That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Really, when I write a book I'm the only one I have to please. That's the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay.
I really just love to open a blank document and spew, whereas with a screenplay I have to be more judicious.
In many ways, it's easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.
I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can't follow the form of the novel. It's a different thing completely. It's impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.
If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.
If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.
With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.
It's hard writing screenplays.
As a writer, it's very difficult to just hand your script over to someone else, especially if you have to watch them hurt it, and that's when I decided I would direct my own work.
I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit.