Simon & Schuster Canada

There’s a million reasons why this phenomenon is rare — ranging from the “this is my baby and I refuse to change the ending, dialogue, plot device, or cut even a single word” to the simple fact that studios want a well-established, well-vetted screenwriter with whom to trust their millions of dollars. But over the years, there have been a few other cases where a writer writing the screenplay for his or her own novel has worked extremely well. Here’s a top five.

— from Book to Big Screen: Writers Adapt Their Own Fiction