Been going through my story making it work in script form and what I’m finding is I may have to rewrite the novel portion. Rather than be the disappointing kind of realization, it’s an exciting one. From now on I’ll write the script version first.

Upon recently telling a friend this, he asked a great question; Doesn’t culling it down in script form reduce the amount of material you have to work with prematurely?

With the process I use, the answer is no. If culling the story down to its essentials and focusing on the most visual, action, and conflict based material is what it takes to create a good script, well — to me that also creates a great story. If the novel is lacking those things then novel needs to change. Novel or not, I always generate more at the outset, and end up pulling back later on to focus only on the most important stuff.

And think about it this way; It’s easy to expand, harder to contract. I’m growing to love the idea that a novel version can include my own camera directions and focus on detail — I get to play the director, not just the writer. A novel may also feature “deleted scenes,” making it the version with extras vs. something radically different in a fundamental way.

For these reasons, a script seems like a better blueprint than a novel for being more story-focused. What do you think?