Translating Jones' Story Structure

I worked on creating a screen version of the story structure for Jones today. It was one of those days where you wake up with cool ideas and fight to get it written out before it fades away. The key is making sure the original content remains true to the book, while translating in a way that draws the audience into the visual story.

All too often books die on screen because no one took the time to translate the literary elements into visual elements. When consulting other writers on the techniques of translation, I always suggest inverting the A and B plotlines – Especially for really good books. While this causes some to stutter for a moment, it increases the success of the translation. It certainly held true in the case of Jones.

With the original story being modular I found that several of the characters would have to be inserted in additional places within acts 1 and 2 in order to set up their key moments. This will help the audience to care about each character enough for their Jones encounter to be more emotionally satisfying.

I know, it sounds Greek to most, so suffice it to say that a lot of hard work goes into the development stage of translating a book to screen or the story will flop and the audience will say, “I preferred the book.” When the translation is done really well, it tends to drive a second edition of the book – The movie edition.