Writing Blog Number 2

20240729 Adaptations

Adaptations

I wrote recently about Ghost Writing.

Well, there is another form of writing that can be available to the willing writer: Adaptations.

This is when you take another medium and turn it into the written one. Nearly every movie from the 1970s to the 1990s had a novelisation (if they weren't first based on a novel); if you liked fantasy or science fiction, Alan Dean Foster would be name from that era (and even to nowadays!) that comes to mind. His adaptations of films could be even better than the films themselves (cought*Alien Covenant*cough)! And now the Disney Company is screwing him over, but that's by the by.

So... what?

Well, if you can get an "in" to off-Broadway plays, student films, TV shows/ pilots, whatever, you can write an adaptation of it if given permission.

So, two things first. One, you do need to know someone. Foster started as the Ghost Writer for the original novelisation of Star Wars (accredited to George Lucas) because he met Lucas through a mutual friend. Knowing the playwright or whatever is good. And two, you need a body of work first that they can look at to decide if you're a good fit. Again, Foster had some novels already published in the science fiction sphere.

So, what do you do? First, you can take the original shooting script and adapt that (Donald F. Glut did that for The Empire Strikes Back). Second, you can watch the film (or whatever) and use the actual visuals to base your story on. (Or you can combine the two). Or third, you can work with the person whose idea it is and Ghost Write for them (as Foster did for Lucas) or use their original ideas (which became Foster's Star Wars book Splinter Of The Mind's Eye).

Now, adapting movies (except student or indy or low-budget efforts) is not something easy to get into. And those student or indy or low-budget efforts are not likely to have much of an audience, but they could well be worth pursuing. Non-Hollywood films, however, are also worth chasing after if you have that "in", e.g., an English-language novelisation of a Bollywood movie?

Adapting off-Broadway plays is well worth investigating, and is becoming more and more popular. Even musicals... you just don't add the songs to your work. Obviously.

TV shows are going to be those made for local stations; the big ones are like Hollywood movies.

Some visual artists have also employed writers to construct stories around the visual works. This happened in the late 19th century with the Heidelberg School of painters; some of the short stories are really good.

And then there's the latest thing - songs. Not stories based on songs (which I write), but the stories of the songs. Think the film The Gambler based on Kenny Rogers' song of the same name. You cannot deviate from the song's story, but you can turn it into a story. I know this is happening as I submitted to a Taylor Swift-based anthology.

So as something different, maybe try a written adaptation of a work from another medium?