Make a screen play or a novel?

I'm so glad you jumped in here!! I knew this was the discussion for you. Love Your Favourite Wife

wow thats really ingenious

A screenplay forces you to concentrate on dialogue. Everyone loves my dialogue. Novels "show" rather than "tell", so you have to concentrate on action. By going from one to the other and then back, you can take a first draft to final draft in two adaptations.

I think if I were to try and convert something I already wrote I would lose my mind very quickly lol. But then I see movies where they come out THEN the book does which makes me always wonder if they just took the movie and added a lot of filler type stuff and THEN made it a book?

That's a good point: It does seem easier to write the book of the film, than make the film of the book. People like Alan Dean Foster seemed to turn them out by the barrowful when I was a kid; he probably wrote half the screenplay novelisations I ever read in the 1980s. Still is, by the look of his Wiki entry. I'd say it's probably the process. From book to film, you're taking one person's vision, and running it through a committee; the director, the producer, the actors, the visual effects people. All of them will have an idea of how the movie should look. The screenplay becomes almost incidental, and that's probably what makes it such a complex deal to convert. The other way round, movie to book, you already have a clear visual image of what things look like, if the film is already produced; it's just a case of describing what you see, and perhaps filling in a little backstory, giving the reader something they wouldn't necessarily have gotten from the movie. You're going from a team effort to a single author.

Moon, The processes are different, but similar. There are two types of scripts, a spec script and a production script. The spec script only contains the scenery and action that's absolutely necessary. The producer and director will "suggest" the action required for a production script. A spec script has to have strong dialogue. This is what attracts actors and agents to sign on to the project. With a novel, you need to have already sold 50,000 copies of your first book before an agent or publishing house will even read your query. It's easier to sell a script to Hollywood (and more lucrative), than to get somebody in the established American publishing industry to even reply to you.

Cool. I don't know why but I have always wondered. When I wrote my books I pictured them as movies and I don't know if that was so I could visualize and write it better or if it had potential to be one

lol thats funny because I already had an actor for the male character in my mind but couldn't think of an appropriate female actress at all for mine and I think it kind of made me have a few issues on how to make her react to certain things since I couldn't fully picture it.

Moon, That's exactly how it should be. It's much easier for me to write, if I only transcribe what I've already seen. In fact, during the character development phase, I always write down the actor/actress I would choose for each character and the traits I've observed in their work. My hero is Richard Dean Anderson in his characters of MacGuyver and Stargate. My Heroine is Mira Furlan (an actress from the former Yugoslavia) in her role as Ambassador Delenn in Babylon-5. These are the characters I have in my head as I write.