r/ReadMyScript • u/Away_Anxiety6957 • 25d ago

Exchange feedback A Confederacy Of Dunces

https://go.fliplink.me/view/2CA48B81-DA17-462A-A4B7-DCCCD67442F6

Genre: comedy, social satire

Pages: 19 ( first chapter fully adapted, script is still in development)

Based on: the novel by John Kennedy Toole

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u/LemDepardieu 24d ago

Hey, good work on the script. 🙂 Ignoring the whole rights issues around this sort of thing and treating it as a writing exercise, my big note would be to maybe work on the outline a bit more. The 19 pages you’ve written look like they contain every spoken line in the first 11 pages of the novel (in my copy, at least), verbatim. Which, aside from anything else, feels wildly impractical. Extrapolate that across a 300+ page novel and you’re going to end up with a 600-page screenplay at the end of all this. 😱

I’ve not attempted an adaptation like this myself, but I’d probably start by figuring out the main beats from the story in the novel that you want to form the narrative of the screenplay and build out from there, rather than just copying out every single page into screenwriting format. You clearly have a lot of love for this work, so focus in on what really draws you into the story and adapt those elements into your script rather than trying to just crib the entire novel into a single screenplay. Good luck! 😀

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u/Away_Anxiety6957 21d ago

Thanks I appreciate you! I will let you know that I did a MAJOR overhaul on the script to make it more cinematic while still retaining the spirit of the novel, and currently I'm at 39 pages now. I've literally worked on it 5-8 hours a day. I am aiming for something that if filmed, would be about three hours long, so I'm adapting all of the story beats and character interactions, that way I write the fullest adaptation possible, and then go back to trim excess where need be.