I’m a TV writer by profession, and when I’m not staffing a show, I develop TV series adaptations with the goal of selling one to a buyer. My favorite novel genres to adapt are mysteries and thrillers because I love suspenseful, propulsive storytelling and because thrillers make damn good TV.
TV shows demand action and surprises that compel a viewer to keep watching, and since suspense novels are built around twists, with chapters that end on cliffhangers, they lend well to adaptation. In the Age of Streaming, where thousands of TV shows across 400 networks compete for attention, it’s incredibly difficult for a series to gain traction, but a delicious thriller can quickly amass an audience.
If I spark to a novel, I develop my “take”—a 20-minute pitch on how I would adapt the book into an on-going series. When pitching a series, the most important question I need to answer is Why Now? A thriller novel with a strong hook and a juicy twist is great, but one that has something to say, that sparks discussion around a timely, compelling theme, is undeniable. Think Big Little Lies, with its examination of domestic violence among the elites, or Codename Villanelle (the source material for Killing Eve), with its rare depiction of female obsession.
The other important question I need to answer when pitching a series is Why You? I need to convince a potential buyer that I am the perfect person to adapt the novel, and I need to demonstrate how I will expand the world of the book into a series that could run for multiple seasons.
After studying and deconstructing many thrillers, I decided to try my hand at writing my own. My debut novel, The Ends of Things, is a psychological suspense about a solo female traveler who disappears from a beach resort. My heroine, a fellow vacationer, becomes obsessed with the missing woman and embroiled in the police investigation that unfolds.
At first, I didn’t set out to write a novel. I thought my idea would make a great movie, so I wrote an outline for a feature script. But then I realized all my favorite parts were scene descriptions and stage directions—none of which would make it from page to screen. I’ve always loved mysteries that feature protagonists who aren’t so much unreliable narrators as they are unaware that they’re unreliable narrators, like Rachel in The Girl on the Train. I wanted to explore a character who was her own worst enemy, and since my protagonist is a catastrophizer, it was crucial that I have access to her private thoughts.
My problem was that interiority is notoriously difficult to express in a screenplay unless you use a trope like voiceover, which is generally considered to be a narrative crutch. (There are exceptions, of course. Some of the voiceover in the TV series You, for example, is lifted from the pages of the novel on which it is based and is used cleverly to endear the viewers to Joe, even though he’s a creepy stalker with homicidal tendencies.) Typically, though, a screenwriter needs to demonstrate character through action. What your character does or doesn’t do reveals who they are. Novels, however, allow you to express your character’s thoughts and feelings better than any other medium. That’s how I knew my story needed to be a book.
I had never written a novel before, and I had no idea how to approach a project that was so, well, long. On a craft level, screenwriting and novel writing seemed completely different. But over the eighteen-month journey that followed, from conception to completed manuscript, I came to discover that for all the differences, the processes had some surprising similarities.
My first hurdle was “breaking” the story. Television is typically written in a group setting, specifically in a Writers Room, so-called because it’s a (sometimes windowless) room where ten or so writers spend all day every day for months on end pitching storylines, brainstorming ideas, eating snacks, and breaking the Season together.
The writers are then assigned scripts, which they write on their own and bring back to the room for feedback and dialogue punch up. The great thing about working in a Writers Room is that you can use the brain trust to help you solve your story problems. Discovered a plot hole while outlining? Take your beats back to the room. Spinning your wheels on a weak cliffhanger? Ask the room to brainstorm alternatives. The room is paid to solve problems, so you can see how an entire season of television can be conceived and written relatively quickly, in about six months or so, with a group of writers working collaboratively before the cameras start rolling, and then doing rewrites through production.
Novel writing, though, is a solitary pursuit. If you’re lucky, you have one or two trusted readers to help you solve your story problems. But mostly you’re on your own. When I started, all I had was a long, unwieldy Word document full of stream of consciousness musings and fragmented observations, along with some ideas for plot twists.
My next hurdle: How do you structure a novel? The only frame of reference I had was breaking story in a Writers Room. When you get hired to join a room, you typically spend the first few weeks discussing the Season as a whole, as well as delineating or “arcing” the emotional journeys of the characters. You do this by writing story beats on index cards and mounting them on a cork board or white board. Once the shape of the Season comes into focus, and once you have a general sense of where the characters are headed emotionally, you begin tackling individual episodes, ensuring that each one progresses the Season Arc, and that each episode fits, like a puzzle piece, within the larger serialized framework of the Season.
Since I didn’t know how else to do it, I broke the structure of my novel the same way. I pulled out a giant stack of multi-colored index cards, and using Sharpies, the writing implement de rigueur of a Writers Room, I transposed every story beat from my Word document onto the cards. My story takes place in two timelines, so I color coded the cards: White for “present-day” action and purple for “flashbacks.” Then, I mounted the cards on a cork board. In a Writers Room, each column of cards on a Season Arc board corresponds to an episode. Thirteen columns = Thirteen episodes. In my case, every column corresponded to a chapter. Thirteen columns = Thirteen chapters. And because I was writing a suspense novel, I wanted each chapter to end on a cliffhanger, to compel the reader to turn the page.
Once I had the structure figured out, it came time to sit down and actually write, and here’s where I found the mediums vastly different.
When writing a screenplay, you write with blocking in mind—describing what your characters are physically doing and where they are in relation to their location and each other. (If you don’t properly block a scene on the page, your actors will definitely accost you on set with their notes, and this can be very embarrassing.) With novel writing, though, I found that my heroine could think thoughts for pages on end without having to physically move. It was liberating to explore her musings without having to worry about what she was doing with her hands!
Another major difference had to do with time management. In the TV world, it’s common to develop multiple projects at the same time. When you get stuck on one script, you can move to another, in a constant rotation. I’ve found this can help when you get blocked: delving into one creative world sometimes helps unlock story problems in another. But what surprised me about writing my novel was how all-consuming the process was. Sustaining my book’s fictional world in all its granular detail demanded my undivided attention. All I did for eighteen months straight was eat, sleep, and breathe my characters.
When you wrap a season of television, if you’re lucky, you’ve made a handful of lifelong friends. After being in the trenches for months on end, trauma bonding from tight deadlines and harsh network notes, and going feral from lack of sleep and daylight, you can’t help but feel a strong sense of camaraderie. You celebrate together, go to karaoke, buy each other wrap gifts, and group-watch the season premiere. Sometimes, the room’s group text keeps going for years after the show has been canceled.
Finishing a novel, though, hits different. When I printed out my completed manuscript and spread the pages across my bedroom floor, I was overwhelmed by a deeply personal and very private sense of accomplishment I had never felt before. I had managed to write this big thing all by myself. And when my ARCs arrived in the mail, it felt incredible to hold my book in my hands. But this feeling of triumph was followed by vulnerability because unlike a TV show, my novel has only one name on the cover, and it’s mine. As proud as I felt, I couldn’t also help but feel a bit exposed.
There’s a troubling new trend in Hollywood, where streamers are deleting entire seasons of television from their digital libraries to avoid paying creatives residual fees. This means that along with losing revenue, writers are losing access to their work. A book, though, is forever. It feels good knowing that no matter what happens, my novel will always have a place on my bookshelf.
Now that pub day is approaching, my TV agents have asked me to put together my take for a potential series adaptation. Talk about a full circle moment. It’s a bit surreal crafting a pitch for why I am the perfect person to adapt my own book. But that’s Hollywood, for you.
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