In this session, you’ll get a crash course on adapting your short story for the screen AND a boot camp on story revision. We'll talk through the questions to ask when adapting a story for the screen and strategies for translating a deeply interior prose piece into a propulsive, scene-driven script. We'll present these same adaptation methods as tools for revising a stalled or “failed” short story or novel opening, examining what can be accomplished by stripping down a scene, taking leaps in time and space, and lingering on the transformative moments in our fiction. You'll benefit the most by having a short story ready to adapt, or a stalled story or botched novel opening on hand.
DEAN BAKOPOULOS is the author of the novels Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Summerlong (Ecco/HarperCollins). The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction, Bakopoulos is an associate professor of cinematic arts and head of screenwriting at the University of Iowa and on the fiction faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A WGA screenwriter, he co-wrote the film adaptation of his first novel and is co-creator and executive producer of the HBO MAX series Made for Love. Bakopoulos is currently developing several original projects for television, including Little Dogs, based on his original short story The Dog.
