Adapting Novels To Screenplays — Development skill for Claude Code

Adapting Novels to Screenplays: a Claude skill

Turn a novel, novella or classic into a **feature-film screenplay**, working as a partnership: **you're the editor, Claude is the writer.** Claude proposes and explains every choice. You decide.

It reads a PDF, EPUB, DOCX or plain-text book. It works in stages you approve, and it can pick up where you left off in a later session. What you get at the end is a formatted screenplay in Fountain and PDF, along with the documents that explain it.

What makes it different

Most book-to-script tools treat adaptation as **reformatting**. This skill treats it as **editing**:

• Three master rules.
  • Nolan: only what can be seen or heard goes on the page.
  • Scorsese: state the visual structural concept before outlining.
  • Jhabvala: "You can't follow the form of the novel." Find the film's own form.
• You approve every cut. Claude proposes cuts, merges and compressions, with a reason and a confidence level for each. It warns you before touching a scene readers love. If a cut would break the story, it pushes back once, then does what you decide.
• No invented padding. Every scene cites the chapter it comes from. Anything expanded from what the book implies is flagged IMPLIED, and anything with no basis in the text is flagged INVENTED.
• Genre commitment. A romance is played as a great romance and a tragedy as a real tragedy. The structure is loud and the dialogue stays quiet.
• Length planned in words. Each scene gets a word budget, and a script counts real screenplay pages so the film lands on the length you agreed.
• Built for long projects. A progress file carries everything across sessions. A session always stops at the end of a scene, never halfway through one.
• A full set of outputs: the screenplay, a character bible, a log of every change from the book, a logline, a one-page synopsis, and the scenes Claude found hardest to write.

The stages

| Stage | What you get | You