I have thought in the past about the type of medium I write in — the path I take. With­out doubt, I tend to lean towards the novel and prose-form. But why? What makes some write a screen­play, a book, a comic book? Over the last week (since writ­ing Hell’s High­way­man) I have won­dered about this.

Some­times I get plot ideas and entire sto­ries that don’t fit specif­i­cally into the set­ting of a three-hundred page book. They lend them­selves towards visu­als and sounds, rather than page-turning in silence with a mug of cof­fee. Does this mean I should try to write in a dif­fer­ent fash­ion, or develop the ‘thought’ with­out pre­scrib­ing exclu­sively to the novella?

Hell’s High­way­man is a per­fect exam­ple. Bypass­ing the usual ‘I had this idea’ for­mula of explain­ing it, I’ll cut to the chase: I’m not sure it worked, per­haps because the medium was wrong. I visu­alised what played out with exactly that — visu­als. The colours of hell, the shad­ing and artis­tic style of the high­way­man. I could see the demon at the end, and feel the vis­ceral nature of where this man was. Per­son­ally, I think it would be bet­ter off as a graphic novel. The BANG and KAPOW of the sequences in my head are not hefty enough to turn novel pages.

This has hap­pened before. A while ago I had a strong notion in my head that I could progress with a story built on the rela­tion­ship between two broth­ers. One becomes the almighty and evil ruler (with super pow­ers to boot) and the other becomes the cham­pion of the peo­ple. This is irrel­e­vant for now, but the show­down between them played out in a film-like way in my head. I could see how it would be filmed, where slow-down would occur between phys­i­cal strikes, what kind of pow­er­ful and then som­bre music would play after a death, and how the shot would take us to the heav­ens before cred­its rolled. I don’t think I’m going (gone?) insane, but you never know.

I’ve also con­sid­ered the forms of script writing/screenplays and nov­els, and the dif­fer­ent ways I envi­sion things in rela­tion to these ver­sions of the craft. I try to write some­thing and it’s dia­logue heavy, and I don’t par­tic­u­larly want to get bogged down in lay­ers of envi­ron­ment — I would much rather state the place and be done with it in these instances. This is obvi­ously not a great approach to novel writ­ing. It’s too brief, too much is not down on the paper and left to the reader (or direc­tor) to generate.

Other instances tell me to write the set­ting richly, to try and develop the world before wor­ry­ing about who fits into it. To build upon the foun­da­tion and cre­ate an alive stage for my char­ac­ters. This would not be good, or pos­si­bly bor­ing as a film (though some inde­pen­dent flicks will be risky and do this and it’s quite enriching).

Maybe I should try my hand at some other form of writ­ing, and not stick exclu­sively to my prose? There is a chance some­thing else could bloom, some­thing that leads in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Maybe, maybe not. But if it’s one thing I’ve learnt as a writer, it’s never stop trying.