This first scene

When I imagined writing this first short scene, which isn't even in the film script, I thought I could type it out in an hour or two. But: oh, no. 1500 words and three days later it is still in progress. OK, so it takes a long time, even with what I like to call a 'first draft' (which is in fact somewhat polished in the process of writing it out).

Why write a scene that isn't in the script of the movie? Well, a book and a film are different media and so tell the story in different ways. In a movie you have to show things through vision and sound. In a book you can write people's thoughts directly. The reader, if they are visually orientated, will make their own movie in imagination as they read.

Anyway, the book is not to be just a slavish copy of the script. It is a separate entity. And it will have non-fiction parts too, I expect. I am treating the novelization of Katherine's story as 'fiction' as even though it is based on what we believe to be a true story, as the real historical truth of her story is heavily obscured by time so it is only possible now to tell a very approximate version of what might have happened. And again, things need to be simplified and streamlined to tell a story otherwise there would be far too many minor characters and the political situation of the world would be far too complex to explain properly, and so on. The important part is the message not the telling of it. I think.