Adapting Your Story from Novel or Memoir to Screenplay with Jamie Leigh Lorente

 A 6-week workshop for discovering the cinematic story inside your source material 

Workshop format - 6 weekly sessions, 90 minutes each, including: instruction and discussion, guided writing and adaptation exercises, workshop opportunities, and weekly assignments designed to move your adaptation forward.

Ideal for: memoirists, novelists, fiction writers, and other storytellers interested in adapting an existing work or story into a screenplay (Feature, short, or series pilot). No previous screenwriting experience is required.

Adapting a book or story for the screen isn’t simply a matter of translating prose into screenplay format. It means discovering the cinematic story within the source material.

What is the essential story? Whose story is it? What does your protagonist want? How does your story become a visual medium? 

Over six weeks, this workshop will guide you through the process of finding and shaping the screenplay inside your existing material. Through instruction, examples, generative exercises, and workshop discussion, you’ll explore character, point of view, structure, scene, visual storytelling, dialogue, and the sometimes liberating art of departing from the source.

The goal isn’t to reproduce your original work faithfully on the page. It’s to discover what form the story, or part of the story, wants to take on the screen.

What You’ll Learn

• How to find the cinematic story within your source material, including its protagonist, dramatic question, stakes, and emotional spine
• How to transform prose into visual storytelling by externalizing interiority through action, image, setting, behavior, and dialogue
• How to reshape your story for the screen, using screenplay structure, scene construction, point of view, compression, omission, and invention
• How to build a working blueprint for your adaptation, from logline and story map to screenplay scenes and a practical path forward

What We’ll Explore

Finding the Cinematic Story

Discover what adaptation really involves—translation, transformation, and reimagining. Identify the essential story beneath your source material, begin articulating it in a logline, and explore what to keep, cut, combine, or invent.

Character, POV & the Adaptation Lens

Determine whose story we’re watching and learn to translate interior experience into behavior, action, image, and setting. Explore character development, point of view, character consolidation, and screenplay fundamentals.

Finding the Screenplay Structure

Move beyond the structure of your original work to identify the turning points and story beats your screenplay needs. Begin developing a beat sheet or story map while exploring compression, omission, rearrangement, and fidelity to the source.

Writing Cinematically

Learn what “show, don’t tell” really means on the screenplay page. Experiment with transforming exposition, memory, reflection, and internal thought into cinematic language through visual storytelling, recurring imagery, setting, and action.

Scene, Dialogue & Subtext

Explore what makes a scene earn its place. Work with scene objectives, conflict, emotional turns, dialogue, and subtext while writing and workshopping selected scenes from your adaptation.

Building the Blueprint & Moving Forward

Step back to consider the screenplay as a whole. Refine your logline and dramatic question, strengthen your story map, identify gaps and opportunities, and create a path for continuing the adaptation beyond the workshop.

What You’ll Need

Bring an existing memoir, novel, essay, short story, or other narrative you’d like to explore adapting. You’ll also need access to your source material, a notebook or journal, and a computer or writing device. Screenwriting software options—both free and paid—will be discussed during the workshop.

Most importantly, come prepared to experiment, cut, combine, invent, and occasionally surprise yourself.