Why become a novelist

Fail better. Double Down. Revise the new novel. Make it scream! Send it out to agents. Try not to get discouraged when no one wants this one either. Enjoy Your First Taste of Success. Publish your screaming second novel with a reputable small press. Go on book tour. Spend all your earnings on gas and drinks for your true friends who come out to your readings. Try not to get discouraged when it seems like every other novelist is getting more money, making more sales, getting calls from Hollywood.

Dream big when a fancy agent emails you to say he wants to rep your next book. Keep working on those next three novels. The big New York publishers are seemingly only interested in debut novels, preferably from authors who schmooze in Brooklyn. Realize you are not going to find success in New York. Consider Having Children. Your generation does, too, by the way.

Take Up Powerlifting. You need to exercise regularly. Maybe you always rolled your eyes at the bodybuilders in the gym, but there is wisdom in the body as well as the mind. You can achieve that wisdom five reps at a time.

Find a new agent. Find a friend in real estate. Hit Rock Bottom. Then you have to try to get an agent for it, then a publisher. Then, you have to build your platform and market it, not to mention, write your next book. The truth is that after you write your book, you still have a long way to go. Martin on the subject :. Ideas are cheap.

I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to be a writer. It was one of those childhood fantasies, of course, but I was serious.

I studied writing in college, and afterward I got a freelancing job at a small local paper. Later, I spent a year traveling the world, working on my writing craft while living in Kenya, Thailand, and Vietnam.

When I got back, I helped a mentor with his book for free, a job that unexpectedly led to my first ghostwriting job. However, I can now say, twelve years later, that I earned my dream. You can make it as a writer. I promise. Instead, get busy. How about you?

What lies do you think people believe about becoming a writer? While both novelists and screenwriters tell stories to an audience, the paths to which those different writers take to get their stories to that audience are vastly different — and writers asking this question need to know and understand that. That last bullet point is the great thing about writing a novel, as opposed to writing a screenplay. Once you get it onto whatever literary platform — print or digital, publishing house or self-publishing — it can be consumed and experienced instantly by an audience base without the need of any other factors beyond the reader being able to read.

That is the most general of breakdowns but represents the added trials and tribulations that you need to go through before you can become a successful screenwriter by successfully having your script read, considered, bought, and produced.

And all too often, your own scripts only work as samples for assignments. Spec scripts — screenplays written under spec ulation that they will be purchased — are not often produced, even if they are acquired by studios or production companies, which doesn't happen as often as screenwriters would like. While one could recite the go-to and somewhat naive statement, "Just go shoot the script yourself," the difficulty of actually doing so in a way that compliments the full potential and vision of your story is easier said than done.

In short, with novels, all that you need to do is get published or self-publish and then get read — a difficult task in its own right.

With screenplays, there are many more hoops that you have to successfully jump through to get that story to an audience. All stories follow similar structures, no matter what the format or platform.

There is a beginning, middle, and end. That three-act structure can be twisted, bent, sliced, diced, and rearranged, but when you get down to the core of it, the beginning, middle, and end is always there. Screenplays require more structure than novels because they are primarily a narrative blueprint for cinematic interpretation.

They require certain beats, certain layouts, and certain terminology to communicate the visual and audio needs of an eventual production — a production that hundreds of professionals will collaborate on. Novels have a general open field in regards to structure. The technical constraints just aren't there. While certain publishing houses may prefer certain molds and methods as to how a story is told — chapters, sub-chapters, paragraph and dialogue format — structure isn't as much of a focus.

Screenwriting guru John Yorke and acclaimed novelist Tim Lott teach this very notion. Their course Story for Novelists: What Fiction Writers Can Learn from Screenwriters states, "While novelists divide their attention between many different aspects of writing, such as plot, style, character, and theme, screenwriters always have three things at the top of their agenda — story, story and story.

They know all there is to know about story structure — they study it, apply it, live by it. In an industry where some films have budgets reaching millions of [dollars], screenwriters have to get it right.

Their course breakdown goes on to say that, "Novelists tend to be more relaxed about story structure. Partly because they can be — since the pressure from other stakeholders is lower — and partly because many of them believe that structure gets in the way of inspiration.

Therefore, structure is often undertaught and underexplored at creative writing courses. This isn't to say that novelists know nothing about structure. It's just that screenwriters are forced to adhere to more of it for their work to be read, considered, purchased, and produced.

In ScreenCraft's Five Major Differences Between Writing Novels and Screenplays , we broke down the five elements that separate novels from screenplays and how writers of each differentiate between the two. Length isn't a concern for novelists — at least not compared to the constraints that a screenwriter must adhere to. Novels are often hundreds of pages long — well above three hundred to start for the average novel.

With screenplays, screenwriters have between 90 to pages to tell their stories, using a specific technical format.

Because of those constraints, screenwriters aren't allowed to go into lengthy tangents. In many ways, we live for story and we live through story. I like to think of writing as life distilled. Writers point out the moments and details of life we miss in our fast-paced society. Writers offer people a glimpse into their own lives, and help them live better stories. The first time I got paid for something I wrote, I felt a warm glow for days.

Writing can draw you deeper into the moment. It can help you understand people and why they do the things they do. If you want to write well, the writing itself will force you to experience your life more fully.