Book to Film Adaptation Zoom Seminar for Writers with Julia Spiro, Sunday, January 19th, 2025
Live Seminar Via Zoom Sunday, January 19th, 2025
Class will meet 3PM - 5PM EST
Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.
Taught by Julia Spiro, the author of two best-selling novels, Someone Else’s Secret and Full, both published by Lake Union. Both books have been optioned for film. Julia adapted Someone Else’s Secret herself for producer Denise di Novi (Little Women, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) and they are in the process of securing a director. Her forthcoming book, Such a Good Mom, will be published by Macmillan. Previously, Julia worked in the film industry, first at Creative Artists Agency, then at a Universal Studios based production company, and eventually at Warner Bros Pictures, where she was a Vice President of Production and Development. There, she oversaw many films, including A Star is Born, Ocean’s 8, Tomb Raider, and Kong: Skull Island.
Learn more about Julia in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.
We all know that having our books optioned for film or television can lead to huge boosts in book sales and other potential success down the road. But it’s increasingly difficult to get books optioned by debut or lesser-known authors.
Still, buyers will always have an appetite for developing books into movies and TV shows. Repeatedly and consistently, content based on books perform well across multiple markets. If you’re trying to get your book optioned (or if you already have – congrats!) then you might want to consider adapting it into a screenplay yourself. Already having a script version of your book could make your package much more appealing to buyers. Or, maybe you’ve already been hired to adapt your book into a screenplay. But now the real work begins.
Adaptations are deceptively complex. Being the author of the original material gives you an advantage, on the one hand, but it also makes the task more challenging. How can you take a hundred-thousand word manuscript and boil it down to twenty five thousand words of mostly dialogue?
Just because your book works as a book, doesn’t mean it’s going to work as a film or tv show without some major changes. In order to write a successful book adaptation, it’s necessary to step back from your original work and look at it through a new lens, one that’s driven by dialogue, visuals, and classic screenplay structure. This can be difficult, especially when your story is a personal one, but a book and a screenplay are two entirely different things that need to be treated as such.
In this course, we will cover:
- Why book adaptations will continue to be appealing to film and television buyers.
- How to pitch yourself as the screenwriter/ how to pitch your version of the screenplay
- The basic structure of a tried-and-true screenplay - and how to use it
- Deciding on comps for your screenplay, and why that’s important.
- Why some things work in a book but not in a movie, and vice versa.
- How to let go (ouch!) of beloved scenes in the book that you can’t include in the movie.
- How to create dialogue that didn’t exist in your book.
- And more!
ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:
Class will meet via Zoom on Sunday, January 19th, 2025, from 3:00PM - 5:00PM EST
- Instructor: Julia Spiro
- Live Seminar Via Zoom on Sunday, January 19th, 2025
- Class will meet 3:00PM - 5:00PM EST
Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this seminar.