SCREENWRITER TO NOVELIST
CHRISTINE CONRADT
W
hen I started writing, I wrote prose. My first recognition as an author came in elementary school when I won the Young Authors Award and I’ ve been writing ever since. At thirteen, I fell in love with movies after seeing‘ Stand By Me.’ I watched the film more than 30 times, until the VHS tape started making a strange whirring sound when you pressed play, and immediately bought Stephen King’ s Four Seasons so I could read the short story it had been adapted from. I knew every line of that movie and was shocked to discover the short story was even better. It led me to buy every Stephen King novel I could get my hands on.
At seventeen, I applied to the University of Southern California’ s Cinematic Arts program and was thrilled to be accepted to the undergraduate screenwriting program. The day I graduated from high school in May, I packed my bags for college and lived out of my suitcases until classes started in August. That’ s how excited I was. I wanted to write for a living— movies, books, magazine articles, anything. I loved telling stories and turning that into a career was all I wanted to do.
For decades after graduating from USC, I focused on screenwriting and managed to carve out a pretty decent career. With more than 60 writing credits, my movies have aired on Lifetime, LMN,
Showtime, Fox, USA, UPtv, and Hallmark. I was the primary writer behind some of Lifetime’ s most successful franchises including my favorite, the‘ at 17’ series of thrillers.
Because of their success, I pitched the idea to the films’ producers of turning them into books for the YA market. They were encouraging of the endeavor and promised to contribute $ 2K toward the self-publishing costs if I couldn’ t get a publisher interested. And so I set off to do something I’ d never done before, turn an existing screenplay into a novel.
Now, I’ d done the reverse. The Secret Sex Life of a Single Mom, which I wrote for Lifetime, was the adaptation of a memoir, and I’ d enjoyed scouring the pages, finding the pivotal scenes from the book to include in the movie. I pared the book down from 296 pages to 110 in screenplay format, combining characters and streamlining conversations.
But this was much different. Much harder. After years of writing as efficiently as possible,’ taking my screenplay‘ Missing at 17’ and expanding it into a novel felt like an impossible task. In a screenplay, you can’ t simply slip into the characters’ heads and explore what they’ re thinking. What they’ re thinking is conveyed through actions and dialog alone. Show, don’ t tell!
The process forced me to get back to my roots and rediscover what it was like
SUMMER 2018
PAGE 10
WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE