How to know if your story should be a play, movie, comic book, etc?

IMHO
Anything with special effects is going to be expensive to do IRL: Sci-fi, fantasy, contemporary with big vistas, large movements, outdoor stuff, frequent changes of scene. Or, large casts, impressive interiors, or animals.

Books are ideal for stuff with lots of explanation required (setting, tech, history). Things that are hard to show and boring to tell. Books are also better at emotions, thoughts, feelings. Once again, hard to show IRL.

This is why movies can be so very different from the book version.

Also, everything on your list of media is going to involve collaboration with a lot of other people. So, depends on how much control you are willing to give up.

How do you think of your story? In your head do you 'tell' it, or 'see' it?

csteffoz said:

So I have the beats of the story outlined (in my head -_-), and I know exactly how I want it to end. Really, I just started writing because I had an idea for a character and dialogue, and writing it in a pseudo-screenplay format was the fastest way to get the words out without worrying about things like picking a narrator and sticking to a narrative voice.

The piece is comedic, so I wanted to also make sure that the pacing and humor wasn't being weighed down with so much scene-setting and things that weren't funny.

And what's calling to me? Lately, it's been a comic book, I think. I understand the process of finding any artist, much less the RIGHT artist is a beast of a task.

Sometimes I wonder if I could just present it as something literary, but in the form of a screenplay? Like it doesn't have to be MADE into a movie, but it could be read like one? It's a really bizarre/absurd story, so I'm just struggling with how to even market it, or find the best angle to promote it from.

Ugh. If you can't tell, I'm pretty new to all of this. I know this is kind of all over the place, I'm just venting my anxieties on this thread. But that's what writers forums are for, right?

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You said above it's 75% written, but here you say the beats are outlined in your head.

If you haven't actually written anything.... start writing something. I've not seen a movie script marketed as a novel and I don't know why one would be -- I don't think most people want to read a script. They tend to want to see a film or read a book (or a graphic novel) or both. There are certainly scripts sold, of stage plays, but they're scripts of stage plays.

I had (and still have) this problem with whatever I'm writing. But I have a love/hate with each format.

For novels, I love painting scenes and flashy dialogue. I'm in complete control of pace without worrying about how many pages it takes up. But I hate that the story in my mind runs faster than what I can type. And more often than not...even though I know how the story will end...I get bored of writing it about 75% through because I already played out in my head what's going to happen. So I lose the element of surprise.

For short stories, I love the fast pace of it. It's snappy. It's to the point. And the story is tightly woven. I hate that I can't expand on the characters. A lot of my stories involve back stories or certain universes that I need to create. Most of these never see the light of day in a short story.

For scriptwriting, I love that I can tell a story and create scenes about how I envision them to play out on the big screen. It's like the imagery in a novel but a little more succinct. There ratio to prose to dialogue is more equal as opposed to a novel where you can spend a few pages just writing about where the characters are at. I love that I write these faster than a novel but still able to tell the entire story. I hate that there's a page limit. After I write a first draft, I have to cut out chunks because of flow to get it under a certain number of pages. And you have to think in Acts like a play. (I.E. Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Denouement) I don't want to be tethered to that some times. And if you're dealing with TV shows, you need to think about commercial breaks...but the raising popularity of Netflix is eliminating that thankfully.

For comics, I can't really speak for. I've been interesting in it and would love to convert some of my finished stories into comics but I haven't experienced it.

Lately, I've been all about scriptwriting for all the reasons I've said above.

But I had one story that lived as a poem, then a short story, then a (badly-written) novel, and now a script. It's much better as a script.

And considering I'm a cinephile with a theatre background, it's no surprise to me that I'd write best in script format. Just took me a LONG time to get there.

Write it in the format that intrigues you the most. You'll know if it's right or not. You'll just feel it.

Good luck!

Maybe I missed it in a post, but how long is it?

I myself don't really cross platform, but I would think the actual length would help figure out which way to go with it. Books have a pretty wide range between novels, novellas, etc. Scripts translate into a page of dialogue is a minute of screen time I believe (someone can double check me on that though) so you're probably looking at around 120 pages give or take for that. If you don't mind low budget, you could try to get an indie group to do it. If you find the right people, they can be pretty passionate about a project. Comics are typically under fifty pages, a few hundred words, so you're probably looking at a series or a graphic novel and a lot of time spent with art proofs.