Screenplays are enjoyed by audiences through movie viewings, either at the movie theater, in the comforts of their own homes with their own home entertainment centers, in hotel rooms, or through smaller screens on their devices. Novels are a multi-hour commitment that often ranges from multiple days to multiple weeks and even multiple months. Screenplays are only a one and a half to two-hour commitment — give or take — through the movie viewing experience.
Novels allow for the added thrill of the reader being able to visualize the descriptions of the text using their own imagination, offering different interpretations. Screenplays are experienced through the limitations of seeing the story unfold through the interpretation of the filmmaker and their cast and crew — their version. Whatever the preference may be, when making this decision between being a novelist and being a screenwriter, an important and key aspect is how you want your stories to be ingested — internally with novels or externally with movies.
Now forget what I or anyone else has written. Because in the end, it depends on what you want to do. If you love movies and you want to tell cinematic stories, go that route. You show, rather than tell. If you are more detailed and want to really dive into the thoughts and backgrounds of characters and their stories, writing a novel is the route for you. The late Dances with Wolves author Michael Blake originally wrote the story as a screenplay in the early s.
He later worked with Kevin Costner on the film Stacy's Knights. Blake was reportedly staying over at Costner's house when he read the Dances with Wolves script. He and eventual Dances with Wolves producer Jim Wilson agreed that despite its worth, no studio would produce it. They recommended that Blake write it as a novel and try to get it published — and then work to use a reader base to entice studios to adapt it for the screen.
Blake did just that. It was first published as a paperback and sold primarily in airports. It soon became a bestseller, allowing Kevin Costner himself the chance to obtain the rights knowing that the film adaptation would get the necessary studio distribution.
The rest is Oscar-winning history. We live in a multi-platform obsessed world. It's no longer about the single platform base. Movie studios require intellectual property for most of their productions — thus they seek out novels to adapt. Publishers want novels that will also draw in movie studios for the adaptation rights. This offers writers a chance to play on both fields — for the benefit of their own projects. You can write a novel to draw in an audience that studios can use to pre-market an eventual adaptation.
You can also write a screenplay as part of your book proposal package. And it goes beyond the monetary aspects of signing deals in either industry. Novels offer screenwriters a chance to break free from the constraints of the screenplay format and technical structure. You can expand on the scope and range. You can expand on the character backgrounds and utilize their inner thoughts to further the character depth. You can expand on the smaller characters involvement in the story as well.
Screenplays offer novelists a chance to utilize more structure in their stories, not only for writing a more commercially successful novel but also to have a chance of being adapted for the screen. You can learn how to compact a story and refine it to its core. You can learn how to tell more visually enticing stories — either within a screenplay or by applying screenwriting structure elements to a more streamlined novel.
Now that you've read the general differences of the various paths, structures, and formats between the two, you can ask that question — "Should I be a novelist or screenwriter? Ken Miyamoto has worked in the film industry for nearly two decades, most notably as a studio liaison for Sony Studios and then as a script reader and story analyst for Sony Pictures.
He has many studio meetings under his belt as a produced screenwriter, meeting with the likes of Sony, Dreamworks, Universal, Disney, Warner Brothers, as well as many production and management companies. Follow Ken on Twitter KenMovies. For all the latest ScreenCraft news and updates, follow us on Twitter and Facebook! Genre-Specific Notes. It sits on a shelf with your name on it. Screenplays, on the other hand, are one link in a long process leading to the final art form: a movie.
Right or wrong, the director will get most of the credit for what makes it on screen. To get rich. Just watching the end credits scroll by is bewildering to anyone outside the industry — who rated the men to pick the Best Boy? It will surprise no one when I point out that these are three terrible reasons to write a screenplay. I get frustrated when journalists treat screenwriting as a kind of lottery, emphasizing the payday rather than the work.
Most scripts never sell, and most scripts that do sell, sell for a tiny amount. The reason why you read stories about million dollar sales is because they are pretty infrequent. But creating characters, shaping storylines, and stringing together words in a pleasing fashion are prerequisite skills for both novels and screenplays. I would lose respect for any working screenwriter who professed an inability to write traditional fiction.
And it costs a helluva lot less. But a screenwriter quickly finds that maintaining a willful ignorance about the moviemaking process is impossible. Do you envision an intimate psychological profile of a half-Korean woman trapped in a mediocre marriage who imagines an affair with her co-worker? The story is largely internal; the action is minor; the stakes are low.
I use a different skill set to write a novel than I do for a screenplay, and call on still another part of my brain for a comic book; the single setting and limited characters of a play require yet another avenue of thinking, while a documentary demands not so much writing as harvesting a story from its parts and assembling it, like Dr.
And much like the story of Frankenstein , it all starts with selecting the correct brain. While each medium offers different storytelling opportunities, each also poses unique challenges. Some ideas will work across multiple mediums—witness how many books and comic books, stage plays and documentaries, are made into film, television, and even video games.
By developing different writing muscles, I feel I can best tell the best story in the best medium, but only if I understand how those mediums work. What if your idea basically entails two people doing nothing but sitting in a room and talking? Recognize that what you have here is a stage play. I had an urge to explore the early days of the civil rights movement through the eyes of two former boxing champions, one white and one African American, who fought against that backdrop and are reunited in old age.
That last part—that it could happen in front of a live audience—made it feel more nakedly real. Thus Glove Story became a play, with an immediacy and intimacy no novel, comic book, or even screenplay could match. Conversely, a bigger world requires a bigger canvas.
Could it exist as a film or TV series? Yes, but the high production budget required is a bar to probable success. I stumbled immediately, writing my first script in Final Draft, screenplay formatting software that seemed to make sense: after all, comic books, like films, are all settings and dialogue.
Those word balloons can only hold so much—25 words of dialogue is a lot —and there are limited panels in which to say it. The happy surprise for me was that the end result was better than what previously lived on that endless white page. Sometimes constraints will set you free.
As the villain discusses the future, we get to see it as his captive envisions it, continuing the conversation in captions. It would be unusual to do this in a screenplay, difficult to convey in a novel, impossible in a stage play.
While both film and comic books are visual mediums, another difference is in how you write those visuals. In a screenplay, I might have a character enter a dark room, cross to a desk, pull out a bottle of whiskey and pour it into a glass, downing it in a single gulp.
A single throwaway line of stage direction in a script becomes a half page of storytelling art in a comic book.
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