I love telling stories. That has been the constant in everything I’ve done, from my high school days writing for the school creative paper, to my work as a cinematographer, to my own personal filmmaking. The medium changes. The tools for storytelling change. The passion underneath never does. I want to tell a good story, and I want people to experience it.

Which is exactly why screenplays started to frustrate me.

The Drawer Problem

I’ve written about 10 screenplays, co-written another half a dozen. They are stories I worked hard to make feel visual, exciting, and meaningful. I spent months, and sometimes years, on a script. I’ve sweated the structure, the turns, the moment in the second act where everything tips. And then, sadly, for many of these stories, they go into a drawer, and almost no one reads them.

I am not exaggerating the "almost no one" part. Most of my scripts, stories, which I am genuinely proud of, were each read by maybe a handful of people. A few producers. A couple of industry contacts. The occasional screenplay contest reader who probably skimmed the first ten pages and moved on with only a vague notion of what I was trying to achieve. That was the entire audience for something I had poured myself into.

The Idea That Changed Everything

Then I had an idea. Why don’t I turn them into novels? The first script I started with was Stillwater. It took me about nine months to convert my script into the prose of a book. Fast, sure, but remember, it was a story I had already written; I just had to do the fun part, which was expanding the limited information allowed in a screenplay into a more detailed novel. It released on August 1st, 2025, and has now sold almost 200 copies.

The story I loved now had new life, and people were reading it! Sure, not millions of people. I’m not making a fortune on the prospect, but what was important to me was that it was out there, out of the drawer, out of the hands of a few select people, and into the world for all to (hopefully) enjoy.

This Is Not Giving Up on the Film

I want to be clear about how I think about this, because I know some writers hear "I turned my script into a book" and assume it means giving up on the film. It does not. I am not waving a white flag. I see it as the smarter move.

Look at where stories come from now. A huge share of the movies and series people are watching started as books. One of my favorite films this year, Project Hail Mary, is based on a novel. Look at how much of your watchlist traces back to a novel someone wrote first. The book came before the deal. The book built an audience that made the deal make sense.

A Novel Is the Most Direct Path to Readers

All of our goals as writers are to get our stories read and seen. Whether that is to attract financing, talent, or an agent, we write because we believe in our stories and want to see them come to life in another way. But sticking with a screenplay isn’t the best way to achieve that. A novel is one of the most direct paths you have to getting your story out there. You don’t need anyone's permission to publish it. You don’t need a studio to say yes. You write it, you put it out, and readers find it. If it connects, you now have something real to point to. An audience. A track record. Proof the story works.

And here is the part people forget. You are not only building an audience for the story. You are building one for yourself as an author. The next book has a head start because the last one earned readers. That compounds in a way a script sitting in a drawer never will. And honestly, it’s more fun.

Writing Novels Is a Blast

I expected the move from screenwriting to novels to feel like a grind. It turned out to be the opposite. Writing novels is a blast.

A screenplay is a tight set of rules. You learn to live inside them, and there is a real craft to that. Spacing, structure, economy of words. Trusting the reader to fill in the rest. You’re providing the tools for a director, actor, or cinematographer to see your world and build it for real. But those rules are also a cage. You cannot tell the reader what a character is thinking. You cannot linger on a place. You cannot wander down a hallway with a minor character just because that character is interesting. Every line has to earn its keep on the page because someone is paying for every page to become a shooting day.

A novel hands all of that back to you.

I have found real joy in expanding the stories out. The secondary character who got two scenes in the script gets a whole arc in the book, because now I have room to give it to them. The location I had to summarize in a slug line becomes a place I can actually walk the reader through. I get to slow down. I get to describe a space, a face, a feeling, in a way a screenplay would never allow. In one of my current novels, I spent almost an entire chapter talking about the history of spaceflight, valuable information that plays for the rest of the novel, but that would have been cut from any script. As a writer, that freedom is a gift. The story gets richer because I am no longer cutting it down to fit a format.

How Stillwater and Archaic Grew

Stillwater grew that way. It started as a script rooted in where I grew up, in the hills outside Silverton, Oregon. A boy who wants to be a detective, a town with more darkness in it than anyone lets on. As a screenplay, it was lean and contained. As a novel, it got to breathe. I could sit inside those characters’ heads, follow the guilt and the doubt, let the town reveal itself slowly. That version of the story is the truest one I have told.

My next book, Archaic, took the same road. It began as a creature feature, a group of college students caught in a small town when something very old wakes up. On the page, it was all momentum and tension, which a horror script should be. As a novel, I get to do more. More dread, more time with the people before things go wrong, more room for the relationships that make you actually afraid of losing them. It’s exciting, and I’m proud of where it landed.

You Can Do This Too

Here is the thing I most want you to take from this. Becoming a novelist is not as hard as you think. It’s actually pretty easy for us screenwriters. You’ve already done the hard part, namely, written a story. Now you just need to flesh it out, then put it into a format for printing. Like a screenplay, there are some specific formatting rules, but far less stringent in design. Then there’s designing a cover, but with today’s tools and your own creativity, these things are easy to figure out.

There is an assumption that putting out a book based on your own screenplay is somehow a compromise, that you are in some way sullying your position as a writer. But let me offer this alternate thought: We as writers want one thing, for our stories to be enjoyed. While I would love it if all my scripts ended up on screen, the truth is, I just want people to enjoy them, however they can. I spent years on some of these projects. I love them. And sitting in a drawer or on a shelf, hoping I find an interested producer or financier, is not the way to share them. If you have a finished story, getting it into readers' hands is more achievable than at any point in our lifetime.

A Finished Screenplay Is Further Along Than You Think

The hardest part is still the same as it has always been, which is writing something worth reading. Everything after that is learnable.

But you aren’t starting from scratch. A finished screenplay is further along than you think. You know the structure, the beats, the characters, the ending. Converting it is less about inventing and more about opening up. Take a scene that was three lines of action in the script and ask what it actually felt like to be there. Take the character who only existed for a brief scene and ask where they came from, who they are. Take a moment and think about all that you want the reader to see, feel, hear all the things you were resigned to leave to an onset professional, and write it in. That is where a novel comes alive.

Why We Built Bigfoot Robot Books

I learned most of this by doing it and by building something around it. My wife Maggie and I started Bigfoot Robot Books not only to tell our own stories, but because we believed independent authors deserved a real home rather than a vanity stamp. Helping other writers get their stories into the world has been every bit as rewarding as putting out my own.

So if you have a script in a drawer, or a story you keep telling people about but have never finished, my honest advice is to stop waiting for someone to choose it. Write the book. Put it out. Let readers find it.

Our stories deserve to be read, not stored. That’s why we wrote them.

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