Prose v. screenwriting

In my head, I've been writing and rewriting the first paragraph of a prose piece I've started. If this same action were in a screenplay, I could dash it off in a second: "She runs along the bluff. She spots something below. A van in the bushes down an embankment. She stops running."

But the rhythm of this is all wrong for the prose piece, and I also need to allude to other things important in the narrative later, and so on -- the prose obviously is more complex and, being so, is much harder to write. And this is a big difference between prose and screenwriting, the greater demand on the resonance of the writing in prose, the bigger job it's asked to do. In screenwriting, the main task of prose is clarity and not getting in the way of the story. Only in dialog does "style" become an issue as challenging as writing prose.

In this sense, the rhetorical sense, prose is so much harder to write than screenwriting.