I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I love to do very long and complicated scenes.
I've written a couple screenplays and half-finished plays.
Almost every scene, I re-think as I'm about to start drawing it, and at least half of the time I'm changing dialogue or whatever, or adding scenes or different things.
I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now.
I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.
When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.
I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.
I write screenplays in the middle of the night.
I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.
Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.