It's bread.

So many writers have created a whole cast of celebrities in their mind to play their characters before they even have a first draft ready. They grieve that "this and this actor might be too old to play Character Name before I get published so what's the point lol!!", limiting their motivation further.

Descriptions? Well, descriptions are either shortened to be adaption-friendly, or overly heavy on details because the writer panics that a future set design department won't get it right. Language is no longer played with, everything increasingly reads the same from story to story for the sake of marketability and profit.

Writers are still having fun, but not with the writing on its own.

They don't trust that their story can be carried through words alone. It needs real faces, playlists, visuals - one guy on Discord even demanded that no one read his excerpt without having Sentenced to Death by Colossal Trailer Music on Spotify playing in the background to "get the right vibe".

Let's not even get started on the use of AI, but at least in the spaces I'm in it's mostly frowned upon so I'll leave that topic up to someone else for grabs.

What I'm trying to say is that I find it sad that writers are increasingly forgetting that not every story needs to be adapted by netflicky overlords to be valid. It's awesome that writing can inspire art in other forms, arguably writing is the baseline for a vast amount of art, but that doesn't mean that a book is just supposed to be an advanced idea meant for corporate factions to build upon.

Of course, we do actually need music, visuals and spectacles drawn from the real world to be inspired. Finding inspiration in various forms of art is pivotal regardless of the medium you prefer. We can have fun casting Current Popular Young Male Actor in the role of Nathanar the Night Prince. But, and I say this lovingly, if you feel like your story can't be told without a reference sheet for readers to hold alongside the text, you are likely missing out on what makes writing a truly awesome hobby.

A book deserves to stand on its own. It's a raw and powerful form of storytelling that requires someone full attention to be experienced. Your reader can't just pick up their phone or talk to their partner without having to go back and refocus on the words they just skimmed. And they are your words, every single one, and you can play around with them as you please.

After all, why have just one adaption on Netflix instead of the many, many individual adaptions in various readers' heads?