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From screenwriting to books

21 December 2009

'The beauty of screenwriting is that nobody can do anything without a script, so whether you are going to make the film or not at the end of the day, the writer gets paid, and has to be paid at every stage and for every rewrite... For years my mother had been saying to me, "Write books because then it's yours", so I thought "I'm going to take all the ideas I've had for films over the years and start writing books...

As a screenwriter you have to be succinct and cut out any extraneous words or descriptions so when I started writing prose for the first time it was really difficult to make it last. I'd write Chapter One (and it would take up) three-quarters of the page!'

Belinda Bauer, author of Blacklands, in the Bookseller