Adapting A Novel Is Mostly A Subtraction Problem

A novel contains far more material than a film can hold. The adaptation's quality is determined almost entirely by which parts are cut and on what principle.

The arithmetic is unavoidable

A screenplay runs to a fraction of a novel's length, and much of a novel's content is interior in ways that occupy no screen time at all.

This means an adaptation is not a translation but a selection. Somewhere between half and most of the book will not appear in any form.

Adaptations that refuse this arithmetic produce the familiar result of a film that hits every plot point and communicates nothing, because each event has been reduced to its announcement.

Interiority is the hardest loss to replace

Prose can state what a character thinks directly. Film cannot, and the substitutes available all have costs.

Narration imports the prose voice at the price of distancing the audience from the image. Externalising thoughts as dialogue makes characters unnaturally articulate about themselves.

The strongest solutions usually invent action. A scene that did not exist in the book can carry, through behaviour, what the novel delivered through access to a mind.

Subplots are removed by structure, not by preference

The instinct is to cut the least interesting material. That frequently breaks the film, because a dull subplot may be supplying a character's motivation elsewhere.

Experienced adapters map dependencies first, identifying which threads feed the spine of the story and which are genuinely parallel.

Parallel threads can be removed cleanly. Load-bearing ones have to be compressed into the surviving structure, usually by merging characters or relocating a revelation.

Fidelity is a poor measure and a persistent one

Readers assess adaptations by what was retained, since that is what they can check. Retention correlates weakly with whether the film works.

The versions readers consider most faithful are often those that preserved the tone while changing the events, which is not what fidelity is normally taken to mean.

Filmmakers therefore face an audience judging by a criterion that conflicts with the craft. This is why adaptations of much-loved books are commercially attractive and creatively unrewarding.

Short fiction adapts more comfortably than novels

A short story frequently gives a film exactly what it needs, which is a situation, a small number of characters and an unresolved tension.

Because the source is under-length rather than over-length, the adapter is building rather than cutting, which is a more comfortable creative position.

A striking number of well-regarded films come from short fiction for this reason. The source supplied a premise and left the film free to decide what to do with it.