I love films. I always have.
Cinema shaped how I see the world, how I understand emotion, pacing, silence, and beauty. Some of my most formative experiences came from watching stories unfold on a screen, feeling seen by characters who didn’t even know I existed. Film made me fall in love with storytelling long before I ever thought about writing seriously.
So naturally, when I started writing, I assumed screenwriting was where I belonged.
It wasn’t.
That realization took me longer to accept than I expected.
Loving film doesn’t mean you’re meant to write for it
For a long time, I felt almost guilty admitting this. How could I love movies so deeply, study them, analyze them, rewatch them obsessively, and not feel at home writing screenplays?
But loving an art form and being suited to creating within it are two very different things.
Screenwriting asks you to think externally. Everything has to be visible, audible, actionable. You’re not writing the experience itself, you’re writing instructions for an experience that will eventually be interpreted and changed by dozens of other people. Directors, actors, editors, producers, all filtering your work through their own lenses. That sounds brutal to me.
But that’s just how it works. It’s a deeply collaborative medium.
On the flip side…
I care about what a character is thinking while they’re speaking. What they’re not saying. The memory a smell triggers. The emotion they don’t have language for yet.
Novel writing doesn’t ask me to compress that.
It lets me stay there.
I don’t have to justify a pause or cut away from a moment too quickly. I can sit with discomfort. I can explore why someone reacts the way they do instead of just showing that they did. I don’t have to make every emotion “filmable” to prove it exists.
That freedom matters more to me than I realized at first.
Control matters more than I thought it would
A novel is intimate. Solitary. It lives and dies by the choices you make on the page. The reader meets the story exactly as you shaped it.
There’s something deeply grounding about that.
I don’t need my work to be filtered through industry approval to feel real. I don’t need it to be produced to feel complete.
That sense of completion is something screenwriting never gave me.
Film is still part of how I write, just not how I format
Ironically, my love for film didn’t disappear when I moved toward novels, it just changed roles.
Film taught me pacing. Visual clarity. When to cut a scene. How silence can say more than dialogue. How mood and atmosphere shape meaning.
All of that still shows up in my writing.
I just don’t want to be confined to what can be shown on a screen anymore.
Blog writing also ended up fitting me in a way I didn’t expect. It gave me space to think in real time, to explore ideas before they were fully formed, to connect reflection with storytelling without needing to polish everything into a finished product.
It feels closer to how my mind actually works, curious, associative, sometimes nonlinear. I can write about what I’m noticing, what I’m questioning, what I’m learning, without having to justify its existence to an industry or a market. The writing itself becomes the point.
In a way, blogging bridges the gap for me, it lets me think on the page the way novels let me feel on it.I want to write what can only exist on a page.
Choosing the medium that simply fits me isn’t giving up
For a while, I treated my shift away from screenwriting like a failure. Like I just “couldn’t hack it” or wasn’t disciplined enough.
Now I see it differently.
Novel writing suits my temperament because it honors how I process the world, slowly, internally, emotionally, with room for nuance and contradiction.
I’ll always love movies. I’ll always analyze them, recommend them, revisit them, and let them shape how I think about story. But when it comes to writing, I’ve learned to stop forcing myself into a form that doesn’t fit just because it’s admired, prestigious, or romanticized.
Honestly, Vanessa 