I came to screenwriting through the long road of novels and stage plays. I’ve always been a fantasy novelist first—world-building is my native language—but after my debut novel Child of Dawn was optioned for film, I fell in love with the geometry of scripts: the distilled dialogue, the visual beats, the way white space itself can create tension. A formative English-teacher-turned-mentor, Greg Stobbe, pushed me to see story as performance, not just prose. His encouragement, coupled with years of directing youth-theatre productions, made the leap to screenplay feel inevitable rather than accidental.

I write in layered passes, starting with an “emotional spine” before plot. First I ask: What wound is this character trying to heal? From that, I map three or four core moments where the wound is pressed or partially healed. Only once the heartbeat is clear do I outline scenes—index cards on a wall, color-coded for POV and theme. I draft quickly, allowing the characters to surprise me, then revise slowly, interrogating every scene with two questions: Does it move the plot? Does it deepen the relationship? If it does neither, I cut ruthlessly.

I’m currently adapting my novel Silken Waters into a two-hour, PG-13 dark-fantasy screenplay. The book is lush and lyrical—120 k words rife with internal monologue—so the primary challenge has been compression without losing voice. To solve it, I leaned on visual metaphor: the sea itself becomes a character, echoing the protagonist’s grief. Another hurdle was honoring multiple POVs while giving the audience a clear emotional anchor; I solved that by restructuring scenes so that Rennault and Fiain trade the narrative baton at moments of maximum tension. It’s been a surgical exercise in subtraction.

Emotional clarity. Gorgeous dialogue, inventive structure, and high stakes all unravel if we don’t know why this hurts or why it heals. When the audience can finish a character’s sentence because they feel the need behind it, the screenplay has done its job.

It’s a paradoxical moment—gatekeeping remains fierce, yet there’s unprecedented hunger for fresh, diverse voices. Streamers and indie studios are ravenous for high-concept, low-budget stories, but they often treat scripts as replaceable blueprints. Our task as screenwriters is to advocate not just for credit, but for creative partnership throughout production. The good news: audiences are savvy; they feel the difference when the writer’s vision stays intact.

I treat genre as promise and audience as ally. In romance, I promise an emotional payoff; in dark fantasy, I promise awe laced with danger. I study the audience’s genre “grammar” and then decide where to subvert it. For middle-grade readers in my youth-ministry work, that means brighter hope and quicker pacing; for adult fantasy fans, I lean into moral gray areas and lyrical prose.

I separate note from solution. If five people trip over the same scene, something’s wrong—even if their proposed fixes clash. I let the sting last one night, then I triage: craft notes get priority, taste notes get weighed against core vision, and any note that excites me earns immediate experimentation. The motto is defend the story, not the ego.

I’m outlining the final book in my Legends of the Vale series while co-writing a limited-series pilot with an animation studio that wants to blend 2-D art with live-action plates—think Arcane meets classic Celtic myth. On the stage side, I’m revising a one-act play for a regional youth festival that reimagines Joan of Arc through slam poetry.

Interactive storytelling and transmedia worlds are blurring lines. I see screenwriters becoming narrative architects—writing branching scripts for games, immersive theater, and mixed-reality experiences, not just linear film. The craft fundamentals stay the same, but our canvas is expanding beyond the screen.

Write the story that scares you. Finish drafts—unfinished brilliance can’t be fixed. Read produced scripts while watching the film to see what changed and why. Build community; screenwriting is a relay race, not a solo sprint. And remember: every “no” is data, not a verdict. Collect the data, refine the work, keep running.