The Art of Adaptation

I hear often from fiction writers who are hoping to write a television pilot script for the first time. I’m currently adapting a few of my own short stories as TV pilots/series for studios, and I think adapting your own short story is a great way to explore the form of a pilot, especially if you’re a beginner!

The benefits of adapting your own short story into a TV pilot script are many, including the very practical reason that you own the underlying IP and it’s always nice to approach a studio (or a literary manager if you’re just starting out) with both a published short story (though it need not be published!) and a finished script.

I also find it helpful to write a pilot script based on a character(s) that I have fully imagined already, in a time and place I’ve already explored as a writer. Additionally, since most short stories end with a character stepping into a new reality, and gesturing towards the future rather than fully explaining it, they can be fertile ground from which to develop and ongoing TV series.

So, for those of you looking for a productive and possibly fun summer project, consider taking one of your own short stories and adapting it into a pilot.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

The main character(s) should want liberation from SOMETHING.

WHAT IS IT? (Sometimes, you don’t know this explicitly when you write a short story; it’s something you realize well after it’s finished.) So, if you can’t answer that easily, the adaptation needs to reimagine the character a bit more deeply to sustain a series.

Usually there is one literal thing (i.e. poverty/debt) and one spiritual thing (i.e. self-loathing or mediocrity) that a character wants to liberate themselves from? Knowing this is important in a TV script, because you don’t have the luxury of interiority and narration in the same way with dramatic writing. So you need to imagine a series of escalating scenes that dramatize this (you can really see this clearly in most pilots, but I love using Breaking Bad, Barry, Insecure, and Atlanta as very clear example of this kind of escalating tension that establishes what characters need liberation from in the series.)

IN FACT, IN A TV SHOW, CHARACTERS WANT LIBERATION SO BADLY THEY WILL RISK DESTRUCTION TO GET IT.

In other words, when I talk about DESTRUCTION I’m asking: what kind of external and internal MONSTERS could possibly destroy your characters? Which literal and metaphoric monsters will they face in the series? Such as addictions, toxic relationships, bad jobs, angry dragons, unsafe environment, hostile landscapes, mental health, narcissistic parents, serial killers, terrible bosses, bitter cops, etc.

Not only does this knowledge give you a deep sense of your character, but it also gives you ideas for scenes and a plot of the pilot’s first half. Your scenes should show the REASONS they need liberation and the CHARACTER TRAITS that could destroy them as well as THE FUTURE DANGERS of the external world? (Look at the opening halves of Insecure, Breaking Bad, Search Party, Schitt’s Creek, Atlanta, Severance. Mad Men etc. They all do this.)

What would be a transformative moment for the protagonist(s) in the pilot episode that will hint at WHAT LIBERATION COULD LOOK LIKE OR FEEL LIKE? WHAT WILL IT GIVE THEM? (Usually this is the midpoint of a pilot, followed by a SWIFT REVERSAL). (e.g Barry’s first moment on stage—he wants a purpose, he glimpses the actor’s life, but damn he’s still a hitman with PTSD in the next scene.) You’re showing the tension between the reality they want and the reality they have! Most short stories have this, but often it’s buried or too interior, not dramatized through scene.

The reversal usually has the character clinging to a glimmer of the new reality. It usually is irreversible. A one-way gate. Once they know of this new reality, they cannot go back to the old reality by the end of the episode. The episode makes a promise that the journey is going to be fun, thrilling, dangerous, sexy, hilarious, gut-wrenching etc.

(For example, Don Draper realizing he’s a POS with a double life in Mad Men).

So after the exhilarating midpoint, followed by a swift reversal that brings your character back to reality, the second half of the pilot will have your character fighting to change their reality. In a TV pilot, we just see the beginnings of that fight, not the whole battle. Most short stories have these sorts of scenes in them, but a lot of times the character is moving quietly through their ordinary life THINKING of their dissatisfaction and longing. In a TV script? They should be visibly battling these things!

In adapting a short story, you want to make every scene count, and every scene also should feel like a mini-movie with a beginning and middle and end. A rule I like to follow in TV writing is one I call the roller coaster rule—if one scene ends on a high note, the next should end on a low note, and so on. This allows us to feel the ups and downs that will make a show interesting to us.

Don’t stick to the story events incredibly closely unless that feels right. Rather stick to the characters closely and the tone and the world, but allow the dramatic events to morph and change as needed. You’re essentially crafting about fifteen escalating scenes that make us super invested in a protagonist’s forthcoming journey. That’s about it. 15 major scenes. I honestly don’t outline much at all.

I start with an opening scene, a midpoint taste of liberation and an idea of the swift reversal that follows this, then an idea of the new reality that our hero will step into at episode’s end.

I also determine POV. Most pilots feel like third person stories, meaning our main character does not necessarily have the POV in every scene. So I ask who, if anybody, will also get POV scenes? Or will our protagonist be in every single scene? I don’t think there is a correct way to do it, really, however many short story writers pivoting to screenwriting sometimes forget that their protagonist need not be in every single scene. In fact, sometimes it’s helpful if we (the audience) know things the characters don’t.

FINALLY: Before you begin, read your short story over several times and spend a few days ruminating on it? Where did that short story come from? What personal sparks caught fire and made you write it? And what makes this adaptation exciting to you? What is exciting about it intellectually, creatively, philosophically, emotionally? What parts of yourself could you add to it, to introduce a new layer of complexity while expanding the world of the story to go for many seasons?

I often will talk to myself about a short story or novel before tackling an adaptation. I like to pretend I’m talking to Terry Gross or Marc Maron about the story, because knowing what your subconscious mind was intuitively doing in the short story process will help your intellectual mind craft it into the first episode an addictive series. So interview yourself? Talk to yourself while driving or on a walk or folding laundry? The more you know about a story’s themes, the more focused your idea will get, and knowing a theme can help you come up with scenes. For example, if a character wants liberation from their family’s legacy or debt and poverty, and your theme is “Good guys never win,” you have an idea of what kind of scenes you need. Rather than showing a scene that tells us your character hates his job, write a scene that shows your character hating his job and then impulsively doing something unethical that makes him hate his job less.

Anyway, this is just one way to start thinking of adapting one of your own short stories as a pilot. Any process that works for you is useful, but I’ve adapted three of my own short stories into pilot now, all of which sold to studios, and so this is me telling you what worked for me!

Does it work for you? Well, as we say in the Midwest: if not, no worries!

Your pal,

DB

PS: Feel free to ask questions in the comments!