Writing for Visual Media, 2nd Edition

Writing Techniques for Adaptation

11

Let us reprise a point we made in Chapter 1, working up an understanding of visual writing, the kind of writing that is special to the screen. We used Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms to show the difference between prose fiction and screen writing by asking how we would translate the opening descriptive paragraph into a screenplay. We were showing the difference between two types of writing, two types of storytelling. We now need to look at a much bigger issue, which grows out of that initial problem of what you represent in a scene when you adapt a source work for filming. We need to deal with techniques of adaptation.

In the entertainment world, a writer is frequently called upon to adapt his or someone ...