Advanced Screenwriting: Adapting Your Fiction to Film

This is a course for advanced fiction and nonfiction writers who would like to adapt their work to film. Many successful writers have the opportunity to see their books become films or television series, often adapted by other writers. This is a course about adapting one's own work for such opportunities. Students bring to class an original creative work to adapt (they are welcome to use a story that they wrote for a course). Through a series of exercises and assignments, students write and workshop a treatment, which is a summary of the full film or series, providing a clear outline of a show's plot, characters, and themes, often used to sell a project. From there, students write and workshop an original screenplay based on their own work, 15-25 pages of which serves as the final project.