How to adapt novels to screenplays

ATTENDEES at next Wednesday’s monthly Bendigo Writers Council meeting will have the opportunity to pick the brains of local multi-award-winning science fiction romance author Jess Anastasi.

The theme of her talk will be adapting novels to screenplays, a process she’s become familiar with after changing her focus to screenwriting and adapting her books into scripts.

Ms Anastasi has already worked one-on-one with several US-based executive producers and, at the end of 2024, signed with an LA manager.

She said she’d wanted to be a writer since high school and never really tried to do anything else, studying the Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing at Bendigo TAFE.

According to Ms Anastasi, her path to working as an author was fuelled by a healthy amount of stubbornness.

“It took me seven years before I got published and nine years before I had an agent,” she said.

“It was just persistence, submitting and writing books and honing (my) craft and doing all the hard yards that I had to do.”

She said her first book deal was exciting with “a bit of relief as well.”

“My parents used to ask if I was ever going to give up and maybe I should. I suppose they found it hard too – when you get rejected all the time, it seems a bit silly to keep going,” Ms Anastasi said.

“There’s really no way to do it but (jump) in the deep end.

“You’ve got to talk to other authors and go to writing conferences and talks at the library, talks like I’m doing for the Bendigo Writers Council.”

She said her interest in developing scripts was born from an interest in how words on a page end up on the screen, and how the story structure differs between a novel and TV show, for example.

“There’s a lot of similarities, but there’s also a lot of differences, so it was a real fascination (that) I had.”

Find out more at Explore March with Jess Anastasi, Adapting Novels to Screenplays on Wednesday 26 March at the Bendigo Library, Activity Room 1, from 7pm to 9pm. Entry is $10.