If you read last week’s blog post, then you’ll know how movies themselves got me into writing. (And by movies themselves, I mean Twilight.)

Don’t get me wrong–I read the Twilight series before I saw the films. But seeing how things could look on-screen… it got me thinking of how every little I wrote thing could look if it were in a movie.

So when I saw this while scrolling through Instagram, I knew I had to write a post about it.

I suppose we all probably do this while we write. We picture the scenes in our head. Whether we’re the main character or we watch the whole thing from above. I’d say I did a healthy mix of both while writing my novels.

After taking some film classes and becoming a photo/video major in college, I definitely started to do more of this in the writing process. I even wrote an entire term paper on my novel, In the Sky, and how it would be turned into a film in its technical aspects. I would insert parts of it here if I could find it…

I think it can be both detrimental and really important to write as if your book is about to be the next huge YA film adaptation. Because I studied framing and cinematography and all the technical stuff in college, it feels normal for my brain to automatically look at a scene in that way. It can be a bad thing though, as writing for the page is very different from writing for the screen.

For instance, descriptions and point of view are super important deviations that the page needs.

That’s why I say a healthy mix of both is great, at least for me.

You’ll see this most in my playlist at the end of In the Sky, as it has a lot of references to “this is when this song would play,” going back to the photo above.

Here’s an example of one of the playlist entries… with a spoiler scratched out!

As you can see, I focus a lot on what my characters would look and feel like on the big screen. Let’s hope one day they make it there.