I Thought I Knew How to Write Until I Tried Scriptwriting

There’s a very specific kind of psychological collapse that happens after you hit “send” on a script you’ve spent months bleeding into.

Not an email. Not a WhatsApp. Not even a Times of Israel piece where you can at least pretend confidence while refreshing the page every eleven minutes like a Victorian widow awaiting sea correspondence.

A script.

A pitch deck.

An entire fictional world attached to your actual name and sent directly to a producer in South Africa, the country that made you, damaged you, educated you, traumatised you, and gifted you enough material for at least four seasons of legal drama and one manageable personality disorder.

My heart has been pounding for hours.

My nervous system currently resembles Eskom during peak winter demand.

But something extraordinary happened after I sent it.

I showered.

This should not qualify as a cinematic turning point, and yet here we are.

For weeks, I have looked less like a functioning writer and more like a teenager in the final stages of existential exams. Hair in hostage negotiations with gravity. Oversized T-shirts. Sneakers with emotional damage. The sort of appearance that quietly tells Woolworths cashiers, “She either writes professionally or owns three lizards.”

Then suddenly, after pressing send, I found myself wearing actual adult clothes.

Matching clothes.

Shoes with structure.

Shoes that suggest tax compliance.

Because submitting creative work into the world does something strange to the body. It releases you from the cave for a moment. You stop editing imaginary conversations in your head long enough to rejoin civilization and perhaps consume a vegetable that didn’t come from a packet.

The thing nobody really explains about scriptwriting is how fundamentally different it feels from ordinary writing.

When I write essays or opinion pieces, there comes a point where I know I’m done. I can feel it physically. Every sentence sits exactly where it should. Every sarcastic barb has landed precisely enough to wound without requiring legal representation. Every thought feels sharpened into its final form.

I stop.

The piece belongs to itself.

Sometimes people respond beautifully. Sometimes silence greets the work with the cold indifference of a Cape Town Atlantic current. Then you sit wondering whether you accidentally mistook self-indulgence for insight. Writing, I suspect, has a lot in common with stand-up comedy. Timing matters. Rhythm matters. Some jokes die screaming under fluorescent lights, while others unexpectedly resurrect an entire room.

You learn to survive the silence.

But scriptwriting is different because dialogue has to do the heavy lifting while pretending not to.

Characters cannot conveniently deliver essays because the writer is having thoughts. Nobody in real life says things like, “This moment really symbolizes the collapse of late-stage capitalism and my unresolved intimacy issues.”

If they do, they should be removed from brunch immediately.

Scripts demand structure. Rules. Timing. Page counts. Turning points. Escalation. Visual storytelling. Economy. Subtext. Apparently, people in television prefer scenes to contain “movement” instead of twelve uninterrupted pages of sardonic observations and one woman quietly spiraling in a Spar parking lot.

Fascists.

And yet, annoyingly, the rules exist because they work.

That’s the part currently rearranging my brain chemistry.

Writing prose feels like collaborating with yourself. Your history. Your grief. Your family. Your personality. The bizarre things overheard in restaurants. The memory of someone crying in Checkers over avocados. Every strange emotional fossil you’ve carried through life can become material.

But scriptwriting forces you to disappear.

Your characters must speak for themselves.

You cannot rescue weak scenes with clever narration. You cannot explain emotion into existence. You cannot hide behind beautiful paragraphs if two people sitting in a room sound fake.

The dialogue either breathes or it dies.

And for someone used to controlling every word, every rhythm, every punchline, that loss of control feels deeply unnatural. Like being asked to juggle emotionally loaded chainsaws while studio executives discuss “likability.”

Still, somewhere between the panic, insomnia, caffeine poisoning and suspiciously feral appearance, I realized something important:

I finished it.

Not perfectly.

Not flawlessly.

Not with the serene confidence of someone who graduated from a prestigious film program wearing black turtlenecks and discussing “narrative architecture.”

I finished it anyway.

Which, frankly, may be the most adult thing I’ve done all year besides buying shoes that require socks.