By extension of all this is the unavoidable fact that characters in contemporarily set fiction, if they are to be believable, have to share the readers' experience of the real world - an experience which will probably involve watching a large amount of television and the occasional trip to the multiplex. Indeed Brett Easton Ellis' follow- up to American Psycho, the celebrity satire Glamorama plays on this very fact. Whilst American Psycho occasionally glimpsed behind the curtain of literature and cinema, Glamorama pulls the curtain right back to reveal that the Wizard of Oz is just a little old man pulling a bunch of levers. Ellis' protagonist in Glamorama - again captured in first person present tense - becomes convinced that the bizarre sequence of events he finds himself caught up in are just the events in a movie in which he is not only a character, but is an actor in the starring role. It even goes so far as to have him reading the 'screenplay' of the events unfolding, and encountering members of the 'film-crew'. This is taken to such an extent that the book fails to make sense if these characters are only figments of the protagonist's imagination, but would also fail to make sense if these characters weren't there at all. The clever-clever Ellis has ended up producing the Scream of books: a book that knows it's a book, want to be a movie, and at the same time wants the reader to believe in the central conceit of its own fiction. That knowing, ironic, (post-modern if you really insist) self-referentiality is a trick that is very quickly getting tired at the cinema, and can only have a limited shelf-life in the novel. And plot-wise Glamorama contains, in amongst all the obsessive and inconsequential detail, a slim story that could be transferred to a 100 page screenplay without the loss of a single plot point. But 400 pages of filler stuck round a neat little screenplay does not great literature make.

But the lure of the silver screen is ever present. A book is a far more satisfying thing to produce than a screenplay, but that cheque for the film rights isn't going to find itself being rejected. It may be the case that many modern authors are not only brewed in the visual image but they secretly want to be film directors (and maybe even film stars) themselves. If this is the case, then to them writing gives them that chance to be the auteur-director that the real world of filmmaking would not give them. For even in the world of agents, ghost-writers, editors and marketing departments, the novel is still one person's art. Cinema is, and always will be, an act of collaboration. Don't believe the auteur theory, and believe instead that there are directors out there who secretly want to be novelists.

Oliver Francis is a screenwriter and novelist working in and out of Bristol and Oxford.