every addition.
Two days. Two three-hour sessions on Zoom. A working TV writer with credits on The Baby-Sitters Club, Nine Perfect Strangers, and Grey's Anatomy walking through the diagnostic moves above with your source material in the room.
Reserve Your Spot ($225)How Do You Sell an Adaptation?
The last decision is the one most craft posts skip: how the adaptation gets out of your hands and into the marketplace. Adapting source material for film and TV is a working profession before it's an art, and the assets you build to sell are part of the craft, not adjacent to it.
The practical kit, in 2026, looks like this. You'll need a written take, usually one to two pages, that names the source, your interpretive frame, the format you're proposing, and the tonal references. You'll need an opening sequence or pilot pages, ten to fifteen pages strong enough to communicate voice. If it's a series, you'll need a series document outlining the season-one arc and the show's renewable engine. If it's a feature, you'll need a longer treatment or a complete script. Producers in adaptation meetings look at all of these at once, not because they're checking boxes but because each document tells them something different about whether you can deliver the show or film you're pitching.
The marketplace in 2026 is contracting and selective. Streamers are buying fewer titles. Studios are looking harder for IP that comes pre-packaged with a strong take and a writer who can articulate it in a single meeting. Authors increasingly arrive with their own adaptation already in development, partly because they realized waiting for someone else to option their work was a slow road, and partly because producers have started preferring authors who do the upfront thinking.
The package serves both kinds of writer: authors with their own manuscripts, and screenwriters mining public-domain or optioned material. It's what lets the work survive a meeting after you leave the room. A great take in a writer's head is a thought experiment. A great take in a buyer's hand is a project.
The Six Decisions, Run Together
Should this be adapted? What format does it want? Where is the heart? What's my take? How do I break the story? How do I sell it? Working writers run that sequence on instinct now, but instinct came from doing it deliberately, with a real piece of source material, with feedback from someone who has done it before in the rooms where the work gets made. That's the function the workshop serves. That's also why working writers keep teaching: the framework is portable, but the muscle has to be built.
The May 16-17 weekend intensive with Dan Robert is two three-hour Zoom sessions on Saturday and Sunday, sized for writers who already have a piece of source material in mind and want to apply this exact decision sequence to it under a working TV writer's guidance. Whether the source is your own novel, a public-domain title, a historical figure, or something stranger, the diagnostic moves are the same, and the room makes the work better.
The Art of Adapting Source Material for Film and TV Projects with Dan Robert. Saturday and Sunday, May 16-17, 2026. Two 3-hour sessions on Zoom, 2:00–5:00 PM ET. $225.
Enroll NowFor writers who want sustained one-on-one development on an adaptation project, Dan also offers a multi-week 1-on-1 mentorship structured around finishing or fixing original or adapted film and TV projects. Browse our full slate of upcoming screenwriting and TV classes to see what else is on the calendar.
About WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, New York Times bestsellers, and Emmy-winning television writers, with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
