Keep the Heart, Change the Rest: Turn a Book Into a Screen Story
How to convert a story into a screenplay comes down to one decision before any formatting or scene cards. Find the single feeling the book leaves in you, and protect it. Everything else in the book is up for negotiation, including the ending.
That sounds harsh to anyone who loves the book. It's also the only way a 300-page novel fits into two hours, or eight episodes.
Some of my favourite Hindi films are adaptations. Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool and Omkara take Shakespeare's Macbeth and Othello into the Mumbai underworld and the gang politics of small-town Uttar Pradesh. 7 Khoon Maaf grew out of a Ruskin Bond short story, and Pinjar out of Amrita Pritam's novel. None of them copies its source. Each one keeps the ache and builds a new world around it. If I could adapt anything for today's audience, I'd start with Satyajit Ray's stories, Amrita Pritam and Shivaji Sawant's work. The feeling in those books hasn't aged a day. Only the world around it has.
Keep the feeling, not the furniture
A novel can live inside a character's head for forty pages. A camera can't. The novelist has memory and pages of explanation. The screenwriter has what the audience can see and hear, in the order they see it.
So you can't move a book onto the screen. You rebuild it. And when you rebuild, you need to know what the load-bearing wall is, because that's the one thing you don't touch.
In advertising we learned this the hard way with long brand stories that had to become a thirty-second film. The client always wanted every fact in. The films that worked kept one feeling and let the facts go.
How to convert a story into a screenplay?
I break it into three moves.
Name the feeling. Write one sentence about what the book leaves you with when you close it. Not the plot. The ache or the warmth that stays with you.
Cut to that feeling. Every scene and every flashback has to serve that sentence on screen. If it only served the book, it goes, however much you love it.
Invent what the screen needs. Some of the best moments in adaptations are not in the book at all. When you take out explanation, you often need a new image or action to carry what the paragraph used to carry.
Notice that step three gives you permission. A faithful adaptation isn't one that copies the most scenes. It's one that makes the audience feel what the reader felt.
Spoiler note: the next section reveals the endings of the novel Musafir Cafe and season 1 of the Netflix series.
Musafir Cafe: a closed book becomes an open question
Divya Prakash Dubey's Hindi novel Musafir Cafe came out in 2016. The Netflix series of the same name, created by Sharanya Rajgopal from Dubey's novel and directed by Ruchir Arun, released on 24 July 2026 in eight episodes. Vikrant Massey plays Chander, Vedika Pinto plays Sudha and Mahima Makwana plays Preeti.
According to Republic World's book-versus-series comparison, the novel closes its story. Sudha hides a pregnancy from Chander, raises their son alone and builds her own life. Chander is later introduced to his son. There is no romantic reunion. The book ties things off.
The series keeps the people and the ache between them, then refuses to close. By the last episode Sudha is back in Mussoorie and back in Chander's life, planning a move to Singapore. Chander has a life with Preeti. The season stops before he decides. Netflix renewed it for a second season.
Look at that as a writer, not as a fan. The book's heart is two people who loved each other at the wrong time. The series keeps that heart exactly. What it changes is the shape around it. A finished story becomes a question, and on a streaming platform an open question is something the audience carries into the next season.
Kahani wahi hai, bas darwaza khula chhod diya. The story is the same; the door has been left open.
Whether you like that choice or not, it's a deliberate one. The writers knew what had to survive and what was free to move.
Spoiler note: the next section reveals the endings of the novel and the film The Shining.
The Shining: the scenes nobody read
The Shining (1980) was written for the screen by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, from Stephen King's 1977 novel. Jack Torrance takes a winter caretaker job at an empty mountain hotel with his wife and son, and the hotel slowly turns him against them.
Kubrick cut hard. The novel gives Jack a long past, including a father who beat him, and the film drops most of it. The book's hedge animals that come alive became a hedge maze. The book ends with the hotel's boiler exploding and the Overlook destroyed. The film ends with Jack frozen in the maze.
Then look at what Kubrick added. The typed pages Wendy finds, the same line about all work and no play repeated sheet after sheet, are not in the novel. Neither is "Here's Johnny!" as Jack breaks through the door. Jack Nicholson improvised that line. These are some of the most remembered moments in the film, and no reader ever met them on the page.
That's step three in action. The novel tells you Jack is losing his mind through his thoughts. The film has no access to his thoughts, so it gives you a stack of paper.
King didn't like the result, and said so for years. His view is that the novel's evil lives in the hotel, while the film puts it inside Jack. So the book's own author disagreed about which heart Kubrick kept. That's worth sitting with. When you adapt, you are choosing the heart, and the original writer may not agree with your choice.
How can I turn my story into a movie?
The same three moves apply when the story is your own, whether it's a short story or a novel draft. Most writers find it harder with their own work, because every scene cost them something.
Start with a logline, because a logline forces you to name the feeling and the conflict in one sentence. Then lay out your big beats and check that the middle of your story still carries that feeling, since that's where adapted scripts tend to sag under leftover book material.
When I adapt, the first things I let go of are the period the story is set in, the characters' backgrounds and the way they speak. Those belong to the book's world. The feeling belongs to everyone, so that is the part I keep.
Then write scenes, not summaries. A paragraph that says "she was lonely in the big city" becomes a scene where she eats dinner standing at the counter. That's the whole craft of adaptation in a single swap.
Try this
Take a book or story you love. Write the one feeling it leaves you with in a single sentence.
Now list every major scene and cut each one that doesn't serve that sentence. Be ruthless on the first pass.
Then test each cut. Ask: if I put this scene back, would the film get better? If the honest answer is yes, it returns. If the answer is "the book had it," it stays cut.
Quick answers
What is the difference between an original screenplay and an adapted screenplay? An original screenplay is written from the writer's own story. An adapted screenplay is based on existing material, such as a novel, a play, a true account or an earlier film. You'll need the rights to the source before you can sell an adaptation.
Do I have to follow the book's ending? No. Musafir Cafe left its ending open where the book closed it, and The Shining replaced the book's finale entirely. What you can't lose is the feeling the ending was there to deliver.
Can I adapt a book I don't own the rights to? You can practise on it, and that's a great way to learn. To sell or produce it, you need the rights from the author or publisher.
Adapting from source material is part of The Foundation of Storytelling, my live online course in Hindi and English.
Send me the one-sentence feeling of a book you want to adapt, plus the three scenes you'd cut first, on WhatsApp. I'll tell you which cut is brave and which one the film will miss.
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