On Adaptation: From Page to Screen

In November 2024, writers Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jonathan Ames, Anna Dorn, and Jane Hu gathered at LITLIT for a discussion with Paul Thompson about how it feels to take a work from book to screen.

By Paul Thompson, Jane Hu, Jonathan Ames, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Anna DornNovember 16, 2025

• Film

• Fiction

THE FOLLOWING IS a condensed version of the panel “On Adaptation” held at LARB’s annual literary festival, LITLIT, in 2024, featuring writers Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jonathan Ames, Jane Hu, and Anna Dorn. The conversation was moderated by Paul Thompson and made possible through the support of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Watch the conversation in full on this page and find past panels from the festival here. LITLIT is a celebration of the West Coast literary arts. Free and open to the public, the festival welcomes literary presses and organizations for two days of programming. Find more information here.

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PAUL THOMPSON: I moved to Los Angeles about 12 years ago because I thought: How hard can selling a TV pilot be? It’s 22 minutes.

This is a great opportunity to talk about adaptation and the different forms of prose fiction, or prose nonfiction, and screenwriting, because we do live in L.A. and—to the degree that these are interconnected mediums and industries—this is a unique ecosystem. I’m interested in the first moment the four of you realized that these two forms of writing have such radically different challenges and capacities. When in the process did you realize they might be entirely different beasts?

JONATHAN AMES: I didn’t necessarily realize that they’re different beasts. Not to contradict the question, but when I write fiction, I see the scenes in my mind. Once, an older writer at an artist colony said “writing is a form of seeing.” I think I see the scenes, I see a movie in my head, and then I try to put it into prose to create a dream in the reader’s mind. So adapting my own work for film or television wasn’t necessarily that hard. You have to pare things down, but I still had the visual component from the scenes I had written.

That said, prose is so different because you can, say, jump around in time. You have interiority. For me, it’s the preferred form of writing, because you can really—you know, you’re the costume designer, you’re the director of photography, you’re the casting agent, everything. But screenwriting is creating a sort of blueprint for the crew and the actors. So that’s very different. One of the things people always tell you with screenwriting is to keep the prose minimal (it’s almost like police crime-blotter writing). You try to be very efficient, because each page is like a minute.

To your point about being in charge of all the different departments: there are no budget or logistical constraints when you’re writing prose. You’re unlimited.

JANE HU: I think I will also contradict the question. I mean, I was trained in a department that didn’t really see the forms as all that different—or, rather, saw film studies as growing out of literary studies, right? A lot of the approaches that one takes to studying, analyzing, and thinking about cinema—you know, like historiography—come from literary departments. Obviously, there’s a lot of distinguishing that happens afterwards …

One thing that is interesting and sort of a difficulty when it comes to teaching the analysis of film to students is that they’re perhaps overly trained in reading in terms of narrative. So, some of it is having them understand what exactly is intentionally happening when they’re seeing a film: say, the lighting. Breaking down visual language and, like, tiers of soundtrack, all of that stuff—you have to defamiliarize a little bit because it’s become so second nature. Overall, I like to think of them as the same close reading skills; reading a work of fiction isn’t all that different from reading a work of narrative film or cinema.

To your point about defamiliarization: One of my early editors would always ask critics to step back and say, “Hold on, is this in color or not?” To really think about formal aspects, along with everything else.

Viet, as we’ve been saying, these forms can be similar. But as someone who recently saw his work on-screen, would you say the forms have capacities to bring out different aspects of a story you’re familiar with?

VIET THANH NGUYEN: Sometimes they really converge—if you’ve seen The Queen’s Gambit, for example. I liked that TV series so much, I went and read the novel by Walter Tevis. And I realized: it’s completely adaptable to TV. I mean, it’s almost written like a screenplay in and of itself.

I happen to have written a novel that falls under the genre of “impossible to adapt to the screen,” or so I’ve been told. Then I think, for me, there is a huge difference, because film and TV are inherently collaborative mediums. And that’s so radically different from what is required of most writers. I like to talk about the fact that when poets write, the only thing that it costs a poet is their life—and no one cares about the lives of poets. But when you make a TV show or a film, it costs tens of millions of dollars, and then everybody cares; you have all this money invested in it. The fact is that I never wanted to write a screenplay because I knew that after, everybody else would meddle with it. And that was the experience with the Sympathizer TV series. We had a writer’s room, we had scripts and so on, and I read the scripts, and I said, “That looks good,” or “That doesn’t look good,” whatever. Changes were made. Then they go and they make the thing, and they’re changing it even as they’re shooting it.

So, there was this knowledge on my part that I would have to trust the collaborative process. Which, if you look at the history of Hollywood, is not a good bet from the perspective of writers. But I happened to get fairly lucky: we assembled collaborators who actually shared the vision of the novel (or at least said so, to my face). And if you’re judging from the output, what was done at the end, I think that was fairly accurate. I remember—basically, the auteur of the series, Park Chan-wook, when we premiered the episode, the debut, he apologized to me semi-facetiously about the changes that he had to make in the adaptation. “But,” he said, “hopefully you realize that there are things you can do with the visual medium that you can’t do with the literary medium.” And I think that’s absolutely right. In my case, the novel was supposedly “impossible to adapt” because it’s just a confession. It’s an interior monologue, it’s voice-driven, it’s driven by the vocabulary. The reason I wanted Park Chan-wook so badly was because he could achieve visually what I was trying to achieve narratively, through the visual palette, color shots, what he could do with the actors and the music—all of these different visual and sound elements that would try to translate what I was doing on the written page.

Anna Dorn—you’re now facing the prospect of your work being adapted for the screen. Obviously, it’s a collaborative process, and you might not know what it looks like until the final edit comes out. Do you feel nervousness, maybe even preciousness, about your story going through that?

ANNA DORN: Nervousness, yes. Preciousness? No. Not to be cynical, but ultimately, I just want money. Sorry! Sorry. Somebody had to say it. TV and adaptations—there’s a lot more money involved. Did you get health insurance? Did you get in the Writers Guild? Maybe I’m precious about those things, like getting health insurance. No: I don’t care if the adaptation is horrible.

But I do love film and TV. I think a big reason I was drawn to writing novels is because I love being alone and not having to work with anybody. And in a writer’s room, there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, you’re getting notes from people whose opinions you don’t necessarily respect, and I find being diplomatic in those situations (as you might imagine) incredibly challenging. But also, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to learn. I haven’t been in a writer’s room, but I have had two books optioned, one of which went through the pitching process—like writing the pitch, pitching it—so I have some sense. And I learned about plotting and structure and format and making ideas more profitable, which is something I’m obviously always interested in, because I’m a vicious capitalist. No, I’m not. (I mean, maybe I am.)

You brought your trademark optimism to the process! I’m curious; I think everyone here probably can imagine the drawbacks or anxieties attendant to collaboration after years of solitary work. What are the positives? What did you like about being in rooms, about seeing your work go through a room? What does it bring that you might not have expected? Please: Contradict me again.

JA: I learned a lot of tricks with screenplays. Like, you shouldn’t have a scene be longer than two pages. Once it gets to be two pages, it starts dragging and ends up getting cut, certainly in comedy. If you go longer than two pages, you need a couple of entrances and exits, other people to come in and really switch it up. But it was a lot of fun to try to write fast dialogue and see that come to life. And the more I wrote for TV, the more I began to have fun with doing visual things, like calling up images from silent films.

VTN: So, I’m an “executive producer” on The Sympathizer, which means, apparently, nothing. Beforehand? “I promise you have creative control.” I said to my agent, “Do I really have creative control?” He said, “No, they just say that to get you to sign the contract.”

Again, I mostly am a writer because I like sitting in a room by myself. So it was an arduous process in a lot of ways, because you had to be an extrovert. The hardest part for me was spending four or five years having meetings with people and doing a lot of talking. (Apparently, making movies or TV shows involves a lot of talking, a lot of lunch.) But the collaborative part was actually really, really interesting. I’ll never forget the moment I met Sandra Oh for the first time—she’s in the TV series—and she turned to me and said, “So, what’s your process?” I was like: “Wow, I have no idea. No one’s ever asked me that question before.” Because no one cares about a writer’s process. And then, you know, meeting Park Chan-wook … He came to my house, and this man had clearly read the novel. He’s a director and so on, but he’s also a writer—

He was a critic initially, right?

VTN: He’s a critic. He’s a scholar as well. Getting all his questions and suggestions, I thought: Where were you when I was writing the book? It could have been a better book!

There were certain things that he did in the making of the show that tightened things up. It was interesting watching all these really talented people in their own disciplines do things that I could never do, and realizing, as I was watching this TV series being made—you know, it took at least a year—that there is a parallel between that production and the written drafting process. You read a book, you see the finished product, and all of us who are writers know that there were a thousand layers of stuff that we had to scrape away and redo and all that. To watch a TV series getting made … I realized the script is just the basis, and then you layer all of this other stuff on top. And that is really interesting to watch—and also really boring. I got a greater appreciation for how much [patience] the artistic people have to have to tolerate the drudgery and the boredom in order to arrive at what you get to watch at the end, which is a really spectacular product. You get to watch seven hours! And that took them like a year. It’s not a complaint; it took me two years to write The Sympathizer. Any artistic process involves that kind of discipline. With TV, it’s just manifested among a collective and a collaborative group of people, versus a single individual.

When we’re talking about adaptation, it’s usually not bidirectional; no one is having panels about the novelizations of movies. Anna, you didn’t grow up here, but I think of you as a very L.A. writer. The entertainment industry figures largely in your fiction. What is the appeal to you, not just of the actual on-screen product of movies and television, but also of the milieu around it as fodder for prose fiction?

AD: Well … it’s funny you say that. It’s pretty awkward being in the adaptation talks about my book Perfume & Pain, because a lot of it is inspired by the process of another book I had [that was] being optioned, and how excruciating I found those meetings—like, how bad I was at them. Now I have to show up to these new meetings, and we don’t really address the elephant in the room, which is that I kind of, like, despise Hollywood. I guess I have a love-hate relationship with it. There are a lot of TV shows and films that, you know, blow my mind, and I worship them. But I mean—this is not news—you know that a lot of what’s made in Hollywood is not great or inspiring. And there are people who really think that it is.

The thing that I struggle the most with in the Hollywood world is the language. I think it works really well in a book; my books are a little satirical and it’s pretty easy to satirize. They love to, like, tell you that they love you, that you’re a genius. They’re obsessed with you—but they’ve never read your book, it’s so obvious. And I don’t care, you don’t need to read my book, but don’t pretend that you have. I don’t know how to handle it, because they say something that directly shows they have not read the book, and I’m just kind of like, “Yeah … what’s it like to be such a huge fan of mine?” You’ll do a pitch and the whole room is like, “Oh my god—we’re dying. This is the best thing we’ve ever heard. We’re fainting. We’re on the ground.” And then they pass on it like five seconds later. It’s so funny. It’s part of the reason, honestly, I want to be in a writer’s room: so I can freaking write about it in a novel. That’s the main reason—and the money.

I remember reading reviews of The Sympathizer that explicitly said it was “unfilmable,” “unadaptable.” And that was meant as value-neutral—or a compliment, right? You’re taking unique advantage of the form. As we go through these different phases of television and film, has your idea about what stories are right for adaptation widened? Has it not? What do you think makes something actually “unadaptable”?

VTN: That question is usually asked in terms of formal aspects of the novel or the book or whatever. You know: Something is “too complicated” to adapt. There’s obviously truth to that. It would probably be really difficult to try to adapt Finnegans Wake, for example—

Do you want to read my spec?

VTN: [Laughs.] Awesome, yeah. But there’s another layer of unadaptability, which is that certain kinds of stories just are not seen as adaptable. I mean, people were saying that about The Sympathizer in terms of its voice and its literary complexity, but honestly—it’s a Vietnamese story, you know? And what can you say? Hollywood is generally not at the avant-garde of political complexity. The first American artists who responded to the Vietnam War were the poets. The last American artists to respond were the Hollywood people. The Sympathizer is a critique, in one dimension, of the American military-industrial complex. People in the military-industrial complex generally don’t want to be critiqued. And I call Hollywood the “unofficial Ministry of Propaganda” for the military-industrial complex.

Sometimes officially.

VTN: Officially, yes. On top of that, again, it’s about Vietnamese stories. Telling stories about certain populations in this country has been extremely difficult for a very long time. It took, I don’t know, five or six years from The Sympathizer winning the Pulitzer Prize to get the green light? I think it was partly: “What are we going to do with the story about Vietnamese people speaking Vietnamese?” I mean, that is even more perplexing than avant-garde aesthetics, or maybe just as perplexing. There are so many things that have to happen in order for that to take place. The novel had to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Then, also, COVID (the so-called “China virus”), the rise of anti-Asian violence, [and] the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta made people realize that maybe we’re not as multicultural a country or a film industry as we would like to imagine. Maybe we actually have deep-seated racist problems against Asians in this country. So, I do think that the shock of COVID and people witnessing anti-Asian [sentiment] unfolding in real time helped to create this opening for us to do The Sympathizer. I’m just using this as an example of how difficult it is, as you’re implying, to get certain works made. It’s sort of a miracle it was; we probably will not have a sequel to The Sympathizer TV series.

JA: I don’t think I can speak to the larger issues. But I can speak to what might work well adaptation-wise within my own experience. Like (and this was like 30 years ago), Francis Ford Coppola was starting a literary magazine called Zoetrope, and his pitch—I was one of a bunch of writers in a cafe—was that the short story often makes for the best film. Rear Window is based on a short story.

I always tell my friends: don’t write a spec screenplay. Write a long short story. Write a novella, because people read them—because, you know, we’re making fun of the Hollywood people, but they’re good readers, a lot of them, and very bright, and they love novels or long short stories. I feel like you can really realize your vision if you like to write prose, because people bring so much bias to screenplays.

A lot of times, that’s why novels fall short as films—they’re so long, and a screenplay has got to be, at most, 115 to 120 pages. It’s got to move quickly. I wrote my novella, You Were Never Really Here, and the director basically took it and transferred it into Final Draft, and it worked really well. And then she began to change it, and she did beautiful work with it. Part of what I realized with that novella, and then my subsequent novels, is that I write within a tight time frame. The story will take place over two or three days so that, like, the movie is propulsive. What’s great about what’s happened in TV, though, is you can take a novel, a 400-page novel, or 500-page novel, and do eight episodes. Then you can really do it justice, and you’re not having to cut out all this stuff. You can, you know, honor the novel in a good way.

Jane, what about you? How have you seen Hollywood’s approach to adaptation evolve—or not evolve, as the case may be?

JH: I feel like I probably don’t know anything that a lot of people in this room do, but there’s the rise of IP-based film production—sort of, like, commodity brand-oriented adaptations, where you’re generating narrative and plot around objects or scenes, like Polly Pocket or whatever. Something of that is interesting. I don’t know if anyone read the Vulture profile of Ben Mezrich, who wrote the book that The Social Network was based on? What I found interesting about his trajectory was that it’s kind of like the inverse or the opposite end of the difficulties of adaptation that Viet was talking about. He will, like, grab stories now, from headlines, and then write a 10-to-14-page proposal and take it to Hollywood first. And then, once Hollywood buys it, he’ll commit to writing the book version. So the temporality of book-to-film adaptation is much tighter then.

Sometimes even simultaneous.

JH: Right. They were even saying that he’s “post-IP,” because it’s actually his name, tagged to the story, that generates the value. But yeah, that was interesting in terms of thinking about, like, the rise of nonfiction in contrast to novels, right? Writing “based on a true story” seems to be compelling … It made me think about which genres, not just IP-based genres or templates, but the difference between fiction and nonfiction—which is more salable, I guess.

The salability of nonfiction definitely informs the magazine world. There have been two projects I can think of in Los Angeles that cropped up that were pretty open about their intention to commission and publish stories with the explicit goal of them being optioned. Now, I know we’re not supposed to say these things out loud, but do any of you feel pressure to write things that are adaptable when you’re writing prose fiction?

AD: I think about it for sure, because I’m the capitalist. That’s a joke! That’s a joke—but definitely, I’ve started thinking about it more because I’m aware that that’s sort of how you make writing novels, like, doable as a career. Also, like I said before, I’m not precious about the adaptation. I think just having an adaptation, period, is really good for your career as a novelist. It means the book will sell more, publishers will invest more in you, foreign publishers will be more interested—it’s this whole ecosystem.

Also, you know, I’m here to entertain. I’m not here to do anything much beyond that. I think a book that’s adaptable is the type of book that I want to write; if it works on a screen, if it works for TV, that’s great, that’s what I’m trying to do. And for me, a lot of that is just making the plotting stronger, making it more dramatic, making more action, less thinking. (Though a lot of my books are just a girl thinking, which I also like.) So, I definitely do think about it—but not in a cynical way, in a fun way. I think.

VTN: No one has pressured me to write anything adaptable, and I don’t need to do that either, but my film and TV agent is doing his job, which is to try to bring me opportunities to write movies or screenplays. My feeling on all this is that it’s a test. It’s a test like writing a novel is a test: writing a screenplay or TV series is a test of working with a collaborative process, a test of trying to work with a studio or producers. I’m not sure I’m up for the test. I wanted to do it once to see how disastrous it is or isn’t, adapting to a totally different industry and a different way of making art that I’m not used to.

JA: I, over the years, got very addicted to the page-turner. I love the experience, as a reader, where I stay up until 2:00 in the morning. Those are the kinds of books that I’ve been wanting to write. I do think when I write these shorter, faster novels, I’m aware that they could make really good films, but to get anything filmed or made is climbing such a mountain, you know? It’s really a miracle that anything does get filmed because of the money, bringing all the people together, all that. I call it a “Swiss clock of luck”—like everything has to precisely happen, just right.

But I think for all of us here who love books or love to write … the real joy for me as a writer is to be alone at the desk. The world goes away; it’s a form of meditation. I guess it gives me meaning, and all the adaptation stuff is sometimes a way to pay the rent, or it’s a new adventure or a test—but I really enjoy, especially as I’ve gotten older, just playing with sentences.

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Featured image: Photography by Lynora Valdez.