Fiction Writer’s Toolshed · Practical Tools for Authors
You’ve written a novel. You know its characters, and you care about the story. When you turn it into a screenplay, how do you decide what belongs there?
Mathew Tekulsky joins me to talk about adapting his own fiction for the screen. I went into the conversation expecting to ask about writing a novel and a screenplay at the same time. He quickly corrected that premise: his novels were finished before he began adapting them.
That gave us a more useful question. When you already know and love a story, what are you willing to change so it can work in another form?
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Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
How to Adapt a Novel into a Screenplay (with Mathew Tekulsky) | ep 029
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What this episode covers
- How Mathew finds material in a finished novel that he wants to dramatize.
- Why he removed a character from the screenplay of Saving Annie.
- How a short story became the starting point for new dramatic action.
- Why he prefers lean description and room for an actor’s interpretation.
Start with the story you already have
Mathew’s novels give him characters he knows and a story he has already worked through. When he adapts one, he looks through the novel’s Word document for material he thinks would be good to dramatize.
The novel remains something he can return to as he writes. But the screenplay has to work as a separate piece. A scene that matters in the book may need to be written differently for an audience to experience it on screen.
This is Mathew’s process for adapting those novels. Later in the conversation, his short-story example gives us a different situation: much less existing material, and much more to invent.
A character you love may pull the screenplay away from its story
In Saving Annie, Mathew includes an anti-war protester named Simon. There’s a personal connection behind that character, which makes cutting him difficult.
But when Mathew works on the screenplay, Simon’s appearances divert it from the other characters and what they’re doing. He imagines the interruption: the group is in the middle of something, and Simon arrives to tell them about a demonstration.
Mathew decides that Simon has to go. He still cares about the character, but he thinks the screenplay moves better without him.
I also think about what another role asks of a production: an actor to cast, pay, and bring into rehearsals. And we discuss how a character’s departure might feel like an unfinished thread in this film, even if it feels like part of life in a novel.
The useful question is what the character is doing in this version of the story. Personal attachment matters to the writer, but it doesn’t answer that question by itself.
If you’re wrestling with that attachment in your own work, our conversation about knowing what to cut from a story explores that problem further.
Sometimes adaptation means creating more
Mathew also describes adapting The Western Trip, a short story based on a trip he took as a teenager. That story gives him a small, travelogue-like basis for the screenplay he discusses as Duke. It doesn’t give him all the dramatic material he needs.
One stop on the trip involves the headwaters of the Mississippi. In the short story, the characters can simply visit and cross the river. For the screenplay, Mathew looks for something that can happen there.
He finds a fire tower and develops a scene around Roger, a character who is afraid of heights. Duke pressures him to climb. The location becomes a place where a character has to face something, rather than only another stop on the journey.
That’s a different job from cutting Simon out of Saving Annie. One example involves removing material that diverts the screenplay. The other involves creating action that the short story didn’t contain.
Both ask Mathew to consider what this particular screenplay needs.
Leave room for the performance
Mathew has become more restrained with screenplay description. He wants to give the scene enough to work without directing every detail of an actor’s performance.
His Duke example makes that tangible. The young characters sneak away to a pancake house as an act of rebellion. When they return, Duke is waiting. They expect him to yell or punish them.
Instead, Mathew gives him a brief line: “Gentlemen.”
We imagine what Woody Harrelson might bring to that moment. He’s someone Mathew pictures in the role, and the conversation lets us think about how an actor could make that small piece of dialogue feel specific.
That’s what I like about the restraint. There’s room for tone, timing, and the actor’s own take. The writer doesn’t have to describe every part of the moment to give it something worth performing.
This is the kind of restraint Mathew prefers and I admire. It’s a judgment to make about the scene, rather than a rule that every description or acting cue has to disappear.
Watch with a writer’s eye
Mathew talks about learning from the films he watches. When he’s thinking about an actor for a role, he also watches that actor’s work to understand what they might bring to it.
I connect that with something I call curation of taste: paying attention to what you love, what you don’t enjoy, and how you might do something differently.
Watching can become part of the work when you look closely enough to learn from it. You don’t have to like every choice to notice what that choice does.
Try one scene
If you’re curious about adapting your fiction, choose a scene and try writing it as action and dialogue. What can an audience see and hear? What do you keep, what do you leave behind, and what might you need to create?
You don’t have to solve the whole adaptation before trying that piece. It gives you something to look at and revise.
Near the end of the conversation, Mathew talks about how hard it can be to begin a project he has been thinking about for a long time. I share a couple of ways I get words moving: typing why I don’t want to start, or describing the room I’m in.
They’re small tools you can test if getting started is the problem. For the adaptation itself, try making a scene exist -- and see what changes when the story moves into another form.
About Mathew Tekulsky
Mathew Tekulsky is a novelist, screenwriter, and nonfiction author. His fiction includes The Chestnut Tree and Saving Annie, and he has adapted his own fiction into screenplays.
Explore Mathew’s books and work (opens in new tab).
Resources mentioned in the conversation
Mathew recommends The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri as a place to begin. Read about the book on its publisher’s website (opens in new tab).
He also recommends Syd Field’s work. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting is one of Field’s books you can explore. Read about Screenplay on Syd Field’s website (opens in new tab).
The adaptation conversation in the other direction
Mathew returns in How to Turn a Screenplay Into a Novel: A Working Approach. In that conversation, we work through my question about turning a musical I co-wrote into prose.
It’s a different direction of adaptation, with different questions about what the new form needs.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.