Non-cinematic writing?

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DamaNegra

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Please take into account that this is focused towards literary writing.

It's obvious that cinema has really impacted the way we write books. We've entered into an era where visual imagery is even more important than introspection. Action is valued more than pure ideas (but it's better if ideas are transmitted through action). You have to browse about 5 seconds on these forums to find people imagining their books made into movies and which famous actor they envision in their protag's role. Books have stopped being just books.

Good? Bad? Who knows. Is anyone trying to write non-cinematic books anymore? Is it even possible to do such a thing? Thoughts on the subject of the impact movies have on books?
 

WKolodzieski

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Personally when I write I tend to envision my work as a movie, but that's for my own visual purposes - and if it's succesful then others reading it can also imagine that they are watching a movie and not just reading a book. I think that's just what all writers strive to do: show don't tell. I would love if one of my novels were adapted into film (if only for the sake of selling a few copies and spreading my word further) but would be cringing at the screen every time they fucked it up. If it was done well and was faithful to the novel, I'd be delighted. However I also think that my works would be difficult to adapt (especially my current WIP) because it's a literary piece and, well, we all know how well Hollywood does with those.

Now if only I can write the screenplay and jump behind the camera...
 
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Please take into account that this is focused towards literary writing.

It's obvious that cinema has really impacted the way we write books. We've entered into an era where visual imagery is even more important than introspection. Action is valued more than pure ideas (but it's better if ideas are transmitted through action). You have to browse about 5 seconds on these forums to find people imagining their books made into movies and which famous actor they envision in their protag's role. Books have stopped being just books.

Good? Bad? Who knows. Is anyone trying to write non-cinematic books anymore? Is it even possible to do such a thing? Thoughts on the subject of the impact movies have on books?

I think it can be a good thing in that it's certainly forced me as a writer to show rather than tell.

After all, a cinema screen doesn't let you know what the character is thinking. All you have to go on, as with real life, is what a person says, what a person does.

We're not mind-readers in real life, so why should we be in books?

Regarding action/ideas - I don't think the balance is tipped in favour of action, or if it is, it's certainly not stopping ideas-based writers from being published.
 

Mad Queen

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I, for one, don't write as if my story was a film. I think "show, don't tell" is an important principle, but we also have to recognise that books and films have different strenghts and weaknesses. For instance, in a film, the director only needs show a landscape for a couple of seconds for the viewer to know exactly what it's like. In a book, we'd need paragraphs of boring description to do that and it still wouldn't be quite the same thing. We only have to glance at a good actor to learn a lot about the character he's playing. On the other hand, we writers have internal monologue. Readers can know what our POV characters are thinking without resorting to voice-overs (a much criticised technique), exaggerated reactions or people thinking aloud and saying things to each other they'd never say in real life. Infodumps in books may be boring, but infodumps in films are ridiculous. We can also describe the way our POV characters see the world much more naturally, depending on the aspects we choose to emphasise or neglect.

But I'd love to see something I wrote adapted into film. :)
 

Magdalen

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Stephen King said recently that he thought short stories (with a limited plot line and fewer possible characters) translate into film much better than novels (with multi-plot lines and numerous characters) and I agree. So why is there such a dearth of short story venues? Most movie versions of novels have sadly disappointed me, because they tend to loose the complexity and nuance of character that can drive a novel, and replace it with a "movie star" whose fame can overwhelm the actual character. Not always, of course. I've studied film, directors and of course I've seen a lot of movies. And I think what's been lost is the desire to really tell a tale. Mostly it's about the box office receipts, now. When I write a scene I do "envision" it through my MC's POV, but not necessarily with the idea of camera angles, fade to black, etc.
 

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Mad Queen, I wasn't saying I was using movie principles to write my novel (because yes, there are many differences between film and novel), but moreso using them from a visual perspective to better see my work. And there are ways of writing visually without info-dumping, which is not only boring to the novel but IMO not visual at all. Info-dumping is telling, not showing. Sometimes one beatifully written line is all it takes to show the "mountainside," and not boring paragraph after paragraph of dumping. That's just crafting. And as for the things said about film many are made poorly, and although voice-over narration is frowned upon many movies have done it extremely well and have been praised by their ability to do so. That's all I'll say about that, however.

Magdalen, I have read Stephen King saying this about short stories and definetly concur with it for reasons you have stated above. I would love to see more films adapted this way in the future, however many reasons why novels are adapted more frequently instead of shorts are because the books usually have built-in fanbases and it's seen as a financially sound decision. As for short stories - well they aren't read nearly as widely. Not always the case of course and there have been many succesful shorts-to-film-adaptations. (Even this year with Benjamin Button - with much liberty taken, I might add.)

I'm spent, goodnight AW.
 

Mad Queen

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Mad Queen, I wasn't saying I was using movie principles to write my novel (because yes, there are many differences between film and novel), but moreso using them from a visual perspective to better see my work.
Having a visual perspective is great and I think it has no connection with cinema. It's a basic ability we all have as a result of being animals with eyes and an imagination. Anyway, we both agree that using movie principles to write novels is a bad idea.
Sometimes one beatifully written line is all it takes to show the "mountainside," and not boring paragraph after paragraph of dumping. That's just crafting.
I don't believe that a picture is always worth a thousand words either, but there's a fundamental difference between reading that beautiful line and seeing the actual mountainside, a gap we just can't cross -- for a start, a picture contains much more information than a sentence. But of course we can do great things with words, after all the book is almost always better than the film.
 

DamaNegra

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Regarding action/ideas - I don't think the balance is tipped in favour of action, or if it is, it's certainly not stopping ideas-based writers from being published.

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines that introspection is becoming a no-no. Or maybe just in the books I've read.

Since I've been reading a lot of classics lately for school, I've started to notice a difference I can't quite put a finger on with more contemporary books. I've tried to chalk it up to people trying to be more cinematic and visual while writing, while pre-cinema authors favored introspection. Now, we want to get to know our characters through their actions, while on the old days we got to know characters through their thoughts.
 
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Point taken. It's something I'll keep an eye out for in my future reading, oh fellow Worshipper of the Neo. ;)
 

HelloKiddo

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I think confusing a book with a movie script is one of the worst things a writer can do. They are two totally totally different mediums and what works in one might not work in the other.

Jim Carey is a perfect example of that. Onscreen--hilarious. Write down what he says and does--not funny at all.

Dickens is also a good example of this. On paper he's very funny; in a film, not so much.
 

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I think confusing a book with a movie script is one of the worst things a writer can do. They are two totally totally different mediums and what works in one might not work in the other.

Ditto comics. I love Neil Gaiman as a comic book writer, not so much as a novelist. Or screenwriter, for that matter.

I get the feeling that King is aware of how he sometimes lapses into cinematic writing. Remember the end of It? Stephen King had that pothead watching all the nice cinematic destruction scream "Eat your heart out Stephen Spielberg!"
 

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I think confusing a book with a movie script is one of the worst things a writer can do.

Seriously? There just seem to be so many thousands of worst things out there.
Or screenwriter, for that matter.
Odd, because "Stardust" is a superlative script. And "Beowulf"???? Whoa! You can't get a real discussion on this one. Everybody got so freaked out by the weird animation they can no more talk about this as a script than they could see past Johnny Depp to the problems with the POTC scripts.

But Beowulf is remarkable. The guy took a clunky old saga that's been reinvisioned several times before and spun it into something much more dimensional: at once contemporary and pretty greek classical. The whole multi-generational sex biz was cooked up out of whole cloth, then woven into the story so well it looks like it was probably that way to start with but got bowdlerized by monks or something.

All while painting a dumb jock Beowulf that's probably a lot truer to Viking reality than all the stern, well-spoken sea eagles we've gotten so used to that we believe them. A lot of people had a fit over the idea of drunken Vikings turning into frat boys but, know what? Pretty good odds.

It's a writing tour de force that few would have the nerve, not to mention the skills to undertake.

The idea that there's this big gulf between novels and scripts that would daunt a good writer is a quaint one. Probably much harder for the same guy to do shorts and novels than to do either and also crank out a script.
 
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We need some screenwriters in this thread! :D

In screenwriting, there are a lot of no-no's that get your script trash-canned in mere seconds:

1) DO NOT use a voice-over narrator! Voice-over is considered lazy screenwriting and smacks too much of a novel being told in First Person POV. The biggest offender in Hollywood at the moment is Nicolas Cage -- the man lives and dies by voice-over narration.

2) DO NOT use expository dialogue! Again this is deemed lazy screenwriting and even lazy storytelling. The biggest offender to date is George Lucas.

3) DO NOT have two characters engage in a conversation while they are sitting down in a drawing room! Instead, have them talk while walking, or while driving in a car. Or relocate their conversation to a place where a visually dizzying array of very dynamic activities can all happen in their midst such as a lively dinner and dance restaurant full of rushing waiters and dancing people and a live band. Or the main concourse of a busy train terminal full of porters and luggage dollies and venders and rushing passengers. Or a steel foundry with lots of noise and moving machinery and hissing steam and rattling chains and flying sparks and dripping globs of molten metal. There are almost no offenders in Hollywood for this no-no except for the rank amateurs and the low-budget/no-budget indie producers who can't afford to shoot on location.



I have sometimes read novels that came across as "annoyingly cinematic." And I've read novels (even chidlren's books) where it was painfully obvious that the writer was originally aspiring for a screenplay and they "settled" for a book instead. My biggest pet peeve in this whole area is a writer who doesn't properly undertsand when the story they are writing would work far better as a novel, or as a screenplay, or as a stage play, or as a radio play, or as a graphic novel. I've seen far too many stage plays that were really cinematic wannabee. And seen far too many movies that were novels in disguise. Failure to get a handle on the dynamics and attributes of one's own story, and also failure to discern when a story is better told in one medium versus any other is a sign of a poor writer, IMO.

Novels = interior thoughts
Stage Plays = grand speeches
Movies = action and motion
 

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After all, a cinema screen doesn't let you know what the character is thinking. All you have to go on, as with real life, is what a person says, what a person does.

We're not mind-readers in real life, so why should we be in books?

Don't forget that in much of real life we tell each other what we are/were thinking. We also ask other people what they think or how they would feel as we tell them our story.

And though we are not mind readers, we do understand the thinking that accompanies many shared experiences. When someone tells me they were yelling louder than they ever have in their life, I know what that means when they are on a roller coaster or when they are fighting a forest fire or when they are at a football final.

Real life is filled with extra elements of communication, such as tone of voice, pitch, speed, vocabulary, facial expression, body position, hand movements, eye movements. And these can work in combinations to add into the communication.

Conversation probably has more 'mind reading' in it than we imagine.

To my mind, good writing carries these forms of communication with great subtlety. That means that a good writer can, indeed, turn a reader into a mind reader.

The mind reading thing also comes into movies. Does the movie allow us to get into the mind of the characters?

The 'book to movie' thing is more complex than we imagine. Reference has already been made to story length and complexity, but what about the greater complexity of character development? The movie allows a lot of those extra elements of communication to be used.

We've all been to movies that 'cheated' on the book in story terms. But how many of us have read a book, and then been to the movie and found that we understand the character a little more? Surely that's about mind reading.
 

maestrowork

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I think much can be learned from screenwriting: the discipline of show, not tell; the economy of dialogue and action-driven plot (not "action" as in action-adventure, but that everything is externalized in the character's action, instead of internal thoughts and feelings); subtext, etc.

By far the most important thing for me about "cinematic writing" isn't the boom-boom-boom action sequences or visuals, but how such writing gets down to the visceral sensory details -- to say something without saying it, because we trust the readers to be smart enough to come to the conclusion, instead of the author telling us everything, and what to think or feel. We can focus on the external (action) to reveal the internal (thoughts and feelings). That, to me, is the real merits of cinematic writing.

With novels (or any written stories), we have the benefit of both. We can be visual and action/sensory-centric, but we also have the opportunity to delve deep inside the characters' mind when necessary, a device not readily available in cinema (except the clunky voice-over, which I usually hate).
 
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