From Screenplay to Novel: Why I Adapted My Own Work (And What Changed)

In 2020, my screenwriting agent Eric Canton stopped returning calls about my screenplays, Stealing Stealth and Arctic Fire.

The scripts were solid. Contest successes. Professional craft. Strong structure. But my writing had three fatal problems: I wasn't famous, I didn't have an attached star, and it wasn't existing IP.

In Hollywood, that's the kiss of death.

Eric pitched my work for three solid years, hitting at least twenty-five to fifty production companies. But, in the end, I'm not sure anyone actually read it. We never got past the front door. When the pandemic hit, the film industry froze, and even the rejection emails stopped coming.

I had a choice: let the story die in a file folder, or find another way to tell it.

My wife Alyson had been telling me for years to turn one of my screenplays into a novel. I resisted. I'd become good at screenwriting. I had my method, my process, my brutal efficiency. Novels felt like going backward. They took so long. Screenplays were familiar territory.

But every time we watched a new movie, it was always based on a book. Good or bad, it didn’t matter.

That's when it finally clicked. Hollywood executives care about their jobs more than making great movies. If a film is based on existing IP, they have an excuse when it fails. Security over creativity. The spec script gold rush of the 1980s was dead. The market had shifted, and I hadn't wanted to believe it.

I retired from the Air Force in 2023 and finally had time to sit down and make a real attempt at the longer form. I chose Stealing Stealth, my spy thriller. It was the one I'd written while deployed to Afghanistan, the one that had earned PAGE semifinalist recognition.

Here's what I learned about why some stories need both versions, and what fundamentally changes when you move from 112 pages to 128,000 words.

What Screenplays Do Better

Screenplays are simply more fun.

You get to focus on dialogue; it's ninety percent of what a screenplay is doing. It forces you to cut, to stay focused in a way that novels can sometimes ignore. There's a proven formula (thank you, Blake Snyder), and if you deviate from it, you'd better have a very good reason.

The format forces you to think in terms of character arc and voice. It's about their voice, not yours.

Visual efficiency is built in. "Zoe removes her body armor" communicates vulnerability instantly. No explanation needed. The image does the work. Action is visible, immediate, shown not told.

The screenplay version of Arctic Fire was lean. Zoe's PTSD was demonstrated through action (drinking, isolation, avoidance), not explained through internal monologue. The theme is stated once in the opening, paid off in the climax. Clean. Efficient. Cinematic.

Every scene had to advance plot. No wandering. No indulgence. Screenplay page count determines runtime, and 110 pages means you have exactly that many minutes to tell your story. The discipline is brutal and clarifying.

But that efficiency is also a limitation.

Where Screenplays Hit Their Limits

You can't show what characters think.

That sounds obvious, but the ramifications are enormous. In Stealing Stealth, my Soviet spymaster Sasha Morozov had to remain somewhat one-note in the screenplay. Cunning. Ruthless. Cold War villain. But in the novel, I gave him an internal voice and a moral center that reframes everything the reader thinks about him. He's still the antagonist, but now you understand why. You see what it costs him.

The same thing happened with FBI Agent Bruno Vasquez. In the screenplay, Bruno discovers crucial information about the case and reacts. Scene over. In the novel, that discovery becomes a full chapter. Bruno reflects on his childhood pet, a pig named Stuart. This family pet had a dark secret, one that shaped the man Vasquez became and the choices he makes now.

You can't do that in a screenplay. But the novel needs it.

In Arctic Fire, Zoe's grief over losing her daughter Amanda lives almost entirely in her internal world. The screenplay could show her drinking, sleeping on the job, avoiding people. It couldn't show the weight of Amanda's birthday, the memory of her Marines dying, the specific texture of her guilt. Zoe's rock bottom takes two thousand words in the novel. In the screenplay, it was one page. Same events. Different impact.

The wooden box. Amanda's SUPERMOM drawing. The Bronze Star cutting her palm. The vision of Randy Adler dying in battle. All of these artifacts live in Zoe's head. A screenplay can show her holding the drawing. It can't show what it MEANS. That’s texture. It’s what novels do best.

The Adaptation Process (Or: How I Went a Little Bit Mad)

The hardest part of adapting screenplay to novel wasn't adding depth.

It was learning to stop.

My first draft of Stealing Stealth was one hundred and eighty thousand words.

For context, that's almost as long as Dune. I'd spent years being forbidden from poetic description in screenplays. Action lines had to be sparse, punchy, visual. Every word counted because every page was a minute of screen time.

So, when the novel format gave me freedom, I went a little bit mad.

I described everything. I visualize the story and wanted readers to see exactly what I imagined. Purple prose bloomed. I lingered in quiet moments because I could. I wrote entire backstories for minor characters because novels have room.

Bad plan.

It took months to cut Stealing Stealth from 180,000 words to 156,000. Then several more months to get it down to 128,000. I was learning economy all over again.

Arctic Fire went differently. The screenplay was 110 pages. The novel became 92,000 words. I’d like to think I'd learned from my mistakes. But there are still challenges.

The toughest is action sequences. They take ten seconds on screen, but require several pages to make them work on the page. A sleight of hand is a flash in a film, but in a novel, you have to describe who sees it, who doesn't, and what it means to each observer.

I also discovered that if a screenplay is solid and professional, the beats are already rock solid. A good screenplay typically has about forty major beats. That became my starting structure: forty beats, forty chapters.

But sometimes beats needed more than one chapter. I had monster chapters that were way too long. I was holding onto the original screenplay structure too tightly. Once I let that go, it started working.

What Actually Changed

Entire characters emerged.

Daniel Reeves exists in the Arctic Fire novel but not in the screenplay. He's a journalist investigating BM Oil, catastrophically bad at Alaskan survival, synesthetic in ways that make him perceive lies as tastes. He became essential to the plot, to the protagonist’s arc, to the thematic resonance of institutional corruption.

I couldn't have added him to the screenplay. There wasn't room. But the novel needed him.

Sarah Mason grew from capable homesteader into stone-cold operator. In the screenplay, she was supportive but secondary. In the novel, she gets her own chapters, her own mission, her own moment of terrifying competence.

The antagonist, Fisher became more menacing. In the screenplay, he's corporate evil: smooth, folksy, ruthless. In the novel, we see his fears and desires, what drives him beyond simple greed. That depth makes him more believable and more dangerous.

Yaz, one of Fisher's enforcers, became genuinely sadistic in ways the screenplay couldn't quite capture. When he forces the people of Shatterwood to humiliate themselves for his entertainment, the horror isn't just visual. It's internal. You feel their shame, their rage, their helplessness.

The opening themes functioned differently in each format. In the screenplay, it’s an opening line that gets paid off in the climax when Zoe becomes merciless. Plant and payoff. Clean.

In the novel, it becomes architectural. It appears in chapter one, develops through Zoe's repeated acts of mercy (releasing a boy soldier in Afghanistan, refusing to help the Masons, staying passive and broken), inverts when she finally understands what it means, and fulfills across the final battle when she rises transformed.

That's the kind of patient thematic development novels allow. Screenplays work in beats. Novels work in waves.

What I Lost (And What I Gained)

Screenplays move faster.

In the novel, everything needs a transition and a point of view. You can't just cut from Zoe in Alaska to Fisher in his office. You need a chapter break, a new header, a moment for the reader to reorient.

In a screenplay, you write: EXT. FISHER'S OFFICE - DAY

Done. We're there.

That speed is exhilarating. The novel requires more patience from both writer and reader.

But what the novel gives you in return is worth it.

You get subtext and text simultaneously. You get unreliable narration. Characters can lie to themselves in ways that are nearly impossible to convey on screen. You get backstory that doesn't feel like exposition because it emerges naturally from a character's thoughts in a moment of stress.

Most importantly, you get connection.

I always make my kids read books before watching the movie. That's a built-in admission that novels have more depth. They trigger more imagination, more investment. Because you've put effort into reading, you've built mental pictures of these characters. You've felt their struggle and gone on a journey with them.

It's not escapism. It's captivation.

The characters were always real to me. But in the book, I actually knew them. I knew why they did things, what fears they had, where those fears came from. That depth creates connection the screenplay couldn't quite achieve.

From Screenwriter to Novelist to Author

A few years ago, I thought of myself as a screenwriter.

I'd written novels when I was young, but screenwriting was my craft. I had the beats down, the structure internalized, the dialogue sharp. I loved the form.

After adapting two screenplays into novels, something shifted. I am a novelist now. I believe that.

But I'm a screenwriter too.

I guess that makes me an author.

The path wasn't wasted. I learned to write in quite possibly the hardest medium. I learned to be brutal with my own work and to listen to a million different commentaries on my storytelling. I got over rejection and criticism. I learned that feedback is often bad advice wrapped around good insights. What are they trying to tell you, rather than the suggestion they're giving? That's the gold.

For my next novel, I haven't decided yet whether I'll write a screenplay first to lock the structure, then expand to novel. Or maybe I've evolved past needing that. Maybe I can build directly in the novel format now, trusting the longer form to hold the architecture.

That's the question I'm still answering. Maybe you are too.

The Final Truth

If one of my projects gets adapted now, I’m no longer convinced it needs to be a feature film. There are so many mediums.

Limited series are a real thing now. Eight episodes. Eight hours to let the relationships breathe, to show the core theme fulfillment across multiple episodes, to earn the transformation the novel offers.

The screenplay taught me structure. Promise and pay off. Create rising action. Each scene is miniature arc doing three things at once.

Novels taught me depth. How to live inside a character's head, how to develop themes across hundreds of pages, how to make readers feel something so intensely they have to put the book down and collect their thoughts.

But here's what I know for certain: in Hollywood, the strength of a story no longer matters. Intellectual Property is king. You’ve probably noticed it, too. Everything feels recycled and, for lack of a better term, meh.

The screenplay didn't fail. It was good. It just wasn't the right market.

The novel is better. Not because the screenplay was weak, but because novels give the story room to breathe, time to develop, and space for the soul.

The truth is kind of absurd. Gatekeepers refused to look at my work. So I turned it into a book. Now I own the IP. And if someone comes calling, they'll pay more for it than they would have in 2017.

Some stories need more than one version. It’s okay, that’s not a sign of weakness.

If you have a screenplay sitting in a drawer, if it won't sell but you can't let the story go, then consider this: maybe it's not you. Maybe it's just the wrong format.

Hollywood doesn’t want it. But readers do.

Readers are better customers anyway. They care about finding authentic stories, rather than protecting their career.

Stealing Stealth releases January 2026 and Arctic Fire releases Fall 2026. The novel versions of the stories are amazing. I'm glad they didn't sell. The novels are better.

Have you adapted your own work between formats? Or are you considering it? What's holding you back? Let me know in the comments—I'm still figuring this out myself.