What Inspired Me To Become An Author?

It Began With Film

I’ve always had a need to tell stories. Not in that way where i’m centre of attention and entertaining a room––far from it––but in the way where I have endless ideas whirling around in my head and need to be able to express them. Characters I need to explore and develop. Locations I want to describe and bring to life. Worlds I want to build. It’s always been that way. I didn’t discover at forty that I suddenly harboured a need to write something, it’s been my life from my early teens.

To begin with, these stories came in the format of scriptwriting, and remained so until around five years back when the world came to a standstill during covid. That’s when I finally started down and painstakingly wrote my first book.

I’d been encouraged plenty beforehand by an Ex to give it a go. She was an avid reader and used to proofread my scripts. She kept telling me my style of writing would work well in a book, but I never gave it much thought at the time. Film was my life, and I still harboured ambitions of being a Hollywood scriptwriter. But, as I slowly started to fall out of love with modern cinema, and read more, writing a book sounded a lot more appealing.

Having Time To Write a Book

It always took me a lot of time to write a screenplay, but over the years that has somewhat changed. I’d spend months––if not years––writing notes on an idea before I committed to a first draft. Sometimes, I would have hundreds of pages of notes. The problem came when it was time to write the first draft. Despite the notes, and everything normally going well––except that one script––my mind simply wouldn’t switch off while I wrote and i’d get practically no sleep. It wasn’t healthy.

That was kind of okay when I was eighteen and working part-time, but not in my mid-twenties managing a shop and a relationship, and definitely not now in my forties with a growing number of health issues. I used to give myself ten days to write the first draft. Ten pages a day for a hundred page script. It worked like that for years, but wasn’t substaiable.

I got a little better as time went on. I wasn’t as intense with the process after the few scripts so, I gave myself a month instead. Thirty days writing three to four pages a day. I managed to get some sleep during those months, but it still wasn’t idea. Writing a book that way would have been impossible.

Many years on from that, Covid happened. The world shut down and sleep no longer mattered. There was no work, I was single, and there was only so much Animal Crossing I could play––about two-hundred hours. So, I had a choice… start a new screenplay––which I did have one ready to go––or, use this time that no-one asked for to finally write my first book.

Being In Control Of Telling My Own Story

Time wasn’t the only factor in writing my first book, but it was the thing that gave me the opportunity. The bigger reason from a creative standpoint was most of what I was writing would never make it to film, at least, not in the way I would want it too. If by some miracle I sold a screenplay, the time had passed where what ended up on screen would remotely represent my work.

While i’d always made my peace with the screenplay being my final interpretation of the work, and whatever was done after was out of my hands, it began to sink in that it didn’t need to be that way. If I wrote a book, then learnt how to self-published it, the story––for better or worse––would be entirely mine.

Any compromises I had made, consciously or subconsciously, didn’t need to happen. I’d still need to obviously edit the book, consider pacing and structure, and all the rest, but things like violence, language, style, character decisions, and the ending, could all be exactly what I wanted them to be. Having written a few things I considered probably unfilmable at the time, this became an intriguing option. One that made me seriously think about taking the self publishing author route.

Deeper Into Everything

Reading a lot more also showed me how much deeper I could go into everything, from background details, to character thoughts. These were things you couldn’t really do in a screenplay. Structurally, it didn’t work to go off on some character tangent mid-movies––unless you were Ang Lee.

In my screenplay notes I always wrote a ton of extra details and little antidotes about characters, places, and things in and around the story. They were there to make the story richer and give my character more depth, but they wouldn’t be directly told in the screenplay. They’d be notes that only I knew. My little secret.

In a book, if it made sense, I could share those details. Introduce the reader to a character and tell them a little something about them. Recall a situation and go into detail about what happened, rather than mentioning it in passing. Hell, I could write a whole chapter completely unrelated to the main story as long as it was entertaining or informative. Where as, often, doing that in a movie, would kill the pacing of the film and remove the audience from the experience.

With more time on my hands, a renewed love for books, and the creative freedom the format allowed, I was feeling a lot more inspired to chance my hand at being an author. I just needed to learn exactly how.

What Works Best

What it really came down to at the end of the day was a simple question, ‘What format worked best for me?’ Telling stories was my priority, and while I loved the idea of being able to do that within film, the truth of the matter was i’d be able to tell better stories, and actually have a chance for people to read them, if I told them in book format.

Looking back now, it’s really something which should have happened long before it eventually did. The moment I put that first book together––which took nearly a year as I didn’t know what I was doing, and nearly two years to publish it––it felt right. I knew this is what I should have been doing all along. Others had told me so, but i’d been too stubborn to listen.

I’m able to express myself more in writing books than I ever was in writing screenplays. A lot more. A lot lot more. Reading books had always inspired me to write, but for whatever reason––my love of cinema–-it never translated to me wanting to write an actual book… until I did.

Now that I’ve written a dozen books (in a different genre) I haven’t written any screenplays. I started too, but then I thought, “you know what, this would make a better book.” Funny how these things work.