If your project is a biopic, a profile show on a real world figure, or a feature depicting a historical event often times the natural next steps are reading the half dozen highest regarded books the your subject or principal events of their lives along with as many interviews as are available. From there, I’d create a detailed, holistic story of your subject’s within the perimeters of your focus - be that a cradle to grave story, or maybe only a few days. That summary could be as short as five pages or as long as fifty, depending on your needs and is sourced throughout, so you can see where the information was pulled from as you go. Also included in the citations are where you can read the actual text itself for more information.

In my process, checking the sources’ sources to determine where the current narratives about people, places, and ideas have been generated is essential to getting to the root of how the story of your focus has come to fruition. That information is as essential to your adaption as the hard facts themselves.

It’s important not to lean on just one book in your research project - if even that’s the one you’ve optioned or are adapting - as every author inevitably takes liberties in dovetailing the facts toward their version of the story. Reading the whole canon is critical in determining where our source authors editorialized. This isn’t always a problem, often times it’s the editorialization process that makes any book worth reading. But you need to know where those liberties have been taken before you re-represent them in your script so you can assess the facts for yourself instead of blindly repeating someone else’s narrativization of them. Because that’s where your project is going to shine - through your analysis of how this particular figure, set of characters or community can be represented on screen in a new way.

A detailed timeline incorporating major story and character events, concurrent societal, political and cultural events is a natural next step. If generated thoughtfully toward your specific take, a timeline can act as a beat sheet or linear outline of the principal events. This is again where tools like wikipedia and ChatGPT often fail to be of real service: they may have all the dates imaginable, but sorting them for relevance to your character’s internal struggles as well as toward informing your story world requires human understanding of story.

Character biographies are helpful as well for the principal figures involved in your film or television show. Expensive photo galleries for projects post 1860 add color and tone to your mental picture of the events of your story. If needed, summaries of larger societal, cultural, or historical events featured in your series are generated as well. Does your TV show feature a Chechen terrorist? You might want to know how the First and Second Chechen Wars shook out, in brief, before you lean into a trope villain. Knowing the backstory behind the concurrent events or marginal characters in your project will add complexity and depth to your portrayal - elements that audiences will innately resonate with.

Combing out of print books, buried interviews, and obscure primary source documents is the finishing process that generates invaluable information for your project because this is where we find facts, or challenges faced by real people that haven’t made it to the wikipedia pages, to chat gpt, or to the estabilished record. Your take on this person or history is unique to you - so in what world would all of the relevant facts, instances and dilemmas to your specific story already be reported in the popular record? This is where the old adage that the truth is stranger than fiction always bears out to be correct.

In this historical bible for your project, you now have every relevant book ethically sourced into a single cohesive history, a timeline to assess at a glance the interrelated events in linear sequence, character biographies to see the whole scope of each figure in your story, a compendium of primary source information, and an image gallery to base your character and scene descriptions in as needed.

This is the sort of exhaustive work that when done properly, will allow you to access tomes of information easily that otherwise would have taken hours of mental energy to sift through that could have been spent refining your story. Because that’s what you’re here to do - adapt, write, craft, and focus these anecdotes on the page for the screen.