Your Life Is a Movie. Almost.

Aug 17

Six Things to Do BEFORE Turning Your Memoir Into a Screenplay

Memoirs are an incredible source of unique, moving, deeply personal stories - stories, written by life itself. The author lived through these events, and is telling us about their own experience. What could be more cinematic? It’s like being inside a tornado and taking notes on everything you see. Is it worth trying to turn all that into a screenplay? Absolutely.

But wait. Don’t download Final Draft yet.

Here are six things you need to do BEFORE that.

Watch some biopics. With a stopwatch.

Watch a few good biopics and pay attention to how they move through time. Flashbacks? Interviews? Memories? An old photograph that suddenly transports us to 1973? Then pick one and watch it with a stopwatch.

A screenplay page is roughly one minute of screen time, and most feature scripts are around 90–100 pages. Find a few professional screenplays online and look at them. There are very few words on those pages. No long explanations of what someone feels or remembers. Mostly: what we see, what happens, what people say.

Now time a scene. Two minutes? Congratulations. You have approximately two pages. This is the first unpleasant discovery: there is no way to fit absolutely everything in your memoir. So stop thinking like the person who lived it. You are now sitting in a movie theater with popcorn. What would you actually want to watch?

Decide what movie you’re making.

A life lived is not automatically a movie. Annoying, but true. Even biopics that cover an entire life usually have one central event or period holding everything together. Ask people who have read your memoir what they think the most important event is. Their answers may surprise you.

Pick a few possibilities and ask yourself which one already has a beginning, conflict, and ending, and which one you would actually pay to see. That can become your main story. Everything else can be introduced with memories and flashbacks.

You can also tell the story chronologically. That works, too. But you will probably need some device that lets you travel through time without making the audience feel like they are watching a very long PowerPoint presentation: an interview, a conversation, a photograph, a newspaper article, a memory.

If you choose this route, decide where the movie ends before deciding everything that comes before it. Your ending may tell you what the movie is actually about.

Make a pile of tiny stories.

Take every event you think belongs in the movie and give it one page. Maximum.

Beginning. Something happens. Ending.

That page should tell us what happened, why it matters to the character, and how it connects to the larger story.

Now you have a pile of little stories. Look at them. Some should be tragic. Some frightening. Some romantic. And please, some should be funny. Even tragic lives contain funny stories. Human beings are inconvenient that way.

If your main story is the spine of the movie, keep the memories and flashbacks that connect to it. If you’re telling the story chronologically, keep the events that move us toward your chosen ending. You can save a few tiny atmospheric memories simply because you love them. Keep them under a minute. And start cutting. You will be doing a lot of that.

Now cut the people.

This part may feel slightly criminal.

You cannot bring everyone from your memoir into the movie. Choose a small group of people who matter throughout the story.

Sometimes you may even have to give something that happened with Person A to Person B, simply because the audience already knows Person B and has feelings about them.

Yes, that means the movie may not be literally accurate in every detail. The audience will survive. What matters is that they have enough time with your characters to love them, hate them, fear for them, miss them, anything except wonder: Wait, who is this again?

Try your stories on actual humans.

Memoir is literature. Screenwriting is drama. Drama has one particularly cruel feature: the audience is sitting there while you are doing it.

Think of telling a story at a party. Someone laughs: good. Someone leans closer: excellent. Someone checks their phone: trouble. Three people suddenly need drinks: serious trouble.

Take some of your one-page stories and tell them to friends. Don’t begin with, “This is incredibly important because…” Just tell the story. Watch what happens.

The stories that make people genuinely want to know what happens next are probably the ones worth keeping.

Tell the entire movie in 3–5 pages.

Eventually, if you want producers to read your screenplay, you will encounter loglines, synopses, treatments, and several other documents, apparently invented to prevent writers from enjoying themselves. Ignore them for now.

There is one thing I never start a screenplay without doing: I tell the entire movie as a simple story in three to five pages. Beginning to end. Writing a memoir is a little like painting a beautiful house in watercolor. A screenplay is closer to the engineering plan for that house. Before you start building, you need to know what holds it up.

So write the whole movie as a short story. See where it begins. See where it ends. See which events suddenly look unnecessary when you only have five pages. This is hard. Much harder than it sounds. But if you can make the whole movie work in a few pages, you can make it work as a screenplay too.

The next two steps: write the screenplay, then write your Oscar speech. Although you can start with the speech…

Nightingale-Grey Admin