Far less is said about what happens after you’ve written.
Dr. Ken Atchity, founder of Writers Lifeline has spent his career on both sides of that question. He has written nearly 30 books, helped launch New York Times bestselling authors, represented stories to publishers and Hollywood, and produced nearly 40 films, including The Meg franchise.
What should I do next?
Publish, Pitch, Position
Once you have the story, you have three jobs: publish it, pitch it, and position it in the marketplace to promote it.
Those three things can look very different depending on what you’ve written and where you want to go.
For book writers, finishing the manuscript is only the beginning. The next questions is my manuscript ready to publish? How should it be published? And how do you get it in front of readers?
Direct publishing can give writers more control over the process—but publishing without a plan isn’t enough. The book needs to be ready, properly presented and supported by a strategy for reaching its audience.
For screenwriters, a great script still has to be sold.
That starts with the concept and logline. How do I write a logline? Can you explain the story in a way that makes someone want to hear more? Is the concept clear? Is the hook strong? And are you pitching the project to the right people?
And whether you’re writing a book or a screenplay, you have to know where your story belongs in the marketplace.
Who is it for? What makes it different? Why now? How do you get it noticed?
This is where story development, concept and logline review, publishing, and marketing come together. The goal isn’t simply to finish your work. It’s to understand how to develop it, position it, and move it forward.
These are things writers need to think more strategically about:
Getting your book ready for publishing
Developing and sharpening your concept and logline
Pitching your screenplay or story effectively
Positioning your work for the marketplace
Finding the right audience and building visibility
Marketing your book or project beyond simply putting it out there
Choosing the next step that makes sense for your larger writing career
Because there isn’t one path that works for every writer.
You don’t have to know the whole road. You just have to know the next move. Visit Writers Lifeline Services and see what’s your next step.
Authors often wonder whether their book could become a movie.
After all, a compelling novel already has characters, a world, a plot, and a story. However, taking a book from the page to the screen involves more than finding a producer and selling the film rights.
A book can become a movie. Yet not every book is structured to work as a movie without significant adaptation.
In a Film Courage interview, literary manager, producer, author, and story consultant Dr. Ken Atchity explains what writers need to understand when they hope to move a story from publishing into film or television.
His advice begins with a fundamental distinction: novels and movies serve different audiences.
A Great Novel Is Not Automatically a Great Movie
A novel gives readers room to explore.
Readers can spend pages inside a character’s thoughts. They can follow multiple storylines, absorb extensive backstory, and take their time moving through the narrative.
Film works differently.
Because a movie unfolds in real time, the audience must understand the story through what they see and experience. Consequently, the structure needs to create momentum from beginning to end.
That difference becomes particularly important when a novelist considers adaptation.
An editor may accept a novel in which the third act develops gradually. A film audience, however, expects the story to build toward a decisive turning point, climax, and resolution.
What works on the page does not always work on the screen.
Therefore, authors who hope to see their books adapted need to look at their stories through a filmmaker’s eyes.
The Three-Act Structure Still Matters
One of the biggest challenges in adapting a novel can be the story’s third act.
In many novels, the transition from the second act into the third is not especially pronounced. The story may gradually move toward its conclusion, and readers may accept that progression.
Film audiences tend to expect something more defined.
The story needs a clear progression:
Act One: Establish the protagonist, the world, the central conflict, and what is at stake.
Act Two: Complicate the protagonist’s goal. Increase the obstacles. Raise the stakes.
Act Three: Force the protagonist into the final confrontation and deliver a satisfying climax and resolution.
Most importantly, the movement between these acts needs to feel purposeful.
A strong Act Two should create pressure that eventually forces the story into Act Three. Then, the third act should deliver the payoff the audience has been anticipating.
As Ken emphasizes, Hollywood storytelling depends on keeping the audience engaged throughout the entire experience.
Your Protagonist Needs Someone to Fight
Structure alone does not make a story cinematic.
Characters matter just as much.
At the center of a compelling film is a protagonist the audience can understand, care about, or root for. That does not mean the protagonist needs to be perfect. In fact, flaws often make a character more relatable.
The audience simply needs a reason to invest.
However, the protagonist also needs opposition.
That is where the antagonist becomes essential.
A weak antagonist creates a predictable story. Conversely, a powerful antagonist forces the protagonist to work harder, make difficult choices, and change.
The stronger the antagonist, the stronger the protagonist has to become.
As a result, stronger opposition creates stronger conflict. Stronger conflict creates greater tension. Ultimately, that tension gives the audience a reason to keep watching.
The Antagonist Should Be Worthy of the Protagonist
An antagonist should not exist simply to make the protagonist’s life difficult.
The antagonist needs a goal, motivation, power, and the ability to create meaningful consequences.
More importantly, the antagonist should be capable of winning.
That possibility creates uncertainty.
If the audience knows the protagonist will easily defeat the villain, there is little dramatic tension. However, when the antagonist is intelligent, capable, motivated, and difficult to defeat, every confrontation carries greater weight.
That is why character conflict becomes so important when evaluating a book for film adaptation.
Ask yourself:
Who is standing in the protagonist’s way?
What does the antagonist want?
Why is the antagonist difficult to defeat?
What happens if the protagonist fails?
How does the conflict escalate?
What forces the protagonist to change?
If those questions do not have strong answers, the story may need more development before it is ready for the screen.
Movies Need a Big Payoff
Another important consideration is the ending.
A reader may finish a novel feeling satisfied by a quiet or ambiguous conclusion. A movie audience often expects a stronger sense of payoff.
That does not mean every film needs an explosive ending.
Instead, the ending needs to feel earned.
The central conflict should reach a meaningful climax. The protagonist should face the consequences of the choices made throughout the story. Finally, the audience should understand why the journey mattered.
A satisfying ending can determine how an audience remembers the entire experience.
Therefore, writers should not wait until the final pages to think about the ending.
The ending should influence the story from the beginning.
Think Like a Filmmaker Before You Pitch Your Book
If you believe your novel could become a movie, start by stepping away from the manuscript.
Instead, look at the story as a potential film.
What is the movie?
Who is the protagonist?
What does the protagonist want?
What stands in the way?
Who or what is the antagonist?
Where does the story turn?
What happens at the midpoint?
What forces the story into the third act?
What is the climax?
And, finally, what does the audience feel when the story ends?
These questions can reveal whether your book already contains the dramatic architecture needed for adaptation.
They can also reveal where the story needs work.
Your Book and Your Movie Are Two Different Storytelling Experiences
A successful adaptation does not necessarily reproduce a book scene by scene.
Instead, it identifies the story’s dramatic engine and rebuilds the material for a different medium.
That process may require changing characters, combining events, eliminating subplots, restructuring the timeline, or strengthening the central conflict.
For authors, that can be difficult.
You spent years building the world of your novel. Naturally, you may want to protect every scene, character, and storyline.
However, adaptation requires a different question.
Instead of asking, “How do I put my entire book on the screen?”
Ask:
“What is the movie inside my book?”
That shift can change everything.
Should Your Book Become a Movie?
The answer begins with the story.
A strong candidate for adaptation typically has elements that can engage a broad audience: a compelling protagonist, meaningful conflict, a worthy antagonist, escalating stakes, clear turning points, and a satisfying climax.
At the same time, the story needs to work visually.
Ultimately, ideas do not make movies. Stories do.
And great stories do more than entertain. They create characters audiences care about, conflicts they want to see resolved, and emotional journeys they want to experience.
For authors dreaming of seeing their work on screen, that is where the real work begins.
Watch Ken Atchity’s Full Film Courage Interview
In “Can Any Book Be Made Into a Movie?”, Ken Atchity discusses the challenges of adapting books for film, what makes a story cinematic, and what writers should understand about the expectations of a Hollywood audience.
Want to know whether your story is ready for its next step?
Writers Lifeline helps authors examine story structure, character development, market potential, and the elements that can determine whether a project is ready to move forward.
Your book may have the potential to become a film.
The first step is understanding the story you actually have—and the story the audience needs to see.
Kirkus Reviews gives Unstoppable: The Victoria Woodhull Story a “Get It” verdict, calling it “a deftly paced and meticulously researched novel” and “a compulsively readable portrait full of rich characterization and well-observed historical detail.”
Some of the most compelling stories are hiding in plain sight.
They may be buried in history books, reduced to a footnote, or remembered for a single controversial moment. But occasionally, a writer discovers the person behind the historical record—and realizes there is a much bigger story waiting to be told.
That is what Kate Danaher has done with Unstoppable: The Victoria Woodhull Story, a historical novel about a woman who was decades ahead of her time.
And now, Unstoppable has received a coveted “GET IT” verdict from Kirkus Reviews.
Victoria Woodhull was born into poverty in 19th-century Ohio. She married young, became a mother, educated herself largely through books, and eventually emerged as a financial entrepreneur, advocate for women’s rights, and the first woman to run for president of the United States.
She did this in an era when women couldn’t even vote.
That contradiction alone is remarkable. But for Danaher, Woodhull wasn’t simply a historical symbol. She was a complicated, ambitious, provocative woman with convictions, flaws, relationships, enemies, and enormous dreams.
That distinction matters.
A historical figure becomes a story when we stop looking only at what the person accomplished and start asking who this person was—and what it cost her to pursue what she believed.
Kirkus praised Danaher’s novel for its “rich characterization and well-observed historical detail,” noting that Victoria remains a vibrant presence throughout the book.
That is an important lesson for any writer working with history.
Historical fiction presents a particular challenge.
The writer has an extraordinary amount of material to work with: dates, political events, famous people, social customs, clothing, locations, technology, newspapers, and documented events.
But research alone doesn’t create a compelling narrative.
The story comes from the character moving through that world.
In Unstoppable, Danaher brings 19th-century America to life through details ranging from parlors and steamships to lavish dinners and the social conventions of the period. Kirkus specifically praised the novel’s novelistic rendering of the era.
But those details work because they surround a character who wants something.
Victoria wants a voice.
She wants independence.
She wants women to have a say in the government they help support.
And, ultimately, she wants to challenge a system that has already decided what a woman is allowed to be.
That gives the historical detail dramatic purpose.
One of the most useful questions a writer can ask when developing a story is:
What does my protagonist want that the world says she cannot have?
The larger the obstacle, the greater the potential for conflict.
Victoria Woodhull didn’t merely enter politics. She announced her intention to run for president at a time when women had no right to vote.
That creates an immediate dramatic question:
What happens when someone attempts the impossible?
For a storyteller, that is fertile territory.
The goal itself creates opposition. The culture resists it. Powerful people become threatened by it. The protagonist has to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice.
And that is where historical research becomes story structure.
Kirkus notes that Victoria’s campaign attracted powerful enemies, particularly after she publicly accused Henry Ward Beecher of adultery. The resulting scrutiny put her at risk of imprisonment.
This is another essential storytelling principle:
A protagonist’s goal becomes dramatically interesting when someone—or something—has a powerful reason to stop her.
Writers sometimes spend enormous amounts of time developing a protagonist’s backstory while overlooking the forces working against that character.
But conflict is what turns biography into narrative.
It would be easy to describe Victoria Woodhull simply as “the first woman to run for president.”
But that doesn’t tell us why we should care about her.
The more interesting question is:
What kind of woman would attempt something so improbable?
Danaher’s novel explores Victoria’s beliefs about marriage, sexuality, religion, women’s rights, money, and political power. Kirkus describes her as a far-seeing woman whose ideas about gender, religion, and happiness within marriage feel remarkably modern.
That’s where a historical figure becomes a character rather than a museum exhibit.
Writers should resist the temptation to make historical characters perfect heroes.
Contradictions are often more interesting than accomplishments.
A character who is brave but reckless, visionary but flawed, compassionate but difficult, or idealistic but capable of making disastrous choices can give a story far more life.
Great historical storytelling doesn’t make readers feel like they’re reading about “back then.”
It makes them feel as though they’re standing in the room.
That requires research, certainly—but also sensory detail, relationships, conflict, dialogue, and character choices.
Kirkus’s review highlights Danaher’s use of historical detail and her richly characterized cast, which includes figures such as Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Ulysses S. Grant.
Kate Danaher’s Unstoppable: The Victoria Woodhull Story is a reminder that history is filled with people whose stories are waiting to be rediscovered—and that the writer’s job is not simply to tell us what happened.
It is to make us care about the person it happened to.
Congratulations to Kate Danaher and Story Merchant Books on this important recognition from Kirkus Reviews.
