Gary Whitta has worked in Hollywood for 15 years, and if the experience has taught him anything, it’s that screenwriters don’t have much control over the final product.

“Oftentimes when you work on a movie, it gets all bent and pushed and pulled out of shape by the various people on the film who are more powerful than you,” Whitta says in Episode 164 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Because everyone on a film is more powerful than the writer.”

Fresh ideas face an uphill battle in Hollywood. At first Warner Bros. was enamored with the edginess of Whitta’s script for The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic thriller with religious overtones. But when push came to shove, the studio balked.

“When the time comes, somewhat later, to actually write a check for $80 million to make the film, they look at the script again and go, ‘This is kind of edgy and dangerous and controversial, and we’re not quite sure about this,'” says Whitta.

Only the unlikely intervention of Alcon saved The Book of Eli, but Whitta has learned that such good fortune is rare in the film industry. Most projects languish indefinitely, especially if they’re unconventional. When Whitta dreamed up a monster story set in 9th-century England, he felt certain it was too offbeat for Hollywood.

“There’s a good chance that I could write that movie, spend six months putting all my blood, sweat, and tears into it, and the studios would just say no,” he says. “So you’ve spent a lot of time writing this story that maybe 20 or 30 people would ever see, and for a writer that’s very disheartening.”

Instead he decided to write the story as a novel, Abomination, which he published through the crowdfunding platform Inkshares. The novel format allows him to explore any idea he wants, and also means that no one can tell him no—you can always self-publish. Writing a novel also lets him deviate from the three-act structure typical of Hollywood movies.

“The way that I wanted to tell the story didn’t necessarily conform to what at times are the very rigid expectations for how a movie story is structured,” he says. “I knew that with a novel I would have the ability to tell the story with more flexibility, and not have to worry about a lot of the perceived, prevailing wisdom about how a story is supposed to work.”

Of course most novels will never reach the large audiences that films will, but for writers who value creative control, the tradeoff can be worth it.

“Maybe [the book] takes off, maybe it doesn’t, but at least I know that the version I put out there is the one that I wanted to tell,” says Whitta.

Listen to our complete interview with Gary Whitta in Episode 164 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Gary Whitta on luck:

“Typically what happens when you submit a script—to anyone, really—is it’s never going to be read by the principal person at the company or the decision-maker. It usually goes through a whole phalanx of readers and people who determine if this is even worthy of the attention of one of the principal people at the company. … But by pure happenstance, my script got put into the wrong pile. It got put into the pile that the company’s founder would take home—the cream of the crop scripts—to read over the weekend and consider whether he wanted to represent these writers. … And this guy called me over the weekend and said, ‘I don’t even know why this script is in the pile … but I ended up reading half of it anyway, and I already know that I want to sign you.”

Gary Whitta on Glenn Beck:

“I read somewhere that Glenn Beck was a big fan of [The Book of Eli], and again, it was very much embraced by people on the right—Christian conservatives and fundamentalist-type people. And in Glenn Beck’s case it was particularly interesting, because the Gary Oldman character, Carnegie, was very much modeled on people like Glenn Beck—kind of the TV evangelists who you see on TV late at night or on Sunday mornings. I think a lot of those people are snake-oil salesmen. They’ve basically identified and are exploiting people’s genuine faith … as a way to make money. … So I just thought it was particularly ironic that Glenn Beck saw the movie and liked it, without recognizing that the movie was supposed to be criticizing people like him.”

Gary Whitta on Abomination:

“There’s a lot of fantasy fiction out there these days. It’s a very, very crowded marketplace—I think more so than ever in this post-Game of Thrones world that we live in now—and everyone’s got their own version of Westeros or Middle Earth or Shannara, these great fantasy kingdoms, and I felt like it might be more interesting—or at least interesting in a different way—to tell a story with fantasy elements, with magic and monsters and all this cool stuff, but ground it in a real historical time and place. … All of this stuff really happened. England really was split down the middle, with the Vikings basically occupying all of eastern England, and there was very little real English territory left, and there were these tremendous battles that were being fought. That I think is as interesting as anything that’s in Game of Thrones, but it all really happened.”

Gary Whitta on strong female characters:

“A lot of people, when they talk about creating strong female characters, they often have a simplistic interpretation of it, which is to say, this is someone who’s really tough, this is someone who’s kickass, this is someone who basically has a lot of masculine characteristics, someone who can fight her way out of a situation. … I don’t necessarily think a man who can fight his way out of a situation is particularly strong, just because they’re good with their fists or a gun or something, I don’t think that necessarily makes them a strong character. So I don’t know why necessarily assigning those traits to a woman—other than the fact that we don’t necessarily automatically assign those traits to female characters as much—automatically makes her a strong or interesting character.”