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Q&A Why write a book when there's a movie in my head?

Don't forget that nobody (except perhaps students on a film-making or screenplay-writing courses) ever reads screenplays, even those of classic famous movies. Write one by all means if you feel com...

posted 6y ago by alephzero‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

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#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T10:57:10Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42420
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar alephzero‭ · 2019-12-08T10:57:10Z (about 5 years ago)
Don't forget that nobody (except perhaps students on a film-making or screenplay-writing courses) ever reads screenplays, even those of classic famous movies. Write one by all means if you feel compelled to, but most likely the only person who will ever see it is _you_ - unless someone else makes it into a movie.

As other answers have said, movies are a collaborative art form. Your screen play will just be the "basic idea" for what emerges at the end of the movie making process.

The same is true for writing stage plays, though maybe not quite to the same extent. But don't forget that even Shakespeare gets rewritten in modern productions. Scenes are cut, the order of other scenes is rearranged, somebody thinks it will be more "relevant for a modern audience" if Ophelia is black and Othello is white, or if Hamlet is female …

If you don't want else anyone to mess with your text, stick to writing books!

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-02-21T15:53:50Z (almost 6 years ago)
Original score: 9