I Whom are you talking to?
While writing screenplays, it is important that you keep in mind your target audience, instructs Abbas, because when you try to please all, you end up pleasing none! "Some films try to talk to people outside of India.
That way, they lose the Bollywood audience. On the other hand, if you Indianise or exotify the story too much, you'll lose out on the rest of the world," he says. Unlike most of us, he believes that emotions are not universal, so one needs so be extra careful.
"We Indians are a far more melodramatic species than those in the West. Ours is a country where we hire a 'Rudaali' to help us emote!
A Western audience won't like a hero's 10 day session of mourning over his mother's loss," he quips, reminding that we only kid ourselves to believe that people abroad like our movies "That's only because of the increasing number of Indians everywhere!"

II The Print Screen Chapter
You think converting books into movies is the easiest task? Abbas corrects "It isn't easy to adapt a book to screenplay. Recently, I was working with Vishal Bhardwaj on an Australian short story that we wanted to translate into a film, but we had to play with the time, events, characters and circumstances. The only thing we kept constant was the spirit of the story.
"We just had to interpret it differently, it was too simplistic," he says. But Abbas has a converse theory, too "A lot of books that find widespread acceptance are easier to convert into movie scripts because they are generally written in a way that is already accepted, and  are talking directly to the audience, hence needing much lesser manipulation."

III When writing, give it your best
Though putting his thoughts into a book is something of a personal "fantasy" for this guy, he likes telling his stories well. "A great script can manipulate viewers' emotions and take them on wonderful journeys... I love doing that," he reveals.
And we bet you, too, like watching well-told tales. Though scripts can be tampered with, unlike hardcover books, the master says the process is fascinating and should be sincerely and dedicatedly worked on, no matter how challenging it may seem.
"Though the untouched writing of authors is the purest and most complete form of thought, screenplay writing is as individualistic when it comes to someone like me," he concludes, thereby rubbishing speculations of Aamir Khan's 'strong influence' on his project. Aspiring writers, cut and keep!