Time for a Rewrite
With Christmas just past and the long stretch of post holiday free time ahead (that’s a joke, there’s no free time, just more gray skies) it must be time to launch into a new project. Or perhaps just rehash, reimagine, and rewrite an old one. I’m mid-way through turning my Christmas novella Winter Wonderland into a feature script. With plenty of Christmas magic and romance it’s a Christmas love story with missing diamond and a mystery in the middle. Which I think would make a great not-quite Hallmark movie.
So How Does That Work?
So how do you turn a novella into a movie? Rewrite! Not everything in a book can go directly into a script. The reason we love an actor who can convey a full range of emotion and the internal workings of their mind with just their face is because we don’t get to hear what’s going on in their heads the way we can in a book. So for a script I have to find ways to translate some of those internal moments into external dialogue and events. And sometimes that means changing up events, adding characters or giving existing characters some new dialogue.
Other People Have Thoughts Too
I’m still exploring the world of scripts and figuring out the process, but one of the things I have learned is the need to determine who I want to produce my script and then tailor it to meet their standards. Hallmark has pretty specific thoughts on swearing (no!) and Christmas (put it in every scene!). But the format it’s filmed for can also affect the script. If it’s intended for TV I might want to look particularly hard at some of the scene endings to make sure they’re a little bit of a cliff hanger to pull people back after commercial breaks. And all of this means that my perfect little gem of a novella will need… (you guessed it) rewrites.
And How Does That Make You Feel?
Well, I can’t say that rewrites are something I look forward to. But sometimes they offer an opportunity to rethink something I wasn’t quite happy with, or flesh out a side character that didn’t get the time they deserved. Trying to reconfigure a story for a new format can be a challenge, but it can also be pretty fun. I’ll let you know what this one turns out to be.
Learn More About Winter Wonderland
When a Marcus Winter, a photographer with a bah humbug take on the holidays, meets Larissa Frost, a set designer who loves all things Christmas, sparks are destined to fly, but when a famous diamond goes missing from the shoot they’re working on Larissa finds that Marcus may be the only one who can keep her from being framed for a crime she didn’t commit.
