literary-adaptation ยท diff
git:20260922.e4b072e to git:20261009.50e1aa7
33 added, 0 removed. Audit A to A.
---
name: literary-adaptation
description: Decide what a literary adaptation preserves or changes and map source units to film destinations; no screenplay or media generation.
---
# Literary Adaptation
Own AdaptationContract and DramaticCompression in `contracts/creative_source.py`. Consume reviewed LiteraryAnalysis and PhilosophicalCore. Preserve must-keep units, core relationships/events, arc, theme conflict and narrative identity. Record permitted operations and a reason, source-unit reference and narrative effect for each decision. Decisions are ADAPTATION_INVENTION, including choices to preserve or compress source material; never write them back into analysis.
+ ## Faithful dramatic invention
+
+ Before mapping operations, find what makes this particular work live: a relationship,
+ contradiction, fate, narrative address or way of knowing. Fidelity can require a new
+ dramatic process rather than reproducing the author's event summary. Separate the
+ adopted expression from explicit user locks; an authorized alternative remains a
+ candidate, not a silent revision of the adopted contract.
+
+ Read an omission in context. It may compress a process whose cost cinema needs to
+ let people experience, preserve a consequential uncertainty, or simply omit a
+ detail with no expressive importance. Do not assume every absence is intentional
+ ambiguity, and do not fill limited knowledge with a convenient fact. Ask what the
+ work would lose if the audience knew the answer, and what it loses if they never
+ experience the process. Core relationships and fate can constrain invention while
+ actions, exchanges, local time and the world's activity remain open.
+
+ Judge an invention by the encounter it makes possible: whose independent need can
+ now act, what another person receives or refuses, and what cost remains after the
+ event. Historically plausible scenery or an additional tactic is not that benefit.
+ Let ordinary activity, waiting, misunderstanding or persistent desire contribute
+ when they change the lived relation; do not require louder conflict, a new person,
+ tragic history or a philosophical speech. Compare a complete expanded passage with
+ a persuasive condensed form. Keep expansion when its experiential gain warrants
+ its loss of compression, uncertainty or narrative emphasis; keeping the condensed
+ form is equally legitimate. A forceful invention can still distort the work.
+
+ Hand the chosen opportunity, protected source relations and expressive tradeoff to
+ Story/Scene and Character, without dictating specialist realization. Record invented
+ facts and speech as invention, not recovered source evidence. Reconsider the
+ proposition when local gains damage the whole arc or first-person narrative form.
+
+ ## Source accounting
+
Account for every source unit with KEEP, MERGE, COMPRESS, REMOVE, REORDER, EXTERNALIZE or an explicitly permitted other operation. Compression maps those same decision IDs to Film Beat/Scene IDs; do not maintain a second decision list or summarize without destinations. REMOVE has no destination. Preserved units cannot disappear. A significant causal or character change requires upstream contract revision and renewed review before screenplay persistence.
Bind the combined adaptation/compression review to the source revision. Rights come from supplied artifact assertions and the deterministic gate, not this Skill. No formal screenplay text belongs to this upstream package.
Use [Creative Source boundary](../../docs/creative-source.md) for review hashes, routing, persistence and source-map consumers. `source.prepare_screenplay` validates the complete reviewed package; it does not author missing specialist outputs.
For missing retained context read `work.get_work`, `script.get_script`, or `context.build_context`.