For years, I built my career as a screenwriter, crafting stories that had to be lean, structured, and ruthlessly efficient. Every word had to pull its weight. No indulgence or waffling, just pure, distilled storytelling. The economy of language was everything. Then I transitioned to fiction, and it felt like unbuckling a very tight seatbelt. Suddenly, I had space, room to stretch, to let words breathe, to dive deep into my characters’ minds in ways that scripts never allowed.