Book Vs. Screenplay
I recently finished my third book titled Bad Land and had the opportunity to turn my novel into a movie script. When things fell in place and I was asked if I could turn my book into a script my thought was, "Sure how hard can it be." Well it turns out that writing a script is absolutely NOTHING like writing a novel. I've just finished the first draft of the Bad Land script and I have a new found respect for script writers everywhere, especially when it comes to dialogue.
Authors have dialogue freedom. By that I mean it's up to us to decide how long each character talks and we can take a sentence or a paragraph to get our character's point across. But it's not the same in script writing. As a general rule, and yes there are always exceptions, script writers have under five lines to get their point across. One to two lines is preferred since long dialogue scenes in a movie tend to slow down the action.
There are so many other things that make the two arts totally unique but for me dialogue was the most challenging. When I'm done going through a dozen drafts or so of Bad Land and have a final product I think I'll stick with writing novels. I'll definitely be open to writing more scripts in the future but for now I'm going to go and let my characters have some long winded conversations.
